First steps with the system

This section describes first steps with the system and actions you should do to configure your affiliate program.
The steps are described only briefly here. For further explanation refer to the Configuration description.

1. Brainstorming

This step is very important. Think about your affiliate program.You should have a plan of what you want to achieve.
How big commissions can you afford to provide? Will they be attractive to potential affiliates compared with your competition?
How do you want to attract your affiliates to join?

2. Review your settings

Post Affiliate Xpress is made in a way that it can work with the default configuration.

However, you should check the configuration and fine tune it for your own needs.
You can find the configuration screen under the Config & Tools menu -> Configuration.

The detailed description of all configuration options are described in the Configuration section.

The most important settings are:

• Affiliate options – settings like manual or automatic affiliate approval, affiliate fields and signup form
  

• Payout methods - select which payout methods you want to support, and set the minimum payout options

• Tracking options – choose which format of tracking link you want to use, set Fraud protection parameters, etc.

• Affiliate panel and Signup form contents and theme – Post Affiliate Xpress allows you to fully customize your affiliate panel. You can choose which menu and screens your affiliates will see, you can even create your own content for example with training materials.
  Also Signup form can be customized.

3. Define your commissions

One default campaign is created during the installation. You can modify it, or create your own campaigns.
Campaigns are used to group a set of products (or only one product) that have the same commission settings.

For example, you can have campaign for Product1, where you'll reward your affiliates per click, and another campaign for Product2, where affiliate receives commissions per sale.

Or you can have campaign called Low cost products, which will have 40% per sale commissions, and another campaign called Expensive products with 15% per sale commission.

4. Add banners and other creatives

In the Banners manager menu you can various creatives, from text links, standard image banners to HTML, Flash and promo email banners.
Every banner must have destination URL specified - it is the URL where the visitor is redirected after click.

Destination URL path should be absolute URLs with http:// in the beginning, for example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/products.php?productid=13
http://www.yourdomain.com/sample-product.html

5. Set up emails

You should set up emailing functionality. This includes:

• mail account - how the emails are sent. You can choose either mail() function or SMTP server.

• email templates – these are templates that are used when system sends automatic emails, like after signup or after sale notifications

• email notifications – you can configure what kind of notifications you would like to receive as merchant, and what notifications will be available for affiliates.

Make sure that mail account is set up properly – try to test sending emails. Without working emails the affiliates will not receive confirmation about their signups, etc.

6. Customize your affiliate signup form

Check the standard signup form, and customize it if you want.

The signup form comes with an information mini-site that contains information about the affiliate program, etc. You can use the mini-site, or delete it and use only signup form.

Find more in Customizing signup form.

7. Customize affiliate panel

Affiliate panel in Post Affiliate Xpress is very flexible. You can configure how the menu will look like, what content you want to have there, and even write your own content or link to another pages.

Find more in Customizing affiliate panel.

8. Integrate affiliate system with your web page and shopping cart/payment gateway

Integration is a way to connect the affiliate system to your current website, shopping cart or payment gateway in a way that affiliate system will be notified about referrals and purchases.
When notified, affiliate system registers the sale, finds referring affiliate (if any) and creates appropriate commission for him.

Integration usually means adding few lines of code into your pages, and it is described step-by-step in the Integration guide for most common shopping carts and payment systems.

9. Test everything

When you created your campaigns, defined correct commissions, and created some banners/links, you should test the system.

The best is to simulate the whole process from affiliate’s and your point of view:

1. Sign up as some testing affiliate – after approval you should receive confirmation email with your password, and you should be able to log in to your affiliate panel
   

2. Log in to affiliates panel, get the code for banners/links and put them onto some testing page
   

3. Click on the banner and check that the click is registered
   

4. After the click, try to make test sale and check that sale commission was registered in affiliate system (only for per sale or per lead commissions)

If you experience some problems in any of these steps, turn on and look at the Troubleshooting later in this book.
If everything works as it should, the work is finished. Affiliate system is running and you can start getting affiliates.

10. Promote your affiliate program

After you have successfully tested integration of affiliate system with your website, everything is ready to start up promoting your new affiliate program so that you'll attract new affiliates to join it.

It is a must to put link to your affiliate program information or signup form to your own website. Name the link like Affiliate program, Webmasters make money, Affiliates etc. This will attract the visitors of your site and can convert them to your affiliates.

To reach more potential affiliates, submit your program to affiliate directories. There are tens of affiliate directories on the web, visited by thousands of experienced affiliates every day.