Create and/or save your documents using LibreOffice or OpenOffice, such PDF documents are compatible with this feature.
Newer PDF versions unfortunately cannot be edited as easily and will most probably not work.
Rebrand PDF is an advanced viral marketing feature of Post Affiliate Pro. It allows you to create a special type of promo materials - rebrandable e-books customized for each affiliate registered in your Post Affiliate Pro.
You can create your PDF e-book only once and upload it to Post Affiliate Pro as a banner. For creation of the document we recommend either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, however you can use any PDF tool which can save older versions of PDFs (up to version 1.4).
Inside the PDF document you can use our Post Affiliate Pro's variables, which will be automatically replaced with affiliate details when the affiliate downloads the document from his affiliate panel.
Your affiliates will automatically get their own re-branded copy of the e-book, with their name, affiliate links, texts, etc.
There is no need to run any external program for branding, they will simply download a Rebrand PDF in their banners section.
Rebranding is made automatically in the background and your affiliates don't need to have any knowledge about creation of PDF documents.
Article contents:
- Feature activation
- Creating Rebrand PDF banners
- Preview of Rebrand PDF document
- How will the affiliates see my Rebrand PDF banner?
- Creating rebrandable PDF documents
- Video guide
- Troubleshooting
Feature activation
You can activate the Rebrand PDF feature in your merchant panel under Configuration > Features by clicking Activate next to it. After activation you'll need to reload your browser tab and then you can start creating your Rebrand PDF banners in the Banners > Banners manager section.
The feature is available only in the Ultimate and Network plans so you will not find it if you are using the Pro plan.
Creating Rebrand PDF banners
As a merchant you can create new banner at Banners > Banners manager by clicking the Add banner button. If you have activated Rebrand PDF feature (as mentioned above), you should see in the list of supported banner types also Rebrand PDF. If you don't see this option in the banner types list, you need to activate this feature first (as mentioned above) and than reload the application.
In the next step you will need to fill in the mandatory fields of the banner like: Name, Campaign and Destination URL.
In the Banner Parameters you can upload the PDF file which you want to rebrand.
List of supported variables, which you can use in your PDF document is in the section of "Supported Variables".
After you selected any valid PDF document and the application was able to parse it, new section will be displayed in the Banner Parameters with information about the uploaded PDF document. In the Uploaded PDF File section you can see file name, file size and list of found variables in the uploaded document. You can see here, if all the variables you wanted to use in your document are listed.
If you entered any other variable as the supported ones by our application, the system will not list it here! List of supported variables is limited just to field names defined at Configuration > Affiliate Signup > Fields (tab).
After you are ready with uploading of PDF file, push the Create button at the end of the screen. After this action the banner will be saved into the database and you will be able to test how it will be generated for your affiliates.
Preview of a Rebrand PDF document
In edit mode of a Rebrand PDF banner you can preview the Rebrand PDF document. Just select an affiliate for whom the PDF document should be generated and click the Preview Rebrand PDF document button.
All variables you used in your PDF document will be replaced with values of the fields saved for the selected affiliate.
How will the affiliates see my Rebrand PDF banner?
Right after you create a Rebrand PDF banner, your affiliates should see it in their panel at Promotion > Banners & Links. Your affiliates can download the rebranded pdf document and send it to their customers by email, distribute it on their website or use in any other way they like.
Next option is, that they will use a link to this PDF document displayed under the button of 'Download PDF' and their customers will download the PDF document directly from your installation of Post Affiliate Pro.
Creating rebrandable PDF documents
PDF documents can be created in multiple editors and tools. In my example I will show you how to create such document in OpenOffice, which is a free application and you can download it here: Open Office Download.
1. Open the OpenOffice Writer application - it is very similar application to e.g. Microsoft Office Word, but free.
You can compose your marketing text, format it, add images, etc.
Also links in PDF documents can contain variables, which will be automatically replaced during rebranding. You can use {$destUrl} to have automatically generated the affiliate URL based on the link style and the Destination URL defined in the banner settings or you could add the URL with {$refid} and {$bannerid} variables based on your link style, for example with New Style links style you could add - https://www.postaffiliatepro.com/features/rebrand-pdf/?a_aid={$refid}&a_bid={$bannerId}
After you are be ready with designing of your marketing document, you can export it to PDF using the menu File > Export as PDF ...
Than just click button Export and select where should the document be saved.
In our example we created a PDF document, which as you can see contains varibales, which will be replaced by Post Affiliate Pro with real values.
This is the document I uploaded to my installation of Post Affiliate Pro as a Rebranded PDF banner and when I tested the preview of the banner I got a rebranded document like this:
As you can see, all the variables were replaced with real values stored in my affiliate profile under which I downloaded the rebranded PDF file. Also links are pointing to correct destination url with correct affiliate id and banner id parameters.
Video guide
Troubleshooting:
Server configuration
Pdf processing is a heavy operation so it is good to set higher values for some php settings. They can be set by your hosting provider or sometimes in the server administration panel.memory_limit - this should be set to higher then default 32M , 64 MB is minimum for Pdf Processing and even 128M or higher can be sometimes required for bigger documents (2 MB and higher)
max_execution_time - this depends on the performance of the server and the server load as well as the pdf size , default value is 30 sec that is usually not enough , safe value is 240sec .
upload_max_filesize - default value is 2M and pdf's can be bigger so this should be 3M or higher
Incorrect text shifting for special characters
If you are using special characters e.g. Chinese or Japanese characters, shifting of this text probably will not work correctly. In this case we recommend to use affiliate variables at the end of line.