New to the community? Start here

affiliatelite – getting it to work on private blogs

Given the nature of my MU purpose, all blogs will be private. I’m trying to use the affiliatelite plugin to compensate my affiliates for signups. Affiliate referrals will only come through email campaigns and direct referrals, not click-throughs on individual blogs.

Affiliates are give a unique tracking URL, but how can this work if their blog is private???? New registrants go through the affiliates’ blog. Right?

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:08:00
  • Barry
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    The affiliate link will also work if they arrive at the sites main blog.

    As long as the reference query string is on the URL (or they have added the referral URL in the settings) then the visitor is still tagged with their affiliate id just as if they came to their own blog.

  • Barry
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    Ok, I’m assuming you are running wpmu, and your main site isn’t private and allows people to sign up. Correct?

    So assuming the user has set themselves up as an affiliate for your site, then ANY url on the WPMU install, as long as it has the ?ref=johd-95 at the end will record an affiliate visit.

    So, for the sake of an example, the users private blog is http://myprivateblog.bigsite.com

    and your site is

    http://bigsite.com

    then the link http://bigsite.com?ref=johd-95 will record a click for that user (even though the visit isn’t to their own blog).

  • liquidus
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    You are correct. My members are not going to be promoting their own site, only the main site. Main site is public, members blogs are private.

    What may be happening is my MU install is not set up to create sub domains, only sub directories? Does that matter?

    Shouldn’t the ref link take them to the sign up page though? Not to an affiliate’s blog?

    What if the link was this: http://myprivateblog/wp-signup.php/?ref=johd-95. So long as it has the ref id attached it will track. Got that. But, how are people supposed to sign up when the automatically generated link points the the affiliate’s blog not the main "public" blog?

    Sorry I’m so confused about this :

  • Barry
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    You can change the instructions on the affiliate users page by going to the affiliate settings page (Site admin – > affiliates -> affiliate settings) if you want to highlight specific pages or provide different instructions.

    The link is designed to track a link regardless of the url that is provided. So a user could write a nice post about your system, link to it and then they send people to the sign up location.

    Some people also want the links to go to a specific information page about the affiliate program. Others want it to go straight to a sign up page. The system works and tracks for all of these scenarios. It’s up to you to tell your affiliates how best to do it. So, maybe a note that says "if your blog is private then you need to use the main site for your affiliate links".