For any affiliate system to work, two things need to be tracked. Number one when the visitor first lands on your website, we need to track where they came from and who sent them there. The second thing we need to be able to track is the sale. When someone makes a purchase, we need to be able to credit that sale to the affiliate and pay them their commission, 15 to 30 days from now.

That’s what you’re going to watch me do in this video. You’re going to watch me go through the configuration of iDev Affiliate and choose different payment options whether it’s PayPal or OS Commerce, Zen cart, Pinnacle Cart, X Cart. There’s a lot of different shopping cards that are already preconfigured inside of iDev Affiliate. I’ll show you how to set those up, where to get the instructions and exactly how to copy and paste the snippets of code that you get into the HTML. This is extremely important because if you’re only tracking the visitors but you’re not tracking the sales then your affiliates are not going to get the proper commission. iDev Affiliate makes it very easy and I’m going to walk through step-by-step to show you how do to it.

If you’re shopping cart or payment system is not listed in the drop down list that iDev Affiliate comes with standard then there’s also the alternate cart integration and I’ll show you exactly how to use that and how to set that up. It’s very simple and with this video tutorial I’m going walk you through it step by step.

For any affiliate system to work, two things need to be tracked.

1. When the visitor first lands on your website, we need to track where they came from and who sent them there.
2. When a sale is made we need to be able to credit that sale to the affiliate and pay them their commission, 15 to 30 days from now.

In this video you’re going to watch me go through the configuration of iDev Affiliate and choose different shopping cart options whether it’s PayPal or OS Commerce, Zen Cart, Pinnacle Cart, X Cart. There’s a lot of different shopping cards that are already preconfigured inside of iDev Affiliate. I’ll show you how to set those up, where to get the instructions and exactly how to copy and paste the snippets of code that you get into the HTML.

This is extremely important because if you’re only tracking the visitors but you’re not tracking the sales then your affiliates are not going to get the proper commission. iDev Affiliate makes it very easy and I’m going to walk through step-by-step to show you how do to it.

If your shopping cart or payment system is not listed in the drop down list that iDev Affiliate comes with standard then there’s also the alternate cart integration and I’ll show you exactly how to use that and how to set that up. It’s very simple and with this video tutorial I’m going walk you through it step by step.

This is a very short video tutorial and in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to set up PayPal payments and why you might want to require PayPal when your affiliates sign up to join. I strongly recommend that you require someone enter in their PayPal email address when they join your iDev Affiliate powered affiliate program.

If you’re selling products primarily through the US, Australian or UK or Canadian markets, then using PayPal to pay your affiliates is a no-brainer. And I’ll cover some of the exceptions to that rule in this short video but if you’re doing business in the United States, UK, Australia or Canada this is going to be an extremely short step for you. All you need to do is follow the steps that I’ll show you in the video and you’ll be up and running onto the next time in no time.

In this video tutorial you’re going to watch me go through some of the technical details about setting up your email address and your alternate email address in the configuration of iDev Affiliate. And the reason why this is so important is because when a sale is made or when an affiliate signs up, emails go out to you and also go out to your affiliate.

So you want to make sure that iDev Affiliate has access to the email resources on your web server to be able to send out those emails. I’m going to cover some of the technical details between the different types of delivery methods:

PHP mail() function
The PHP mail function comes native and installed with PHP but some web hosting companies intentionally turn it off for security reasons.

SMTP

I’ll discuss why that might be a better option than the PHP mail() function and also some of the additional things that you may need to ask your web host in order to be able to set up SMTP email delivery.

Just to be clear, it’s not critical that you use SMTP to send out your emails. What is absolutely critical is that you test your set up to make sure that emails are going to go out when iDev Affiliate needs to send them.

I’m going to cover that in great detail so you know exactly what to do and how to set things up with your new installation of iDev Affiliate.

In this video on iDev Affilite you’ll see me cover topics like:

• Giving a signup bonus to new affiliates
• Automatically approving new affiliates, pros and cons
• Tell a friend form, spam prevention

Clarification on iDev Affiliate Setting for Signup Bonus

I’ve confirmed with the maker of iDev Affiliate exactly how the signup bonus works.

The signup bonus does NOT count towards the affiliate payout threshold. Let me give you an example that will show you how this works.

• Product XYZ = $100
• Commission = 25%
• Signup bonus = $20
• Payout threshold = $40

When your new affiliate signs up through your iDev Affiliate software they start with $20 in their “bank” (my term). Then they start promoting your product and get a $25 commission.

$25 commission + $20 signup bonus = $45

That’s $5 more than the payout threshold… BUT the signup bonus doesn’t count. The affiliate actually needs to make a second sale before they qualify to get paid.

The silver lining for the affiliate is that their first payment (in this example) would be $70, on two sales, that would normally pay $25 a pop.

I think you get the point.

This is part one of the configuration of iDev Affiliate. After you’ve uploaded the files and added your license key and completed the wizard it’s time to configure iDev Affiliate to your website and products.

After you watch me log into the admin panel you’re going to watch me go over step by step how to enter in the specific name of your company and the website url. I’m going to drill down to the specifics of the cookie url and I’m going to show you some important details to pay attention to.

iDev Affiliate Cookie and IP Logging

Since the iDev Affiliate system works off of cookies (and IP logging) to track visitors as they’re coming into your website, the details behind cookie tracking are critical. I’m going to show you step-by-step exactly how you want to set this up so that whether you have www in your domain name or your domain doesn’t have the www; the cookie is still going to be set on the visitor’s computer and iDev Affiliate is going to be able to track them from beginning to end… all the way through the sale process.

Ethical issues aside, you want to be absolutely certain your click tracking and sale tracking is working. You want your affiliates to get credit for their sales so they’ll keep promoting your products.

Now that we’ve purchased iDev Affiliate, unzipped the files, uploaded them, created the database, and tinkered with the config file, it’s time to open up your web browser and steer over to your website where you installed iDev Affiliate.

iDev Affiliate Software Wizard

As with all great software scripts, iDev Affiliate gives you a web based wizard to walk you through the basic steps.

But there are some things along the way that could trip you up.

I’ll show you how to use your FTP software to change the server settings on several directories. This change makes it possible for iDev Affiliate to save uploaded files to your site.

One purpose for this is to give you the ability to upload banners for your affiliates to use.

So go ahead and ask me anything about:

• iDev Affiliate
• Affiliate marketing programs
• Growing your affiliate marketing program
• etc.

Just post your comment and I’ll pick the best one or two to answer in a follow up post.

After you watch this video you’ll see that it’s really easy to configure iDev Affiliate.

The readme file tells you where to look. And then you just plug in the database info and the name of the directory (folder) where you installed iDev Affiliate.

Save the file and upload it to your server using your FTP software. When you’re asked about copying over the old version of the file that’s already on your server, say yes.

Done. Nothin’ to it.

Once this is out of the way we’ll be moving on to the next video: “Installing iDev Affiliate Software”.