Overview of what the 3 packages do and features

The setup and installation instructions are found on the individual tabs.

1. adtrackz
2. affiliate
3. graphs

What the rest of this page will focus on is describing what features each module has and how they can work together.

First off, if you haven't run an affiliate program yourself or had success promoting other peoples sites as an affiliate of theirs, an affiliate program can look far more attractive from the outside than what it really is.

An affiliate program allows the owner of a site that sells products to pay a percentage of the sale to anyone who sends them a sale. The attractive thing about this is that you don't need to pay for advertising before you get the customers.

Think of a traditional form of online advertising or even a more modern one like Google Adwords. Both of these forms of advertising force you to pay for them BEFORE you have earnt any money. You are paying for the advertising then hoping that you get a sale from it. If you don't get a sale, you can't go back to the magazine or to google and say "I didn't have any success with your adverts, can i have my money back please."

In these forms of advertising you need to be certain that your site is ready to receive customers because if its not then it is going to cost you money and you will have no success.

The same thing is true for affiliate marketing however it is a bit more disguised. Because with affiliate marketing you pay your affiliates a percentage of a sale or a flat rate when you have success it seams like you are in a no-loose situation. You pay for your advertising AFTER you get paid. But there is a big catch. Its easy to fall into the trap of thinking that affiliates will keep sending you customers forever waiting for it to pay off. Its easy to think that you can burn your affiliates by not paying them for sales that they are owed then just get more affiliates to start promoting you. Follow this road and your affiliate program is doomed to failure.

If you want to set up a SUCCESSFUL affiliate program, treat your affiliates as you would like to be treated. Pay them a fair percentage for the job that they do. The more you pay them the better they can promote you. And don't ask them to do something that you know is impossible.

With most affiliate programs it is quite common to find that 10% of the affiliates are generating 90% of the sales. Often even more unbalanced than that 1% of the affiliates generating 99% of the sales. So it pays to keep that 1% happy.

One method professional affiliates will use is to search for well set up affiliate programs and to purchase advertising on behalf of the site to see if there is a balance that can be found that is profitable. If your site sets up its affiliate program to pay $1 for every new user that signs up, a professional affiliate may take your affiliate link and purchase advertising on google adwords on your behalf. Targeting precise keywords that look like they will lead to bringing new users into your site.

In this example the Affiliate earns $1 for a new sign up and may have to pay 5 cents per click on Google adwords. If you site is set up well and is ready to turn new visitors into signups then it could be realistic to expect that 1 person in 20 would signup if the advertising terms at Google adwords are targeted enough. This is what the affiliate is banking upon.

If that affiliate can get an average of less than 1 person in 20 to signup to your site then this affiliate will pay for your advertising FOREVER.

The math

It costs the Affiliate $0.05 per click.
$0.05 * 20 clicks = $1
The affiliate will break even if he has one new signup for every 20 clicks. The amount of money received from being your affiliate will be exactly the same as the amount it cost him in advertising in order to earn it.

What the affiliate needs is to have the money received be LESS than the cost of advertising. So if the affiliate can average 1 new signup for every 10 clicks instead of 20 then he will be still earning $1 from your affiliate program, but his advertising costs will now only be $0.50.

If you can set this situation up for your affiliates then they won't stop at sending you 10 clicks to get 1 customer, they will fight hard to find as many clicks as they can to send you customers.

The reverse is also true. If your affiliate program pays $1 and it takes 21 clicks to get a new signup for the affiliate he will earn $1 and have to pay $1.05 in advertising. This program will be thrown in the trash as fast as you can say "Yuck!"

Its your job to make your system as polished as possible BEFORE you start trying to automate it. This means BEFORE you start your affiliate program.

This is what Adtrackz is for. It will help you determine:

• how much it costs YOU to get one customer for YOURSELF
• help improve the signup process by TESTING how well your signup process works.
• Isolate paths that lead to a successful signup.

If you can say to your affiliates,

We have had success with these keywords on google adwords (enter list of keywords here) and found that if we send customers to this page (enter best performing landing page URL here) that we could average a new signup for $0.80 with a cost of $0.05 per click. The conversion rate average was 10%.

Then they will know that you have done testing and know what types of traffic to try and target to send customers to your site.

There is also the other kinds of affilaite programs out there that give their affiliates a pretty banner ad and say "Please put this on your site." Banner ads don't work! Just ask yourself when the last time you clicked on a banner ad was. (do that now, ill wait ). Your far more likely to get sales and signups from links embeded in your users myspace players, or from text links that are in context with the page the user is looking at. eg: "I also have my songs over at "Your-jamroom-site.com", Click here to go there and create a new account."

So in order to setup your affiliate program to promote success the order I suggest you use the module in is, Adtrackz to set your site up so that it is ready for automation. Next, Affiliate to automate what you have been doing with adtrackz and to get help expanding your advertising. Then Graphs to chart the data and see how effective the process of automation has been/ is coming along.

so on to the feature introduction.........

Features

Features of Adtrackz (apAdtrackz)

Create unlimited Campaigns.
Track Signups, Sales and Clicks.
Calculate Gross and Net Profit.
Return ROI for each Advert you pay for.
Calcuates Conversion Rates.
Split Test Signup offers.

Most of the features in the table above should be pretty self explanatory except maybe "Split Test Signup Offers". (someone please let me know if the others need explaining more too. Thanks.) but on to split test signup offers.

First a question: "How do you know that your site is performing the best it can to turn your visitors into customers?". This question assumes 2 things. First that one of the goals of your site is to try to get more customers, an second that you care about making your site better.

Assuming that you want more users signing up you have made a page with a signup form on your site and this page has an offer of some kind that asks the user to fill in the form and submit it.

Its this page / banner ad / subscription outline whos job it is to catch the users eye and start them on the path to becoming a member of your site. How do you know this is the best it can be? One way to answer that question is "Split Testing."

Split testing is creating 2 copies of the same page / banner ad / subscription outline and sending half the users to one page and half the users to the other and then count how many signups you get from each. What you end up with is an answer something like "We sent half the users to Page A and half the users to Page B and got 20 new signups. 15 of them signed up on Page B". Pretty easy to say with a high degree of certainty that "Page B is better than Page A."

That is split testing..... and once you know Page B is better than Page A. What you do is create Page C and test THAT against Page B to see if you can make a page that is BETTER that Page B. It never stops. You making your pages better makes it easier for your affiliates to do their job.

Adtrackz usage example (apAdtrackz)

We use adtrackz to gather statistics:

The above screenshot is of the statistics reporting screen. It shows us that for the time period selected we have:

• one active campaign email
• which has one subcampaign 6-march-2010
• there has been one click through this link Raw Clicks
• by one unique user Unique Clicks
• This has generated no new signups Signups
• and no new sales.Sales

The email sent out on the 6-march-2010 promoting your site either is too new and nobody has clicked on it, or the offer contained within the email was not attractive to the people you sent it to. No new signups.

Compare that to a successful campaign, lets extend the time frame to include the previous weeks campaign too.

The above screenshot is of the statistics reporting screen for a date range that includes the previous week. The previous weeks email campaign 1-march-2010 has:

• 89 clicks through this link Raw Clicks
• by 51 unique users Unique Clicks
• of which 5 have created new accounts.Signups

Compared to the email sent out on the 1-march-2010 promoting your site which resulted in 5 new signups. Since there is no cost for sending out emails the rest of the columns are of no interest at this time. If you were paying to send out emails through a mail magazine service the cost calculations would be calculated for you.

Features of Affiliate (apAffiliate)

3 Separate Payment Paths for Actions example: $1 for new Free member signup $10 for new Gold artist subscriptions $20 for new Platinum artist subscriptions
3 Separate Payment Paths for Sales example: 10% for orders below $10 15% for orders above $100 20% for orders above $500
Pay a percentage of the sale or a flat rate.
Set how long an affiliate gets paid for consecutive sales. (cookie period) example: affiliates will be paid for all successes within 30 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link. affiliates will be paid for all successes within 7 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link. affiliates will be paid for all successes within 365 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link.
Set how many times an affiliate can be paid out in that sales period.(Just the first sale or 2 sales or more.) example: affiliates will be paid for the first success within 30 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link. affiliates will be paid for the first 3 successeses within 7 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link. affiliates will be paid for the first 10 successes within 365 days of the customer clicking their affiliate link.
Set the payout level for affiliates to be paid out at. example: Money will be transfered to affiliates when their account balance exceeds $30 Money will be transfered to affiliates on the first of the month if their account balance exceeds $55. Money will be transfered immediately when the affiliates account balance exceeds $45.
System Currency can be set to €/¥/$
Affiliate links can be tagged with a subid to identify where the link came from. example: tag a link with a subid "banner_ad_125x125" to identify the link as being a banner advert tag a link with a subid "email_10_march_2010" to identify the link as one sent out in an email tag a link with a subid "adwords" to identify the link as being used in google adwords campaign (your affiliates will appreciate this.)
Affiliate users also get graphs and transaction reports These appear in their control panel to help them promote your site.

The goal of running a successful affiliate program is to help your affiliates to make money. The more money you can make for your affiliates, the harder they will work to promote your site.

Screenshots of the Affiliate module sections

Graphs of the affiliate transactions.

Features of Graphs (apGraphs)

Below are the features of the stand alone Graphs package.

Graph the locations of bands in Free Quotas
Graph the locations of bands in Subscription Quotas
Graph the locations of Fans
Graph the amount of invitations sent out by users
Graph the users last login time
Graph the amount of users last login time
Graph the amount of songs for sale
Graph the amount of subscriptions sold per week
Graph the types of users
Graph the amount of weekly user signups
Graph the amount of bands sending out fan mails
Graph the amount of bands who have sold the most
Graph the bands with images
Graph the amount of channels created
Graph the amount of comments by users
Graph the genre popularity of your sites genres
Graph the mailing system usage
Graph the amount of radio stations created by users
Graph the amount of users with images
Graph the most active users
Graph the amount of users age group demographic
Spam Detector

Conclusion

The apAdtrackz, apAffiliate and apGraphs package all complement each other by extending the functionality of the others. For a complete marketing system it is recommended to install all 3.

Installation

order of the installation

Detailed explanation of the installation and setup process will be detailed on each modules own page.

1. STEP 1: install adtrackz ('apAdtrackz')
2. STEP 2: install affiliate ('apAffiliate')'
3. STEP 3: install graphs ('apGraphs')

The installation process of the modules assumes that A:) You know how to use unpacking software to extract the modules from the zip file you received as a result of purchase. and B:) That you know how to use an FTP program to get the contents of the zip file to the server.

If either A or B is a still a mystery to you then jamroom has a good explanation here: Installing Jamroom 4 using FTP