Life Energy - New Affiliate program

[Sadu]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to let the community know about an affiliate program I'm managing for Life Energy Solutions - www.lifeenergysolutions.com/affiliates/

The products are based around orgone energy, which isn't a mainstream concept, but should be familiar to anyone running an alternative health / wellness type website.

The program has been running since February 2008, and has a number of affiliates doing quite well already. Commission is 20%, and is paid out on repeat orders (which we get plenty of) within the cookie lifetime of 6 months.

I also programmed a fairly unique feature into the affiliate system, where the affiliate code is grabbed from the referer data sent by the browser rather than from the URL. Meaning all links from www.yourdomain.co.nz will be seen as affiliate links, and you don't need an affiliate code in the link href which often screams "I AM AN AFFILIATE LINK". Or if this isn't your cup of tea, you can use regular links as well.

Admins - any chance of adding this one to the list of NZ affiliate programs?

Thanks,

Harvey / Sadu.
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www.ragepank.com

[affiliateprograms]

Hi Harvey,

Thanks for the details on the program and welcome to the forum. The affiliate program has been added onto the affiliate program list.

It's interesting that you're using the referrer as the main identifier for the affiliate tracking. Are you using a web stats package to do this?

If you are, generally I would have thought a web stats package wouldn't quite be up to the task as they are pretty reliant on their imperfect interaction with the browser as opposed to directly tracked results through a standard database tracking system and referral code.

Happy to hear that it's working well for you just thought it was worth asking the question.

By the way, I like your blog, good stuff on SEO there related to NZ!
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NZ Affiliate Programs
gary@affiliateprograms.co.nz

www.affiliateprograms.co.nz

[Sadu]

Thanks Gary,

The system looks at the HTTP headers that are set by the browser on each request - it does this using PHP rather than server logs. As far as I have found, all major browsers set this value unless you install a special plugin / option which deliberately hides this - but I would expect that this would be the minority.

Because the referer data is updated on every request, we read the data only the first time the visitor enters the site. We take the referer URL, strip it down to just the domain name, and check to see if that domain name belongs to one of our affiliates (who have pre-registered their domains in our database). If it does, we set an affiliate cookie as per normal. If not, we ignore the data and treat the request like a non-affiliate visitor.

Obviously this system opens up a few areas of risk. The main one for me is the visitor copy-pasting the link rather than clicking on it, in which case the affiliate system has no way of assigning the commission. It's also no good for using in newsletters, where the request doesn't have any referer information attached.

We manually approve all the domains that are submitted to us, so that we don't get smart-asses trying to claim credit for sales coming from google.com or yahoo.com

I did a lot of testing on this with various different browsers, and really didn't find any unexpected issues.

The system supports regular affiliate links as well - you just add "/a123/" onto the back of any URL on the site (where "123" is your affiliate ID). Our affiliates are using a combination of both techniques, and we are regularly paying out commissions to affiliates using the referer method.

Personally, I have a real dislike of affiliate systems that don't have discreet URLs. I can deal with domain.com?r=123 but when it's domain.com?AFFILIATE_ID=123 it's just really hard to place on your site without looking tainted. I'm all for disclosure, but for me I use different levels of disclosure of different sites (depending on lots of factors). The referer method would definitely be an option I would go for as an affiliate, on some sites.

I'd definitely welcome any further feedback from other affiliates on this method of detecting the affiliate ID.

Harvey.
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www.ragepank.com

[affiliateprograms]

Cheers for taking the time on a detailed response Harvey.

It sounds like you have the matter in hand, I particularly like that you have the option for either method of referral.

I completely agree on the annoying way some programs implement referral codes. Sounds like you've hit the money on your implementation.

For other affiliates, if you happen to be working with an affiliate program that has the type of unwanted referral URL's Harvey has mentioned, a common few options are either setting up redirect scripts on your own site that go off to the affiliate url (e.g. mysite.co.nz/redirect.php?site=100) or some people will use one of the URL sites like TinyURL to generate the links for them.

I think it's worth writing something about this on the blog as it's a common issue new affiliates come across.
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NZ Affiliate Programs
gary@affiliateprograms.co.nz

www.affiliateprograms.co.nz

[Shooo]

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Incenta Click Media Group is a leading two-tiered CPA Affiliate Programs focused on performance-based online advertising

[affiliatepromotion]

Hello, I have two years to have Internet in my house and even if I tried to get involved in the business of affiliate promotion I could not do it if they would give me a guide on how to do
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Affiliate Promotion

[mBUCKS]

Dear Webmasters,

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Kind regards,

Scott, mBUCKS Support Team New Zealand