Affiliate Marketing

[fitz]

I want to implement an affiliate marketing scheme where people can come to my site via a link on an other website, of the form www.travelclinic.biz/affid=123 I may optionally want to go directly to a product.

I have seen the use of referrer.pl but the links seemed quite complicated, so I thought of writing an asp page such as www.travelclinic.biz/aff.asp?id=123&prod=12 which took the two arguments and redirected to the complicated script name - what do you think of this idea ? Is it daft ? I know I shall have to store the link info in a database of some form but my product range doesn't change that often.

The other problem is that some people may be directed to the website not by a link but some other way - can I get them to quote an affiliate id at some point (say at checkout stage) and use this somehow.

I guess the affiliate ID should be stored in a cookie so I can track future sales as well.

Finally, how does the info supplied via referrer.pl get sent to me i.e. how will I be able to download it into my affiliate sales database ?

All help and suggestions gratefully received.

Regards

David

[cdicken]

Lets say that your URL is

http://www.travelclinic.biz/

Your cgi-bin URL is

http://www.travelclinic.biz/cgi-bin/

Your catalog URL is

http://www.travelclinic.biz/acatalog/

Your CGI-Script ID is

1

Your path from cgi-bin to the acatalog folder is

../htdocs/acatalog

The page you wanted people to land on was:

Section_Page.html

and the affiliate code you wanted to store was

123

The call to the referrer script would be:

http://www.travelclinic.biz/cgi-bin/rs000001.pl?SOURCE=123&DESTINATION=Section%5fPage%2ehtml&PATH=%2e%2e%2fhtdocs%2facatalog&BASEURL=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2etravelclinic%2ebiz%2facatalog%2f

%2f becomes /
%2e becomes .
%5f becomes _
%3a becomes :

The value is stored as 'User Definable 3' in Actinic which you can view in the 'Misc.' tab of the order and also on the Data Entry report.

Hope this helps