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(This is a true story about a real problem that was solved with current and readily available technology.) This story is about two domains. One domain publishes ebooks. Authors with real-world experience are published here. You can buy ebooks. And you can become an affiliate to sell ebooks. The domain has good products and it treats its affiliates well and it flourishes. The domain is Intellectua.com.
Instead of instituting its own affiliate program, DreamJobsToGo.com wants to pay product sales commissions to already established Intellectua.com affiliates who send prospects to DreamJobsToGo.com. (Disclosure: Intellectua.com publishes some of my ebooks. Also, example links in this article use my affiliate code 10033)
Affiliate codes, in this case, are 5-digits in length and need to be in the correct position within the URL. The affiliate code tells Intellectua.com's CGI shopping cart and affiliate programs who to credit for the sale. So when a surfer clicks on an affiliate's link leading to DreamJobsToGo.com, the affiliate code is recorded and kept track of. If the surfer decides to buy, s/he is sent to Intellectua.com with a URL that includes the affiliate code.
JavaScript code scans the DreamJobsToGo.com URL and extracts any affiliate code it might contain. If the URL contains no affiliate code, a generic code is substituted. The "question mark and affiliate code as the last characters of the URL" specification for DreamJobsToGo.com is necessary for extracting the affiliate code from the end of the URL. The JavaScript looks for the question mark and, if it's there, anything following the question mark is the affiliate code. The next step is the recording and tracking part. When an affiliate code is extracted from a DreamJobsToGo.com URL, that code is stored in a cookie on the prospect's computer. That way, the prospect can move about anywhere on the DreamJobsToGo.com site and the cookie remembers the affiliate code. Cookies set by one domain may not be read by another domain. Therefore, a different mechanism is used to transfer the affiliate code from DreamJobsToGo.com to Intellectua.com. The CGI shopping cart and affiliate software at Intellectua.com have their own URL specifications; they each expect to find certain information in certain places along the URL. Here is an example of the Intellectua.com URL for purchasing Dana K. Cassell's "Freelance Writer" ebook: http://Intellectua.com/cgi-bin/sgx/store/web_store.cgi?page=djtg0001.html&afnum=10033 Of all the information in that URL, we're concerned only with the affiliate code. Notice that the affiliate code is at the end of the URL following the characters: afnum= When a prospect visits a product page at DreamJobsToGo.com, Dana K. Cassell's "Freelance Writer" ebook, for example, then the purchasing link leading to Intellectua.com must be custom created on the fly to include the affiliate code. Without the affiliate code, the affiliate can't get paid. The link leading to Intellectua.com is custom created with JavaScript. First, the JavaScript reads the cookie on the prospect's computer. (Note that the prospect is still at DreamJobsToGo.com, which means the cookie can be read.) Then, the JavaScript creates the custom purchasing link and inserts it at the proper place on the DreamJobsToGo.com product page. In this way the affiliate code is sent to the Intellectua.com site for the payment process. It works like a charm. When an Intellectua.com affiliate sends prospects to DreamJobsToGo.com with the affiliate's code, the code is kept track of. If the prospect buys a DreamJobsToGo.com product, the affiliate is paid a commission. Problem solved. Copyright 2001 William Bontrager
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