Merchants Guide

CONTENTS
Home
Account
Programs & Links
Affiliates
Run Reports
Emails
APPENDIX
Glossary
 

HOME

The purpose of the Home section is to give a quick overview of your statistics and daily "tasks." You
can view pending affiliate applications, transactions, and monthly impressions. This provides you with
easy access to information on the most pressing, time sensitive issues concerning your affiliate
program. Here is how to access and make changes:

Waiting Approval
Here, you can view transactions and affiliates waiting for your approval. Click on the number (for
Program Applications, Affiliate Applications, Transactions, or URLs) to view specific details.  Program
Applications refers to affiliate applications to specific programs that require approval.  Affiliate
Applications is for affiliates that have first applied to your overall program.  Transactions is for sales,
leads and clicks that are waiting approval from you.
Customization Options
Default settings for your entire account (across all programs). Click change to modify.  Affiliate
Application Approval: Choose whether you wish to automatically approve all affiliates or manually
review each application. Either way, you can remove an affiliate at any time. The primary email is the
address affiliates will receive their automatic communications from.  Specify the URL you want to
direct your affiliates to after sign up and log out. Simply click “Update” to edit the information.
Statistics
Impressions refer to the number of times your ads are displayed on affiliate sites.  Clicks refer to the
number of times your ads have been clicked on affiliate sites.  Leads refer to the number of leads your
affiliates have made.  Sales refer to the number of sales your affiliates have lead.  To view your affiliates:
Click the Total Affiliates” link. A list of your affiliates appears. Select the Affiliate name you wish to view
or modify.
Advertising Links
Here you can view or edit your advertising links that are offered to affiliates.
Send Emails
Here you can view or edit the communication settings with your affiliates.

ACCOUNT

This information is kept confidential and is only used for billing and business correspondence.
Affiliates cannot view your contact information. Select "Edit" to modify information.
 

PROGRAMS & LINKS

In the programs section, you can create new programs, edit existing programs, and delete
programs entirely. You can also select the ads for your affiliates to use.
Program Settings – Affiliate approval can be set for automatic approval or manual. If you choose
manual, you will review every application for approval while automatic sends the affiliate a
password instantly. Select settings for Affiliate approval, Transaction approval, Cookie Duration,
and Program policy.
Affiliate approval can be set for automatic approval or manual. If you choose manual, you will
review every application for approval while automatic sends the affiliate a password instantly.
Transaction approval can be set for manual or automatic.
If you choose automatic , affiliates will view all sales as "approved" in their account after the
transaction is completed. You can still reverse the transaction.
Manual approval allows the affiliate to view transactions immediately. However, the transactions
will be displayed as "pending" until approval.
2nd-tier offerings are when you offer affiliates an incentive to recruit other affiliates for your
program. Affiliates are then rewarded for transactions completed by their 2nd-tier. To change
payout rates or delete the 2nd-tier offering simply click on Edit program.
The Program Policy is either private or public. Public programs can be viewed by all affiliates
while private programs can only be viewed by groups or individual affiliates that you classify.
Cookie duration is the amount of time (days) that a cookie belonging to a visitor, referred by an
affiliate, is set for. For example, if you set the cookie duration for 30 days, your affiliates will get
credit for a sale they refer anytime within thirty days of the first visit.
The default URL is the URL that your affiliate traffic will be directed to unless you specify another.
Select your program from the drop-down menu.
To Create a New Program, click the “Create Program” button. Enter the destination URL of the
program. This is the URL that you want your affiliates to send traffic to. If you choose, type a
description here -- a brief overview of your affiliate program. Details may include payout or 2-tier
offerings.
Payout options include pay per click, sale, or lead. Select one payout option and type in the
amount.
If you are offering a 2-tier referral program, check the box to the left and specify percent of sale or
flat amount. Then, type in the amount that the referring webmaster will receive.

Choose the messaging option either auto e -mail, or receive
notification upon sale.
When you are finished, be sure to click “Submit” and your program will be saved

In the bottom you will see all the advertising links that are added to this program.
Click "All Advertising Links " to edit and choose advertisements for your program.
The “Advertisements” box appears. Select the type of ad you want to use for your project. Choose
from HTML, Text, Graphic, or Pop-Up Ads. Click the appropriate button. Be sure to check “Include
ad,” and “Save” when you are finished. You may also view and edit your Graphic ad here. Be sure
to check “Include ad,” and “Save” when you are finished. Click "remove" next to the actual
advertisement if you no longer wish to use a specific ad for a program.

ShareBucks also supports commissions per product. Go to "Programs & Links -> Affiliate Program -> Define Products".  To create a new product, click "Add New Product", or to edit an existing product click "Edit" in the appropriate product row.
You may set a unique commission for every product you create.
You may set custom commissions for affiliates for every product. Just click “Affiliates” for the
product you want to edit and you will see the dialog with all affiliates that have custom commission
for this product.
After creating all your products and commissions, you may add the products to the programs you
want in “Products per Program”.
 

AFFILIATE MANAGEMENT

The "Affiliate Management Area" is where you will view and manage affiliate activity. This is the
area where affiliate payments are processed, transactions approved or reversed, affiliate data
collected, profiles viewed and affiliates are accepted or rejected.
The Affiliate Management area is packed with options including notes, removing affiliates, tax
information and payment status. Data is extensive, yet simple to sort and view, saving you valuable
time.

Sorting the List
You can choose to display your affiliate list in several ways. You may sort the list by every column
in the table. Just click on the icon next to the label of the column.
Also, select other options: sort order, and records displayed on your page. You may perform an affiliate
search if your page does not display all affiliates. A box pops up, showing you the affiliate’s profile.
View Affiliate Profiles
Click a link with an affiliate ID number to view the profile. The icon next to each affiliate is described in
the legend above the list. There are four categories. For a discussion of these categories, see below.
Save notes pertaining to affiliates by clicking on the notes icon and entering information.
To perform actions in the affiliate area, go to the options column and select the appropriate action in
the drop-down menu.
Affiliate Pending Approval
Affiliate that has applied to your program and has not been accepted or denied.
Approved Affiliate
Any affiliate that has been accepted other than affiliates that have been included in groups.
Transaction Pending Approval
All sales, clicks, or leads that are labeled "pending" have not been approved or refused. To
manage these transactions, simply select "transactions" in the drop -down menu.
You can add new affiliate by this window “Add Affiliate”.
Make payments to your affiliates by clicking on the "affiliate payments" button.
The Affiliate Payments box appears. Select the beginning and ending dates, sort order, records per
page, and click the “Generate” button.
Options Definitions:
Transactions -- Any commissioned affiliate activity. Here, you can approve, refuse, or flag
transactions.
View Profile -- Select this option to view an affiliates basic account and contact information.
Manual Transaction -- Add a transaction to an affiliate manually. This feature is useful for phone
orders or "spiffs.”
Remove Affiliate -- To delete an affiliate from your program, select this option.
Change Password -- Edit your affiliate’s password.
 

RUN REPORTS

The Reports area is where affiliate program statistics and data analysis is viewed. Reports are
available on Day, Commissions, Advertisements, Programs, Affiliates, and Traffic. This area allows
you to fine tune your marketing efforts and gauge your return on investment.
Select a Report Type from the drop-down menu and date range. Click "generate" to view program
reports. This section is useful for merchants that have multiple programs.
Your report appears.
Daily Stats
You may choose the date on the calendar. The statistics are for the selected date.
Commissions for Date Range
You can view and summarize all your transactions made by the affiliates by date range.
You can view all click commissions as separate transactions. The window gives you an option to
sort the table by affiliate, commission value and status.
You can view all sales commissions as separate transactions. The window gives you an option to
sort the table by affiliate, commission value and status.
You can view all 2-tier sales commissions as separate transactions. The window gives you an
option to sort the table by affiliate, commission value and status.
Traffic
Here you may see the impressions and clicks of your ads in graphs.
Affiliates Stats by Date Range
Here you can view and track your registered affiliates performance.
Stats for every Affiliate Program by given Date Range
Here you can view and track how each of your programs performs. You may see the affiliates that
have registered to this program, total impressions, clicks, leads, sales and activity ratios.
Advertising Link Stats
Here you can view and track how each of yours advertising links performs.
Data you may encounter, and their Definitions:
Cookie duration is the amount of time (days) that a cookie belonging to a visitor, referred by an
affiliate, is set for. For example, if you set the cookie duration for 30 days, your affiliates will get
credit for a sale they refer anytime within thirty days of the first visit. The default URL is the URL
that your affiliate traffic will be directed to unless you specify another.
Affiliate approval can be set for automatic approval or manual. If you choose manual, you will
review every application for approval while automatic sends the affiliate a password instantly.
Transaction approval can be set for manual or automatic. If you choose automatic, affiliates will
view all sales as "approved" in their account after the transaction is completed. You can still
reverse the transaction.
Manual approval allows the affiliate to view transactions immediately also,. However the
transactions will be displayed as "pending" until approval. 2nd-tier offerings occur when you offer
affiliates an incentive to recruit other affiliates for your program. Affiliates are then rewarded for
transactions completed by their 2nd -tier. To change payout rates or delete the 2nd tier offering
simply click on Edit program.
Impressions refer to the number of times your ads are displayed on affiliate sites.
Clicks -- When a visitor clicks on an ad on one of your affiliate sites. Duplicate clicks are counted in
your stats but not credited to affiliates participating in pay per click programs.
Commissions -- When a click leads to a sale or lead.
 

EMAILS – AFFILIATE MESSAGING

The messaging section is where you set up your email messages that you automatically send to
your affiliates after specific system events.
To select the e -mails that you wish to use, simply choose a system event in the drop-down menu.
After choosing the event, you will notice a sample message. This message is an example and can
be used or edited. In the body of the message, you will notice variables such as; $firstname, and
$company. These are replaced by your actual data.
The variables can be viewed by clicking on "variable list.” You can choose whether or not you wish to
use variables.
The From address is the address you want your affiliates to respond to your e-mails at. The Login
link is the URL to the affiliate login.
The E-mail signature is the signature that you can attach to all of your emails.
To create a signature from e -mail address for all of your mailings, enter your information and click
"Done.”
To test your message, type your receiving address into the box, and click, “Test.” An e-mail should
arrive in your mailbox with your test information.
To activate a system e -mail, make the changes to the text, check the "in use" box above the
message and click "update.”
To test your message, type your receiving address into the box, and click, “Test.” An e-mail should
arrive in your mailbox with your test information.
Be sure to click “Done” when you are finished testing.
 

APPENDIX

Basic Affiliate Programs Info
Affiliate programs are really booming and provide people with an easy way to make some money
from their web sites. An affiliate program has to offer the following basics in order to consider
joining it:
• Reliable reporting
• A good business strategy and growth
• Products or services in line with the needs and wants of your site traffic
• Great customer service and support
• A large selection of potential links are possible that can be easy customized to fit your site
• Commissions are the most profitable
• And of course, a fair and realistic commission!
Don't join too many affiliates -- Too much choice confuses potential clients, and they are likely to
not bother shopping. Often, affiliate programs shut down or change and managing multiple affiliate
accounts can also be a nightmare. On top of this, some affiliate programs offer sliding scale
commissions based on sales. So if you split your sales among multiple companies, you end up
receiving over all less than if you concentrated on one or two companies.
Create Virtual Stores -- A logo or banner is not very effective compared to creating a page
dedicated to a product or group of products. This has multiple benefits, people can potentially find
that page on search engines (if you register it!) you can link to it anyway you want and you can fit it
into your site perfectly.
The only way to see serious income as an affiliate is to build entire web sites promoting a product.
When you start concentrating on building web sites dedicated to your affiliate parent sites, you may
start to see a huge increase in your number of sa les. If you have an existing site, you can still place
the virtual storefront on another domain, allowing search engines to more easily find and list them.
If you choose not to create a virtual store, the best way to link to your partner are through specific
relevant product links scattered throughout the site and a small to medium sized logo in a box near
the top of the page, with some text promoting the service or product to your visitors. The extra text
is crucial -- it attracts attention and gives people a reason to click through. If a search box is
available as well, that will help even more.
Your bottom line is sales not traffic -- If you remember this, it can help focus your marketing
efforts. Of course the more traffic you have, the more potential sales you can have. A very useful
number to know is how much money you make per visitor by dividing the total number of visitors
by the total amount of commission made. This is very useful in knowing when you are doing
something right and can help you purchase advertising.
Keep the visitors you get -- If you are paying for a visitor, it can get very expensive if half of them
don't even wait for your page to load. Make sure your page fits all the basic page design criteria.
This is very important when talking about sales and profit. It has to be easy to use, easy to
navigate, easy to read, fast loading and no dead links. If you are weak on any of these, you will lose
traffic right away.
Take advantage of the many free resources out there -- Things like tripod.com, geocities.com,
Netscape.com and other sites where you can have your FREE web site. Free site submits, meta
tag generators, link testers, and many other extremely useful resources are available at Add Me!.
We strongly recommend their tools, especially the traffic tracker software.
Find out what keyword combinations are most common -- This can be done by registering at
GoTo.com, and using their search term suggestion tools (now only available to members) and at
AltaVista.com. At AltaVista.com, typing in a generic search term will give a list of more specific, yet
popular, related search phrases. The same can be found at DirectHit.com. Note: A high traffic
keyphrase is not as good as one that targets people interested in buying i.e., "modern art" for poster
store may be a popular keyphrase but visitor to sale conversion will be low.
Optimize your page for keywords -- Once you have a good idea what your targeted keywords
are then you can make sure that they are in the text of your page two to four times, and perhaps
once in an "alt" tag of an image. Keywords seem, in general, to be best placed three times, near
the top, the bottom, and the center along with one “alt” and the title. Ideally, the title is between
three and six words. The "meta description" tag should have the keywords you are targeting. Don't
even bother with "meta keywords" tag. No major search engine seems to even read them, though
we suspect they may still penalize if they decide you are trying to spam the index. In general, it is
good to have lots of keywords throughout. There are lots of possible keyword combinations that
would help your page rank well.
Submit to search engines -- This is vital, don't forget! Make sure you submit to all of the major
search engines. This is free advertising and can be worth thousands of dollars if you can get a
good ranking for a popular keyword on a popular search engine. You should resubmit
occasionally, best after you do an update. Don't submit if anything is broken! You will be penalized
or removed.
Track who your visitors are and where they come from -- This can be done quickly and easily
using “Add Me!,” one of the best free traffic trackers out there. You can keep track of which search
engines are listing you and help you to further optimize your search rankings. You can also
calculate how much you make per visitor.
 

GLOSSARY

Application – A program or group of programs designed for end users. Applications software (also
called end-user programs) includes database programs, word processors, and spreadsheets.
Figuratively speaking, applications software sits on top of systems software because it is unable to
run without the operating system and system utilities.
Cookie -- A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in
a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page
from the server.
The main purpose of cookies is to identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for
them. When you enter a Web site using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form providing such
information as your name and interests. This information is packaged into a cookie and sent to
your Web browser which stores it for later use. The next time you go to the same Web site, your
browse r will send the cookie to the Web server. The server can use this information to present you
with custom Web pages. So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page you
might see a welcome page with your name on it.
CSV – Also called a Comma Separated Variable file. A CSV file is basically a file where the data is
separated by a comma, most often for use in MS Excel worksheets. Each file can contain up to
20,000 lines of data.
Default -- A value or setting that a device or program automatically selects if you do not specify a
substitute. For example, word processors have default margins and default page lengths that you
can override or reset.
E-Mail – Short for electronic mail, the transmission of messages over communications networks.
The messages can be notes entered from the keyboard or electronic files stored on disk. Most
mainframes, minicomputers, and computer networks have an e-mail system. Some electronic-mail
systems are confined to a single computer system or network, but others have gateways to other
computer systems, enabling users to send electronic mail anywhere in the world. Companies that
are fully computerized make extensive use of e-mail because it is fast, flexible, and reliable.
Most e -mail systems include a rudimentary text editor for composing messages, but many allow
you to edit your messages using any editor you want. You then send the message to the recipient
by specifying the recipient's address. You can also send thesame message to several users at
once. This is called broadcasting.
Export -- To format data in such a way that it can be used by another application. An application that
can export data can create a file in a format that another application understands, enabling the two
programs to share the same data. The two programs might be different types of word processors,
or one could be a word processor while the other could be a database management system.
HTML -- Short for HyperText Markup Language, the authoring language used to create documents
on the World Wide Web. HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a
variety of tags and attributes. The correct structure for an HTML document starts with
<HTML><HEAD>(enter here what document is about)</HEAD><BODY> and ends with
</BODY></HT ML>. All the information you'd like to include in your Web page fits in between the
<BODY> and </BODY> tags.
There are hundreds of other tags used to format and layout the information in a Web page. For
instance, <P> is used to make paragraphs and <I> … </I>is used to italicize fonts. Tags are also
used to specify hypertext links. These allow Web developers to direct users to other Web pages
with only a click of the mouse on either an image or word(s).
Link – In hypertext systems, such as the World Wide Web, a link is a reference to another
document. Such links are sometimes called hot links because they take you to other document
when you click on them.
URL -- Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of documents and other
resources on the World Wide Web. Example: www.sharebucks.com.