Can This Be Done?

[Lazorbeam]

I want to promote the sale of an e-book through my site. I would like to encourage the contribution of content by giving users referral sales through their threads. For example:

- Visitor "Bob" lands on my site thanks to a thread started by "Steve".
- Bob decides to buy the e-book. He clicks the e-book link, which sends him to the Clickbank page or whatnot, and Steve gets affiliate referral.

Is this possible?

[kh99]

If you mean can this be done easily using existing mods or vb feature, then I think the answer is no (although I only did a brief search for "affiliate", maybe someone else will know of an existing mod that helps).

If you mean can it be developed, then yes, of course it could. You could issue "Steve" a sort of affiliate id and have him add it to his links that he posts on other sites, and when someone like Bob arrives at the site you could look for that id and save it with his session. You could also change the link to the sales site to be a link to your site that records the click then redirects Bob to the sales site. But the issue I see is somehow correlating "Bob's" buying of the book (or not) from a 3rd party site to his clicking of the link on your (I'm not familiar with Clickbank so I don't know if there's any provision for doing something like this).

[Lazorbeam]

Originally Posted by kh99

If you mean can this be done easily using existing mods or vb feature, then I think the answer is no (although I only did a brief search for "affiliate", maybe someone else will know of an existing mod that helps).

If you mean can it be developed, then yes, of course it could. You could issue "Steve" a sort of affiliate id and have him add it to his links that he posts on other sites, and when someone like Bob arrives at the site you could look for that id and save it with his session. You could also change the link to the sales site to be a link to your site that records the click then redirects Bob to the sales site. But the issue I see is somehow correlating "Bob's" buying of the book (or not) from a 3rd party site to his clicking of the link on your (I'm not familiar with Clickbank so I don't know if there's any provision for doing something like this).

What if each user had a private profile field that could be filled out with clickbank affiliate ID? Let's assume yours was filled out as 'kh99clicky'. Normally the purchase button would look like this: www.yourforum.com/purchase.php

If a user was reading one of your threads, and clicked the purchase button, the link would instead read http://www.yourforum.com/purchase.ph...ate=kh99clicky

That's essentially all there is to clickbank. I'm not really looking to track where visitors came from as they move through the site... only where they were before clicking the purchase button.