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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Can I use your links from any site I please?
- Where can I find a list of links I can use to promote your products and services?
- Your links are awfully long and won't display gracefully in my ezine promotion. Is there any way to make them shorter?
- How do you track my referrals?
- What does “Lifelong Commission” really mean?
- Why don't you offer a two-tiered referral scheme?
Yes, provided your site is compliant with our Terms of Service. We would appreciate it, though, if you could drop us a line listing all sites you are displaying our links on. This is:
- to get a better impression of which environment our products and services are being featured in; and,
- to maintain a list of affiliate sites we may feature in a dedicated directory some day (which will obviously increase your own exposure, too).
As a registered affiliate partner you are automatically subscribed to our newsletter CrewsNews™ which regularly features new links you may use. There's also an online archive in the password protected Affiliates Section of this site where you can retrieve these links.
Your links are awfully long and won't display gracefully in my ezine promotion. Is there any way to make them shorter?You're in luck! You can shorten them easily with our fantomas trackerJack PRO™ — simply define the targets in your links list file by assigning them a short tag, which is exactly what we're doing, too.
Here's a practical example.
Say your affiliate referral link for our fantomas Super Suite™ is:
http://khedive.com/fantomaster/agents/agents.cgi?YOURID&ln=supst [66 chars]
After installing fantomas trackerJack PRO™ and renaming it to “t.cgi” on your web server, you could assign the tag “1” to this particular link.
This would give you:
http://yourdomain.com/t.cgi?ln=1 [34 chars]
The nice thing being that you can do this with every link you're using — it's not restricted to our affiliate program! What's more, fantomas trackerJack PRO™ will give you easy-to-view logs of any clicks and is an excellent low-bandwidth tracking tool.
Check it out here! How do you track my referrals?Referrals are tracked by cookies — small code snippets stored on referrals' computers which will be read and evaluated by our system when visitors return at a later point. As you may have noticed, none of your links point directly to any of our target web sites. Rather, they are targeted at our proprietary dedicated tracking server, where all affiliate referrals are stored in an SQL database, with visitors being redirected to the pages defined by the referral link.
Redirections being effected in realtime, there is no noticeable delay involved from the visitor's point of view. This setup allows for optimum flexibility. It also makes ours one of the very affiliate programs that allow partners to link to a great spectrum of pages located on various unrelated web sites, some of them completely uncommercial, and yet assign lifetime commissions!
What does "Lifelong Commission" really mean?Depends on how long you intend to live. :-)
But seriously: it's really quite simple. We effect referral tracking by cookies which are stored on the visitor's computer system. Obviously, this presupposes that cookies are enabled in the visitor's browser. As long as your referral doesn't delete these cookies, our system will be able to track them and, hence, assign you your commission for any sales effected.
Admittedly, because of its technical limitations this system is far from perfect: if cookies are disabled in the visitor's browser, you won't get your commission. Neither will you profit from your referral if visitor deletes cookies from his or her system or decides to order from a different computer. Short of nailing your lead to a post, there's currently no technical method available to overcome these limitations. This is a generic problem due to the semin-anonymous structure of WWW browsing which prevents identifying surfers unless they choose to allow cookies to be stored on their local systems.
(About 90% do, however, so at the end of the day this really isn't such a big issue.)
Still, in our view this approach beats all those affiliate referral tracking systems which will either require a one-hit-one-sale transaction (i.e. unless referral buys on a predefined page, you won't get your full commision — vide Amazon! — or, possibly, no commission at all), or will limit commissions to sales effected within a very tight time span (typically between 12 hours to 12 weeks).
Why don't you offer a two-tiered referral scheme?In our experience, multi-tiered referral structures don't really perform that well. Sure, there are exceptions, and sure again, they sound pretty nice when you read about them on paper or the Web. Spreading the message across friends and family members (which is what most people do) may seem like an excellent idea to boost exposure and, hence, sales.
However, in actual practice most of these second-tier affiliates are a complete waste of time. (Yes, we do know there are exceptions - we mentioned as much above, didn't we? :-)
So rather than offer this feature and reduce affiliates' commission to 20% (with another 5% per referred sub-affiliates' sale), we chose to boost it right up to 25% and save on the overhead entailed in managing a sub-affiliate structure.
Actually, working on a two-tiered basis would be better for us revenue wise: because most second tier affiliates are essentially dead wood anyway, we'd save those extra 5% most of the time! But we prefer to pay a fair share to our dedicated one-tier-only affiliate partners and keeping them happy so they can fully concentrate on promoting our program instead of having to nurture their respective downlines.
Do you think 5% extra aren't that much of a deal? Well, think again: if you happen to sell our fantomas Super Suite™ for $890, that's a stately $44.50 you'll make more by way of commission!
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