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Now that your website is integrated with ClickInc.com, what do you do next so that you can start getting affiliate sign-ups and how they can begin sending you traffic? This guide will help you to get to the next steps.

Settings

You will ultimately want to begin by making sure all your settings are in check. When you login go to the Settings Tab at the top:

• Commission Settings and other General Settings: Make sure that once you are fully integrated, that you have setup your commissions, and general settings the way you want. To do this, log into your account and go to the Settings Tab. Check your default commission, 2nd and 3rd tier commissions, alerts and notifications, payout limits, payment intervals, cookie lifetime etc. All these settings should be setup before you start advertising your program.
• Settings > SKU's: If you have many products or just a few, you can import or add them in this section. The benefit of pre-loading them, allows you to set different commission rates PER product if you wish, and also when a partiulcar order is placed then the product name can be visible to the affiliate, so he / she knows what products are working best. This also helps you to know. If you do not import or add SKU's in there, whenever a product is ordered from your website, the SKU will be populated for you in this section, but only the ID of the product. New products will be listed as "New Product" once they are submitted. You may want to edit those product names from the SKU list (just click on the link to edit the name).
• Settings > Affiliate Groups: Before you begin, you may want to setup different groups of affiliates, assigning different commission rates to those groups. This comes in handy if you have different levels of affiliates, like Gold, Silver and Bronze. Where Gold members receive a higher commission rate etc. Create your groups, and when you go to edit an affiliate (by going to Dashboard > Affiliates and then clickinc the ID you want to edit) on their affiliate page at the top, you can select which GROUP to assign them to.
• Settings > Promotion: This works directly with SKU's that you have imported / added. You can set a specific commission for specific products for a time period. This will be a promotion for your affiliates. You can use this for Christmas or Valentine's Day, if you want your affiliates to promote these special products, which you are offering a greater commission value for the holiday season (as an example).

Marketing

Once your settings are done, you will want to add links, banners and promotional elements to your back-end, so that your affiliates will have access to those items to place on their website etc.

• Marketing > Text Links: By default when you register for a ClickInc.com account, the domain you added during signup is added here. You can edit that as you wish. In this section, you can also add other links to your website, specific landing pages, or your shopping cart, and add various keywords and phrases for the anchor text. These links can then be used by your affiliates (with their ID in it) to place on their website / email signatures etc. to drive traffic to your website. To add a new link, simply click Add Link at the top, and follow the directions. Make sure that ANY link you add in here, is integrated with the ClickInc.com scripts, so that they can be tracked properly. If you add a link here, which does NOT have the clickinc code, then it will not track.
  
• Marketing > Banners: Same idea as links above. You will want to add your creative banners / images etc. You can list all banners, or Add / Edit banners from the top. First you have the option to make Categories. This can be helpful, as you can created different folders for different sized banners, or promotions like Christmas Banners etc. When you add a new banner, you are asked for the FULL path of the URL where the image or banner is located. This should be somewhere on your own server. Then it will ask for the landing page. This is the page where you want customers to land on, once they have clicked the banner. It will also ask which Category you want to place the banner in. By default it will be assigned to the General Category. Other options for banners are Flash banners and Pixel images. Pixels are 1x1 clear images, which can be placed in certain places specifically for Impression tracking. It is not used for sales tracking. You can have your affiliates use these on special promotional pages, or Thank You pages for contact forms they may have to generate leads etc. Click here for more information on Flash Banners.
• Marketing > HTML Ads: Like banners and links, you can also create categories. HTML Ads more advanced types of banners, which you can incorporate HTML code with. You can create various HTML banners and ads with your own images and html code. For the links which you add in the HTML code, you need to make sure to use the proper format to append the affiliate ID at the end of each link, like so
  • •  
      • Append ?affId=!!!affiliate!!! or &affId=!!!affiliate!!! with the url where you want to get the traffic. Ex: http://test.com?affId=!!!affiliate!!! or http://test.com/test/index.html?id=12&affId=!!!affiliate!!

Contacting Your Affiliates

When your affiliates sign up, they receive some emails from the system welcoming them to your program. These emails should contain info on how they can get started with your program. By default, the emails are basic. You should go through them and outline your program, how to get banners, what commission rates you offer, how to submit their domain to be used as TruLink etc. This is all customized to your specific program, so you need to explain to your affiliates how they can begin.

• Dashboard > Contact > Mail Settings: This is the section where you can modify the contact messages sent from our system to your affiliates. When you get to that page, you will see a drop-down menu to the left, which has all the various messages. Please go through each one and edit as you like. The most important one may be the Confirm Affiliate Registration email. Once you approve your affiliate, he/she will get this email. You may want to edit that email to explain your program details and how they can get banners / promotions / links etc. and how they can use TruLink to maximize their traffic. Here are a few suggestions you can use:

• Dashboard > Contact > Greeting Message: You can customize this message to introduce yourself as the manager, offer news, tips, promotions etc. When your affiliates log into their control panel, they will see this message at the very top of their page. You can use this space for many different things that could be useful for them!
  
• Dashboard > Contact > HTML Setting: This is the page which Affiliates see once they have signed up to your program. This is the Thank You page, and you can customize the HTML code, add information about your program etc. Even add the instructions above, for how they can get started. By default, affiliates have to be approved by you first, but if you autmatically approve them, this page can serve as your "Getting Started" page, rather than having the system email them the information.