This list of resources has been created in an attempt to create a centralized affiliate help links repository for our community. If you are having problems with the CafePress.com Affiliate Program, please read through the links in the first section prior to posting in the forum. Many questions asked have already been answered within those links.

Additional sections have also been created for information useful to shopkeepers promoting to affiliates and for information useful to affiliates.

Have Questions? Check these links first to look for your answers...
Affiliate Program FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions regarding the CafePress.com Affiliate Program at Commission Junction. These are the most common questions relayed to the CafePress.com Affiliate Team.

Announcements from the CafePress.com Affiliate Team - A forum within the CafePress.com Community Forums where the Affiliate Team at CafePress.com will post information and news regarding the program.

Linking Best Practices - A guide from the CafePress.com Affiliate Team regarding building affiliate links based on the Commission Junction link format.

Report a bug - If you are having technical issues with your CafePress.com Affiliate Program account, please submit a bug report with as much information as possible. Please include as much information as possible to assist in tracking down the problem. (ie: CJ transaction number, links to pages you feel are causing a problem, etc.)

affiliates@cafepress.com - If you have a question or issue with your CafePress.com Affiliate Program account which needs input from a CP employee, you will need to email the affiliate team. The CafePress.com Community Forums are a peer-to-peer resource.


Shopkeepers Marketing to Affiliates
Creating an Affiliate Recruiting Page for your shop - Shannon (Hazeleyes7) has created a couple of great tools for use in creating affiliate recruiting pages. Her Shop Affiliate Signup Guide and Affiliate Recruiting Page Code are great resources to get a shopkeeper started in building a page to recruit affiliates to their shop.

Information Useful for Affiliates
Generic Affiliate Program Tutorial - While not specific to CafePress.com, or any affiliate program for that matter, the guide at this link gives a good basic overview of being an affiliate marketer and some things to do and not to do. This site has many guides about affiliate marketing.

Creating Affiliate Links Tutorial(1) - Basics & Affiliate Linking Guide (2) - Two awesome tutorials by Diane (Tanith) on creating the new style affiliate links on Commission Junction.

Finding the Product Number of an Affiliate Sale Guide - A great guide by fellow moderator Jim (Teesed) about how to find the product number of a sale within the sometimes confusing Commission Junctions reports, complete with screenshots and a link to Jen's (lilgoodies) product lookup tool so you can see the product you sold!

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Since the forums are set to autopurge after so many days, I wanted to add a few post quotes to the sticky so it would be permanently available to folks:
Viewing your stats - Posted on 5/24/07 by Rhea

quote:

Here's my tip for how to determine how well your CJ affiliate links are working. This will let you see a lot of stats about link performance but the main thing you want to look for is the ratio of sales to clicks. 1 sale to 100 clicks is considered good in the affiliate industry.

Here's what you do:

- Login to CJ
- Click the "run reports" tab
- Click the "performance reports" tab
- Click the "Access the Former Performance Reports" link
- Change the dropdown box that reads "pre-selected periods" to "this month"
- Change the dropdown box that reads "web site performance" to "50 best performing links"

Find the line(s) with CafePress Affiliate Program and compare "clicks" to "sales"

There ya go!

Getting "spammed" by Commission Junction? - Originally posted on 8/11/07 by Tanith

quote:

Log in to your Cj account.
Click the Mail tab.
Click the Setting tab.
You can choose what kind of mail you want to receive.
I added a different account to receive some kinds of mail so I could separate out the important stuff.

If your email address is usable to visitors to your web site a spam bot can probably see it. They can use javascript to untangle encoded addresses, and they can use OCR to read images. They can look for patterns like "email (word) at (word) dot com". You are better off using forms.

CafePress Affiliate Program Acronyms originally posted by Carl (Absolute Cotton)

quote:

PID = Publisher (website) Identification code (Identifies your website in the CJ Publisher network.)

CID = Company ID (master number under which all of your PID's are grouped.)

SID = Shopper Identification code (set by you to track, identify, and/or reward your unique shoppers.)

AID = Advertisement Identification Code (set by CJ to track an individual advertiser's text link or banner.)

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NOTE: If you find a link that you feel would be a useful addition to this list, feel free to send me or any of the other moderators a Private Message with the link. Please indicate in the message what the link is and that you feel it would be a good addition to the Affiliate Help forum sticky.

Also note that not all of the links within this thread are located at CafePress.com. Some are located elsewhere and deal with affiliate marketing in general.

EDIT: 9/3/2007-Updated CP Affiliate FAQ link to new FAQ
EDIT: 9/7/2007-Added guides from Tanith and Teesed. Added quoted posts by Tanith and Rhea.
EDIT: 9/14/2007-Added Carl's list of acronyms for the CP affiliate program.
EDIT: 9/18/2007-Added Diane's second link creation guide.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pristinephoto,