Can this be done easily with PHP?

[ezinestein]

Hello!

There are tons of complicated, automated affiliate tracking programs and scripts out there. But all I want is a simple script that DOESN’T require people to actually "sign up" for an affiliate program, but that WILL allow them to benefit from one.

So, can this be done easily with PHP?

Let’s say...

Person “A” comes to my website at www.domain.com.

She fills out a simple form on that page, which signs her up for my newsletter.

I would like her name and email address added to a MySQL database.

And... I would also like to assign her with an “ID” number.

Being that she is the first person to sign up; I would want her to get “ID” number “1”.

I would now also like to give “Mrs. A” the opportunity to send traffic to www.domain.com using her own personal URL. She would simply get; www.domain.com/?1 which I would send her along with here subscription confirmation.

Okay...

Now let’s say person “B” comes along and clicks on “Mrs. A’s” personal link www.domain.com/?1. “Mr. B” will simply be sent to www.domain.com where he’ll also find my newsletter subscription form.

If he signs up, his name and email address will of course be added to the database. But I would also like TWO more things to happen for “Mr. B”.

First I would like the “ID” in “Mrs. A’s” personal URL (in this case, 1) set as “Mr. B’s” “Referral ID” in the database.

Second, I would then like HIM to receive his own “ID” and URL. In this case, if “Mr. B” actually was the second person to sign up, his “ID” would be set at 2, and his personal URL would be www.domain.com/?2.

So I guess what I’m looking to do is simply two things.

I want to be able to lookup who referred who. Plus I want each person to receive his or her own personal URL in THIS simple structure; www.domain.com/?x, all without having to actually sign up for an affiliate program.

If this can be done quite easily, can someone please point me in the direction of a good programmer that will charge a fair price?

Cheers,
EZ

PS – If this can be done with PHP, I guess another nice little feature would be for each person to be able to see how many people they’ve actually referred.

[kobmat]

it can be done easily...

i have made a site that keeps track who referred who.
they needed that feature because, tokens are given to
the person who referred the new user.

I just created a table with the folowing fields

userid
name
referredby

the "referredby" field contains the userid of the referer and is
set to 0 if the user signed up by himself.

on the phpside, on the default document of your site(say index.php) you will pass the referer's id

www.domain.com/index.php?ref=1

where ref is the id of the affliate. With that you can add some
code in index.php to record some stats maybe how many accesses come from what affliate.

you can put a form on that page to allow new signups. For example your php scripts that receives new signups is "saveuser.php". just pass the ref id to the action on the
form.

on saveuser.php you can use that refid to fill in the referredby field on the DB.

I will glad to help you on this.

[Shrike]

First off I would suggest using something a little more unique than 1,2,3,4 etc. for your identifier. Date and time as a string would be an improvement, but still open to guessing.

Secondly to extend kobmats example, in the database you would need

user_id <database prim. key>,
username <optional really>,
referee_id <this persons referer id>,
referer_id <person who refered them>,
num_hits <number of times this referal has been called>

in order to generate some statistics on usage.

Thirdly, if you want to do something like

www.mydomain.com?id=uniqueid then you will need to configure the webserver to allow extra file types (in this case PHP = index.php) as index files. Under Apache it's something like

<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.php3
</IfModule>

hth

Oh and yes it's very easy to do in PHP/ASP/Perl/Java/CF etc 🙂