Email marketing remains among the most profitable methods of advertising in todays world (why do you think your mail box is filled with ads?) However, in order to maximize your return on investment you must have the highest quality address lists to send your promotions to.

Email Cash Plus is an industrial-strength solution for owning and operating a program that pays webmasters to bring you quality, optin email addresses from their visitor pools. What this script does is allow webmasters to signup as affiliates of your program and place the code for your program on their pages.

This small snippet of code allows surfers to enter their email addresses to join your mailing list. Each time a surfer enters their email, the referring webmaster gets paid a set amount. Example: 5 cents per email address. EmailCash has many hidden features such as duplicate address checks and detailed reports to help in catching cheaters. It also gives each affiliate a complete status report on request, automatically, and in real time. The script can be set to redirect surfers to a "thank you" page and then to the original page they were at so your affiliates never lose a single bit of their traffic.

This type of program has been highly successful to many webmasters out there, but until now was only possible for large sites and major corporations. Now you can also share in the profits from this highly advanced method of gathering high-quality, targeted optin email addresses. The script has a ton of error checking and also cheater protection as well as duplicate address checking.

System Requirements

• Customizable to work with all operating systems
• Customizable to work with all web servers
• Perl 5
• Sendmail

Preliminaries

• Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.

• Unpack the tar/ zip archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM. 

• After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

configure.cgi

This file pretty much runs the whole show.  If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly.   In other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY.  Ask your administrator if you need to.  Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi scripts.  All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain things are.

$localurl = "yourdomain.com";

your domain name

$mailprogram='/path/to/sendmail';

Path to sendmail on your system

$adminemail = "you\@yourdomain.com";

Your email address (YOU HAVE TO USE THE BACKSLASH HERE!)

$cgidirectory = "/path/to/cgi-bin/harvester";

Full path to your harvester directory inside the cgi-bin

$cgiurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/harvester";

Full URL to the harvester directory inside the cgi-bin

$webmasterurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/harvester/webmasters/";

Full URL to the webmaster directory

$subdirectory =  "/path/up/to/the data and logs directories";

This is the full path up to the /data and logs directories - might be /path/to/cgibin/harvester/ or /path/to/html/ depending on your webhosting configuration

$commission = 0.25;

What you are paying per CONFIRMED email address

$minpayout = ".019";

MINIMUM CHECK VALUE YOU WILL SEND

$cashfactor = 0.6;

percentage of commission paid as CASH

$plusfactor = 0.4;

percentage of commission paid as ADVERTISING CREDITS

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

• Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into a directory you create called "harvester" inside your cgi-bin.  Make a directory inside of this called data and another one called logs.
• Make a directory inside of your webspace called harvester to upload the admin & webmaster directory and the signup form.

Upload The Edited HTML Files

• Make a directory inside of your webspace called harvester and 2 directories inside of this called webmasters and admin
• Modify the form action tags of the admin (index.html) page and the webmasters (index.html) page and upload these into their respective directories.

Edit your Email Messages

• Copy the exact email message you want to have appended to the default email message into the file webmasters.txt (for new affiliates/webmasters) and message.txt (for new subscribers)

Upload Your Banner image

• Upload your banner images into the webmaster directory.  The "banners" I have implemented actually use TWO images each.   You can design any style of email banners you want however.

WHEN YOU ARE FINISHED...

http://www.yourdomain.com/harvester/index.html

    SIGNUP PAGE FOR NEW AFFILIATES

http://www.yourdomain.com/harvester/webmasters/index.html

Where users will login to get bannercode, check stats, modify info

http://www.yourdomain.com/harvester/admin/index.html

Password protected admin area

http://www.yourdomain.com/harvester/admin/unsubscribe.html

You can link to this page to allow people to easily unsubscribe from your newsletter

ALL CGI will be http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/harvester/

File Access Permissions

File access permissions must be set correctly for this program to run. The table below lists the permissions of each file which are to be set by the unix command ( chmod ) used to set the correct access permissions. You must set the access permissions for each of these files.

CHMOD 755	CHMOD 777
add.cgi login.cgi banners.cgi bydate.cgi byuser.cgi email.cgi stats.cgi confirm.cgi premodify.cgi overview.cgi configure.cgi delete.user.cgi export.cgi getinfo.cgi payout.cgi modify.cgi ctime.pl	logs directory data directory passwords webmasters.txt message.txt removelist confirmed log memberdatabase newsubscribers schedule.db

Operating your Affiliates Program

USING YOUR LISTS

There are several lists generated by this program.  They are ALL stored inside of the cgi-bin/harvester/data directory.

confirmed:  this is the FINAL confirmed email collection list you paid for.  You can download this list but do not ever delete it or you may end up paying for duplicate email addresses.

removelist:  a list of people that have requested to be removed from your mailings

newsubscribers:  basically a log of confirmations - this is the list you can download daily or whatever and then delete.   This keeps the time you spend downloading your lists quick.

log:  contains confirmed and unconfirmed addresses.

CASH VS PLUS

The unique thing about this email collection system is that it allows you to reward your affiliates with both advertising AND cash.   The cashfactor and plusfactor variables set inside of configure.cgi determine what percentage of the total price per email address is allocated to either advertising credit or actual cash.  You can set either of these to zero but the advertising adds a great incentive for you to drive the program.

ADMINISTRATION

The administrative interface is basically a navigational and editing interface.  If you take a little time to push buttons you will see how it works.  You can zoom into the statistics from any point starting at the yearly overview and zooming into the individual users statistics.   From the payout menu you can revoke sales or delete affiliates.

EXPORTING PAY TABLES

The payout menu allows you to export the current pay period sales data into a flat file ASCII delimited database which is stored inside the /cgi-bin/harvester/logs directory.  The file will be called #.payout.txt where # is the numerical value of the current pay period.  This database structure is set by default to be seperated by the pipe character |

CHANGING PAYOUT SCHEDULES

The file inside of /cgi-bin/data/schedules.db is a table of the pay periods broken up into one pay period per line.  The default pay schedule consists of 24 periods (24 lines).  There are no restrictions to how you can restructure this table.  Make sure you do NOT have any extra blank lines in this file however or it will totally throw off your statistics.