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The problem:

You want to create a paid subscription newsletter with an affiliate program. There are a number of responsibilities that come along with that:

1. Managing your membership list (keeping track of payments and adding and removing from your email list),
2. Managing your affiliates (who earned commissions that month and paying them), and
3. PCI compliance (safely storing your customer’s sensitive personal and financial data).

That’s a lot of work to make some money. Fortunately, you can put together a system that automates almost the entire process, just like we did recently for RetirementPlanningInsiderSecrets.com.

The requirements:

My client wanted to sell his twelve month retirement planning course as an email newsletter subscription. He wanted to have an affiliate program as well as use Aweber for the delivery since he was already a customer of their autoresponder service. He also did not want to be responsible for the safety of his customer’s sensitive information. So how was I to put them all together?

To summarize, the requirements were as follows:

1. A payment processor would handle the transactions and store the customer’s credit card information for the recurring monthly billings.
2. People needed to be able to sign up as affiliates and have their commissions tracked.
3. After the customer purchased, they would need to be automatically added to the Aweber distribution list for the lesson delivery.
4. If the customer chose to cancel the subscription or if the payment was declined, the emails needed to be suspended.

I began my research as to how to put this all together. Aweber was a given, so I needed a way to integrate the other elements. Fortunately, the answer was actually quite readily available and easy to implement.

The solution:

The payment processor portion was solved with 1ShoppingCart. They are a shopping cart provider that handles all of the SSL (website encryption)  and PCI compliance requirements so you don’t have to. They also have a built in affiliate program for your product. You can set the commission amounts, the payout threshold, methods of payment to your affiliates,  provide marketing collateral, and make payments to your affiliates all from within 1ShoppingCart. Everything you could want in an affiliate management service. So that took care of requirements one and two.

Now I had to integrate the 1ShoppingCart with Aweber. Enter aMember Professional. This program integrates with 1ShoppingCart and Aweber, in addition to a number of other payment services (PayPal, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, etc) and website packages (Wordpress, phpBB, vBulletin, etc). This monitors payment information and modifies the Aweber subscriptions accordingly. It automatically adds new subscribers to the Aweber list, removes them when they cancel, and halts delivery of email to accounts that are delinquent. Check off requirements three and four.

Putting it all together:

Integrating these elements was far easier than I had originally anticipated. The software and services chosen work together extremely well and allow for a lot of flexibility. And the possiblities with this combination are only limited by your imagination. In the future, we are looking at adding a forum where subscribers can post questions and discuss the newsletter material. aMember can provide usernames and passwords for the forum software, similar to how it handles the Aweber mailing list.

Be sure to contact us when you are ready to put together your membership based site!