August is going to heat up as the TMM crew is headed to the Qwebec Expo in Montreal. In this years lineup, John M. and Nicholas Tse will be hosting an hour long "NATS: Inside Out" seminar. This seminar is for prospective and veteran users who wish to understand just what NATS can do for you to help your business.

If you are a newcomer in the industry or looking to make the switch to NATS from another platform, gain valuable information that will show you how using NATS can increase your revenue and assist you to run your operation more efficiently.

Did you know that most NATS users only utilize about 20% of the software's capabilities? Industry veteran's can join in and learn about functionality within the software that can be used to increase productivity, eliminate some tasks, and increase your revenue.

Do you manage affiliates that require payments to be sent on a different schedule? NATS includes customizable payout periods that Admins can set up for their Affiliates. This new feature allows payments to be built based on days of the month, days of the week, or after a set amount of days.

To get started, navigate to the Payments Admin and click on the "Payout Periods" tab. At the bottom of the Payout Period list, find the text box labeled "New Payout Period Description". Fill this out and click the "Add" button. Once the new payout period is created, it can be configured in one of four ways: once a month, multiple times a month, weekly, or a set number of days. Next, you can set the payout delay. This is the number of periods that payments are to be held back/delayed. Lastly, checking the "Enabled" checkbox will allow Affiliates to choose this option as their payout period.

Once set up, Admins can manage which affiliates are using each payout period. Within the Payments Admin, you can enabled or disabled multiple Affiliates at one time. Within the Affiliates Admin, you can set the proper payment period for each individual affiliate, one at a time.

For more details on setting up different payout periods, including the configuration for each payment build period, please visit our online documentation here.

Do you need to send out an email to all of your affiliates or members? Available in NATS is our mailer admin system which provides a program owner the ability to send out one time or recurring emails to either your Members or your Affiliates. Use this feature to notify Affiliates of news in your system or Members a special promotions you may be having.

To create a new mail that will be sent by NATS, go to the Mailer Admin and fill out the "New Mailer" section at the bottom of the "Active Mailings" area. This section allows you to set when the email will be sent out (either by a specific day or a recurring instance), who it will be sent to (Affiliates or Members), and the subject line of the email itself. Once the "Add" button is clicked you will be taken to a page to set the plaintext and HTML versions of the email to be sent out, once finished click on the "Save Changes" button. After setting the data to be sent out on the email, you will want to set the rules to dictate which Affiliate/Member would receive this email. Much like rules for cascades or options, you can set specific information to denote when to send or when to hold the email. Once the rules have been set, NATS will send out the email in the future based upon your "send on" date, or can be sent out immediately by clicking the "Send Mail Now" button. If you wish to test the email, you can click on the "Send Test Mail to Myself" button to send a mail to the email that you are currently signed in under.

For further information on the mailing admin, please visit our online documentation.

For more information on creating a new email, please check out wiki article here.

For examples on creating an email with Smarty included visit our documentation here.

Video adtools are an invaluable resource for your Affiliates to use in order to promote your sites. Available in NATS are three (3) adtool types which allow program owners to provide Videos for Affiliates to use: Flash Videos, Embedded Videos and Hosted Videos. Each of these adtool types allow for program owners to easily upload that type of content into their program. NATS will provide your Affiliates all the code necessary, or even direct ways to download the content, making them very easy for Affiliates to leverage when promoting your program.

In the Adtools Admin, you can add videos under the "Flash Video", "Video Embed", and "Video Hosted" adtool types. In each case, you would provide the Name, Video URL where the video is located, the video type, which site(s) the video is for, and optionally the thumbnail url, description, and tags. For the Embed adtool type, you would select what type of embed tag to use for this video, between "Embed", "Flowplayer", or "Iframe". Once added, your Affiliates will be able to retrieve them from the Affiliate Adtools area which will include the details for the video and the NATS code which will associate traffic to that affiliate account.

For details in regards to Flash video set up, please visit our documentation here.

For details in regards to Embeded video set up, please visit our documentation here.

For details in regards to Hosted video set up, please visit our documentation here.

Previous Issues of TMM Insider can be found at our archive here.