Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Paul: Yeah.

Anik: It's posted there for all time! So, you know...

Paul: Yeah.

Anik: You know, it's... the whole bunch of them go...

Paul: Yeah, and it's so easy to abestweb, or associateprograms.com, or affiliateclassroom, or any of those websites, do a search on the program, and get the history of anything anyone's ever said about it.

Anik: Absolutely. It's a search feature. You just hit "search" and you type in a name.

Paul: So, how do you become the type of program that, when they do the search over at associateprograms or abestweb, or you, or whatever, how do you become that everyone brags about and talks about? Is it just about offering the most money, or is there more?

Anik: Oh, no. You know what, I've seen programs out there that offer far less than their competition, and are still raved about by the affiliates. You know, money is one of the motivators, I'm not going to lie, paying more will get you, a lot of times, more affiliates. Things like, as simple as actually answering support emails, I can't tell you how many affiliate programs I write emails too, as a, you know, just to test them, they don't know it's coming from me, but I act like a poor old affiliate looking for help, and I never hear back from them. Ever. Nothing even as simple as, they should write back and say that's not the support we provide, or, I don't know. Write back! Another thing, you know, providing a newsletter, this is something I don't know why affiliate programs, especially for the bigger companies that have all these resources, can't just institute like a once-a-month newsletter. Not something that has to be very innovative, it can just be as simple as, "Hey, affiliates, you know, person so-and-so, here is the top leader board for this month, and you know, the top sales was X amount. We have a new product coming out, a new service, here's a new promotion, here's a new data feed, here's a new this. Oh, by the way, Paul Colligan came out with a really neat software which I think will help you with your search engines, so I suggest you go check it out." There, I just wrote a newsletter in like two minutes. Just something as simple as that is helping a lot when it comes to building loyalty and helping affiliates know that you're there to support them.