Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: Affiliates, you know... a lot of people with argue me on this, and I know that, but I really think that the industry's moving more towards these little subcommunities. I mean, you can't just not communicate with your affiliates anymore. I think affiliates should be allowed to have, build those little communities within your program where they can talk amongst one another, or at least have easy access to you or your support staff.

Anik: And these types of things are very big. I mean, one of the companies you can see is Sierra Trading Post. They do a magnificent job of promoting and helping their affiliates. They have an entire team set up, they have a dedicated URL which I believe is sierratradingpostaffiliates.com. The whole domain is only about providing support resources for their affiliates. That's it. And I've never met, ever, I've met thousands of affiliates in my time, and I've never met a single affiliate that had anything negative to say about that company.

Paul: You were going to give away a prize after this next question, so everybody pay attention to this next question, and we'll give away another prize, and this one's worth a good chunk of change. Now you devoted an entire chunk of the course... you know, I noticed there's a session on it, and I noticed there's a CD on it, a thing that you talk about a lot-- the whole issue of spyware.

Anik: Oh, I knew this was coming. [laughs]

Paul: Well, you know, now... well, you're big on this, and a lot of affiliate training types tend to kind of ignore it, and they say, well, you know, you deal with spyware by not buying it. You know...

Anik: Right.

Paul: Why is it such a big issue, why do affiliates get so upset by, why is it so emotional, and what do affiliate managers need to know and do about this whole industry?

Anik: Sure, well, let me give you an example which will probably illustrate why it is that affiliates, why spyware is such a problem. Okay, let's say I'm working hard, I have a website, and I send traffic to... I work hard to get this guy, a qualified visitor, to go to dell.com. So he goes to dell.com, and he's there, and you know, all the sudden something pops up on his, on the person's site. They close it, they don't know what it is, they close it. They go and purchase the computer or whatever they wanted, and you never get your commission. Well, what happened is that little pop-up that occured was triggered by a spyware software that the customer has, unknowingly, most likely, installed on their computer. And it stole your commission, right from underneath of you. It just stole your commission. Because it came in and replaced the cookie that was placed for you, rather than, you know, yeah, replaced your cookie with their own, and they never earned that. It's your commission.