Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Paul: Yeah.

Anik: So when I get a manager, you know, ok fine, if you don't care about your affiliates, at least care about the fact that it's going to be affecting your pocket. It's taking away from sales that should never get credited to affiliates in the first place. And you know, it's been, I've seen plenty of stories. An interesting one I saw about six or seven months ago, a company launched their program, and their affiliate program was doing like, amazing, it was making all this revenue and they were like, "Oh my god, it's starting to overshadow our search engine, it's doing great, why didn't we do this before?" And all of the sudden, they hired an outsource management company to come in and try to help them beef it up, and the company says, "Oh my god, what is going on, your program is overridden with spyware." It's not... so when they cleaned out all their spyware issues, the affiliate program, you know the revenue coming in from that, became more realistic, according to how much work they had put into it. And all the sudden, their ROI on the other end just shot through the roof again. And they realized, "Okay, we better be more careful about managing spyware."

Paul: Yeah.

Anik: You know, unfortunately, Paul, there's no, like, software that a person can use, that I know of, that just goes out and analyzes and finds out whether, you know, whether you're spyware infected or not. But really, the easiest way to know is, if you have, and it's common sense, and we have an entire interview with Ben Elman in this course. And he puts it best. It's common sense to find you've got... if you see a bunch of sales coming in from someone, and you can't explain how they got those sales, that's a major red flag that you need to investigate. If they don't have a website that, you know, if their website is Alexa rank four-million, and they just whooped out a hundred sales in five minutes, you might want to look into that, because those two things don't add up.

Anik: Now, I'm not saying that all of the sudden necessarily that affiliate is a dishonest affiliate, so you don't want to attack them, but it's not a bad idea to go investigate. You know, check the links, check your traffic logs, and see where those clicks came from. If all the sudden you're seeing that there's no, you know, you know, referrer ID on it, that's a red flag, because if those clicks are coming out of thin air, then something happened, unless you have pop-up windows appearing on people's computers. So a lot of it is really just, you know, look at the sales you're getting, and match it up, do those two things match up or not? And that's one of the easiest ways to clean out spyware.