Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: Absolutely.

Paul: Any thoughts?

Anik: You nailed it.

Paul: All right.

Anik: I mean, you know, in the course we actually go through six types of affiliates.

Paul: Right.

Anik: There's six different types of affiliates and you don't necessarily want all of them in your program. We go through them so you know what kinds there are, so when people apply to your program you can kind of quickly classify them. And you, and according to your business plan you'll know which ones you want involved and which ones you don't.

Paul: Give us a sneak preview here. I know you can't go into all of them with the time we have here, but what are the six kinds?

Anik: Well, we already went over three. I'll give you one more, and that's your scraper affiliate. And that's an example of one you might not necessarily want in your program. And a scraping affiliate is someone who just, you know, I guess in a lack of better terms to use is just scraping, creating sites that don't, you know, create much value. They keep making sites, and their job is to keep making site after site after site to keep getting traffic from search engines. And you know what, some of these scrapers might be able to do a lot of traffic, a lot of sales for you, but your brand is then going to be associated with that kind of site and it turns into a business decision of whether you want that or not. So we've already been over four, but, you know, that is one kind of example of a type of affiliate that you probably do not want to work with.

Paul: Let's talk about the training of affiliates. You know, I remember, I used to have a web site, well, I still have it, called FrontPage World. It was the leading website, still is, for the product Microsoft FrontPage. I was watching a show on TechTV, which is, you know, it's basically ESPN for nerds, for lack of a better description. And, they announced, they said, "After the break, we're going to answer a FrontPage question, and show you a great web site for FrontPage information." And I thought to myself, they're going to show my web site, I was so happy, look at me, I'm getting some press on the TechTV. And I started to make myself a sandwich and was going to bask in my glory and absolute brilliance. And they came back and showed a different FrontPage website.