Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Paul: Now the interesting thing was, that website was actually one of my affiliates. And that person got a good chunk of traffic that day. But that affiliate, sadly, was not a very well-trained affiliate, for lack of a better term. And even though there were links to my product on that very page they sent them to, they weren't done the right way, they weren't wrapped the right way, they weren't positioned the right way. And it wasn't like the other ones worked. None of them worked. And this affiliate missed a huge sales opportunity because they weren't trained properly.

Paul: Now you've been training affiliates at affiliateclassroom to be good affiliates for a long time. And that's awesome. Why wouldn't I, as an affiliate manager, just send somebody to an affiliate classroom as opposed to just train them yourself. Why, you know, why... heck, you have an affiliate program associated with the affiliate classroom. Why wouldn't I say something like, "Hey, if you're serious about the affiliate industry, go to Anik's web site, learn from the best, come back and sell a whole lot of my stuff. Why wouldn't I do that as opposed to training my affiliates myself?

Anik: Actually, it's interesting that you mentioned that. In the next course for the next for months, the program you're going to see at affiliateclasroom launched along with our version 2.0 is the ability for merchants to do just that. They can actually send their affiliates to us and we'll train them. And there's nothing saying you shouldn't. As a matter of fact, as a manager, you should not be doing the kind of training that we do. You just should not be, because that is not what your job is to do.

Anik: By training we really mean, you know, there's two types of training that it comes down to, interactive and non-interactive. And in both senses of those trainings, you can do things that don't involve having to do one-on-one. I promise you, once your program starts to get really big and you've got one thousand or two thousand affiliates, you don't want to do one-on-one anymore, you don't have the time. But utilizing things like a newsletter, I talked about this before, a blog, or having an FAQ guide, or an FAQ section on your site, these are all classified as training elements. Doing tele-seminars with your affiliates, these are what I call bulk training. These are things that yes, we can do, and we will do, and we should do. In addition, we still have affiliateclassroom to help you out. But you know, there's certain things at affiliateclassroom that we just can't do for you. When we get affiliates on our tele-seminars, they're from a wide range of industries and a wide range of different affiliate programs. We can't sit there and talk about each offer, or each program out there, for each affiliate program.