Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: But when you do your own, you can, you can talk specifically about your program. You can talk about, hey, I launched this offer, I found that this specific banner works the best at this location, I mean these are things that only you can provide that your affiliates will really, really thank you for. So, to answer your question, really, it's a two way answer. Yes, you should be sending your affiliates to places like aclassweb, to affiliateclassroom, to associateprogram.com, to asscommunity, and to all of these places where they can talk amongst each other and learn about the industry, but at the same time that does not excuse you from still having to do the few things you can do, to do what I call bulk training, to really be able to work with all of them at the same time.

Paul: If you had 30 minutes to walk an affiliate manager through the best possible training, so that they could get going in thirty minutes, what would those 30 minutes be spend doing?

Anik: That's a good question. I would definitely split them up. Unfortunately, there's so much to cover, I don't know if there's one element that deserves the most importance, but... you know, like, OK, I'd want to tell you that there's a lot of different tools and things we do to recruit affiliates. So I would really want to spend a lot of time on them with recruiting. But at the same time, it's kind of like the egg and the chicken, because if you recruit a bunch of affiliates that they don't know what they're doing on the other end, that would be pointless.

Anik: So I would spend, I would definitely spend a good portion of that time on recruiting, but follow that up with a very important segment on activating affiliates, which I think is very important, because signing up for an affiliate program, I could to that for nothing, no cost, nothing taken out of my pocket. But so now that I'm your program, so what? You've got to get me to actually sell for you, you have to activate me as an affiliate. And that's probably where I would spend about 20 minutes of the whole thirty minutes, just talking about different things you do to really make, to get your affiliates active. And really, it's all one big system, so a lot of the things you'd do to activate an affiliate, you'd do when you're training them. Things like the blogs, the tele-seminars, the newsletters, offering tailored promotions, having new products come out, keeping them excited. These are all things that would go into that discussion, so I'd end up hitting a few birds with one stone.