Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: So, really, it comes down to there are simple best practices, things that affiliates want and need. It's not just a want. They need this to effectively promote your program and unfortunately affiliate managers just don't know what that stuff is. So really the whole point behind what we're doing here is to take that excuse out of the picture, to tell affiliate managers exactly what it is that they need to do, the best practices and the way to make their program stick out over any of the other programs.

Paul: I appreciate that but let's be honest here. There's the element of doing what it is that you need to do. I mean I definitely recommend that. Before you do anything, do what it is that you need to do. But there's also, and I really want to grill you here, I mean best practices is such an overused term, but there's stuff that works like gangbusters in the affiliate marketing industry. And there's stuff that doesn't. You know what I mean?

Anik: Sure, absolutely.

Paul: And how do you launch a program doing the stuff that works, spending the time on the stuff that works, instead of just doing the stuff that you're supposed to do because somebody somewhere ten years ago in some free article said you're supposed to do it?

Anik: Sure. Well, OK, the first thing that you have to do is let's say you're promoting a program that has multiple products. Let's say you have a company or a storefront you sell 10, 15, 20, 30 hundreds of products. At that point in today's day in age, you absolutely you cannot launch that product without having a data feed. It just makes no sense because the way affiliates are moving now, they want data feeds. That's what all the savviest affiliates are using. That's one of the biggest areas right now where I see a huge lag is a lot of companies who are just not providing adequate data feeds.

Anik: Fortunately there a lot of big companies out there that are addressing this and it's becoming more widespread. But another thing really that you absolutely must do, is the way you recruit affiliates, as I said before, unfortunately still just list themselves in the directory and hope that that's enough. But there's really a lot of tool out there, software out there, that you should be using to be much more proactive about your recruiting, to go after the top affiliates, and to actually work with these affiliates.