Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Anik: Another problem per se in the industry is affiliate marketing is a lot of relationship marketing. That's what it is. As a manager you're entire job is to develop relationships with these potential salesforces that are going to move your product. And that's another area where you just don't see it being done. They need to be much more proactive about contacting the top affiliates. One of the things that works very well is you have an affiliate that is already doing well. Give them a custom offer. Help them. Give them more commission. Give them a better promotion, different types of marketing materials, things that will allow them to be more motivated to continue promoting your products. Because, let's face it, you're not the only one with an affiliate program and you're not the only one that knows about that particular affiliate who can really move products in your industry. So you really have to work hard on building that relationship and building up loyalty so that person stays with your program no matter what.

Paul: Yeah. And I think one thing that's interesting that a lot of people forget is that the best affiliates don't align themselves with the product or service. They align themselves with an industry and then they match themselves with an affiliate program that provides products for that industry. Like if I'm selling - this is passe now - but let's say I'm selling long distance. I don't care what long distance provider I'm selling. It's long distance. I'm trying to find the people who are going to give the best deal to my audience and the best deal to my customers and the best deal to me. And if they stop doing that, because I've got an audience of people who trust me as an affiliate marketer, I want to take them with me from company to company to company, whoever treats my people the best and whoever treats me the best as the affiliate marketer.

Paul: Well let's move into our outline here today. The first thing I want to do is we promised some prizes on this call and I definitely want to be good to the audience here. Now since everybody's awake. And the first prize we're going to give away, we're going to give away an iPod Shuffle. And here's how we're going to give it away and those of you who are listening to the recording of this call, and I know there will be a lot of you, obviously this isn't going to work for you. What I want you do is want you to send me your name, first and last, and your mailing address with the subject "shuffle me" to paulcolligan@hotmail.com. We're going to give that person an iPod Shuffle. The first person to send me their name and mailing address with the subject "shuffle me" in the header to paulcolligan@hotmail.com we will give them an iPod Shuffle.