Paul Colligan Interviews Anik Singal

Paul: It's pretty fabulous. It's at Affiliate Manager's Secrets. We'll leave the commercial there. Let's get back to the content. But before we do that I want to congratulate Brett Michaels from Utah. Brett, you won the Shuffle. Congratulations, we'll be sending you that in the mail. So let's start at the very beginning, Anik. How exactly does an affiliate program work? Exactly how. Go.

Anik: Sure. Well basically an affiliate program is an online sales force that's commission-based only. So how it works is you utilize some form of tracking solution, and in the industry we'll call them networks. And you make it possible for anyone and everyone out there who wants it and who you approve of to have a unique link. They use that link to actually promote your program. Now through this link you or the network will know exactly who referred the visitor that purchased so you can credit them a sale. And now the way affiliate marketing works is you only pay them if they actually generate a sale for you or if they actually generate some desired response. So you can actually track all of that, always know who it is that sent it to you and you only pay them once it generated the response that you wanted. So put simply an affiliate program allows you to build an online sales force that is only commission based and each and every one of them gets their own unique link which they then use to track their own sales.

Paul: And do you have to deal with people like Commission Junction or something like that when you launch an affiliate program? Do you have to use these big names and give them a chunk of your change?

Anik: Absolutely not. You do not have to use any of these big names. There are a lot of other solutions but like I always say, that's the one area where really there's no general widespread solution. It really depends on your business and your particular needs as to who works best for you. But no, there's lot of ways that you can get rights to using a script from searches like Direct Track or One Shopping Cart and plenty of others where you don't have to pay a commission to the network for each sale that they generate. You're simply, for a set fee, allowed to use their tracking solution.