Is Your Affiliate Manager AC Certified?
February 13th, 2008 by 
Amit
My good friend Anik Singal, founder of the hugely successful Affiliate Classroom and PPC Classroom, has done it yet again.
Through Affiliate Classroom, Anik is launching a program where affiliate managers can get trained and certified!
Imagine, actually having a AC Certified Affiliate Manager that actually knows what they’re talking about!
No offense to many of the brilliant affiliate managers out there, but let’s face it, there are TONS of affiliate managers who have NO idea what they’re talking about.
I’ve dealt with my share.
I think having a standard certification program for affiliate managers is a GREAT idea, and is a BIG step in moving our industry towards a new level of professionalism. Enough with the booth babes and porn hustlers! We, as a community need to clean up our act and get the respect we deserve for the larger business community.
Kudos, Anik for taking the initiative and doing this!
Anik is looking to nominate some outstanding affiliate managers for Honorary AC Affiliate Manager certifications.
So if you have an outstanding affiliate manager, please nominate them here & tell them how much you appreciate everything they do. 
Posted in Industry News | 
eh? No more Booth Babes Amit, are you kidding?
Certified by who? The company your friend started or by an actual legal state board?
Good concept, A recognised body with a certification program goes a long way towards making the industry more transparent and “proper”.
Sorry to be slightly off-topic on this, but throughout a lot of your posts, you talk about our affiliate manager (singular) as if we should only have one. Is this just a general reference to whichever affiliate manager we’re working with for each company, or do you only suggest working with one affiliate company?
That being said, I have noticed that the knowledge difference between some “managers” is vast and it would be good to have some sort of certification for these folks.
Amit,
I would have to agree granted I’m not a PPC master mind like I am with organic search, but I can say this from me talking with them and etc I can tell they really don’t know there talking about or I should say there just saying what there trained to say.
What dazzles me is you would think they would be pretty good at what they do speaking they talk with affiliate marketers all day, but then again I guess the Google AdWords Reps are the same way :).
Think about it. If affiliate managers knew what they were talking wouldn’t they do affiliate marketing themselves rather than working 9 to 5 on a base salary.
Amit, thanks for this post. As an affiliate manager myself (who knows allot but can always learn more - by listening to our partners, reading blogs/ newsletters, trying new things out) I agree that somebody had to come with some kind of certification, or at least something that creates awareness of the need for good AMs. No I believe that we should divide Am’s in two groups. first group as “PHP Tutorials”highlights the 9-5 workers that are happy to have a job, then a group that see Affiliate Marketing (as AM or as Affiliate) as a lifestyle, with this in mind we can now choose who we listen to for advise and who we listen to for company related information (like commission increase, CTR info and other info anybody can read from a paper or monitor).
Now for Mr “php tutorial” think about what you wrote here in your post next time you are talking to one of your “good” affiliate managers, you’d be pleased to know he chose the “9-5″ life to help you and not being an affiliate (because you would end up with a nonsense affiliate manager that needs to fill his position.
This being said for those attending Affiliate Summit, I’ll see you there!!!
@PHP Tutorials,
That isn’t necessarily true. Being an affiliate manager is a different experience than being an affiliate right off the bat. There is a lot of knowledge to gain and is more valuable than without having it. That said, many affiliate managers probably do go on to be affiliates themselves. The only difference is, they leave their job with an arsenal of knowledge we do not have.
Hey Amit,
May I suggest an idea for a future post? I’d like to hear some tips for dealing with Google Adwords account limitations.
Recently I created a campaign with 5000 ad groups (one keyword per ad group) using your methods and bulk loaded it into Adwords Editor. I wanted a unique ad group for each keyword so I could put tracking information into the destination URL, the tracking code tells me which keyword and which ad copy converts. But when I tried uploading it, the Adwords Editor told me I exceeded my account limits. I contacted Adwords Support and they informed me my limits were 100 ad groups per campaign and 25 campaigns per account (2500 ad groups total), and they declined my request to increase these limits. The support person tried to be helpful and suggested that I could open two accounts to get the 5000 ad groups I wanted. But this makes me do tons more work, having to spread my ad groups and keywords across 50 arbitrary campaigns in 2 accounts and manage all of these. And I didn’t break the news to her that if the campaign is successful I expect to have ten times this number of ad groups under test. You recently mentioned loading 50,000 keywords at one time, how did you get around these limits?
I investigated other technical solutions to achieving an equivalent result. Dynamic keyword insertion might possibly work, but there are two problems with it.
First, when an ad contains dynamic keyword insertion the Google Bot will visit the landing page only once per ad, it will not exhaustively insert each keyword into the ad and revisit the landing page, when checking quality score, thus landing page relevance could drop.
Second, expanding a key phrase into a destination URL often does not result in a well-formed URL that contains no blank spaces. There is something called “MOD Rewrite” that might be able to turn these bad URLs into proper URLs, but the complexity of the solution is high.
I hate to do ten times the work just to get around arbitrary limits put on the account.
You gave some great methods for building very large keyword lists and highly targeted ad copy, but there is this other issue that needs to be resolved before those methods can be put into use. I would welcome a blog post on this.