I just read this and whilst I feed your pain, and frustration, speaking as both an affiliate AND and affiliate manager, I’d say that its a bit of a sweeping statement that ALL affiliate managers are useless and fob you off with generic answers that don’t get any results.

I’ve been working in affiliate marketing in the UK for a good 3 years now, heading up the affiliate management and network department for an agency, one thing that you have to realize is the massive shortage of decent and educated staff in affiliate marketing, affiliate managers are highly sough after, and even 6 months experience seems to merit £30k (£60K+) salaries in this space, whilst I agree this isn’t ideal its a simple case of supply and demand, there arn’t all that many decent affiliate managers who would be able to help on both tech based and program base issues

one of the things I believe should happen is that affiliate managers should be certified or have to pass through some sort of training program before hitting the ’shop floor’ the problem is, who should be responsible for this training?

In a nut shell, speaking as an affiliate, i wouldnt want an affiliate manager whom didn’t have an affiliate site of their own, at least that way its an identifier that they know how it feels to be an affiliate themselves.

Sad to say, people who don’t have an adequate way of tracking their campaign generally will never realize these things exist and will have a hard time knowing their getting scrubbed by a network until it’s too late. Or too late may never come if they never suspect such a thing exist in the first place.

Either way, my take on affiliate managers is that they should be screened and certified before allowed to join ANY network, this way the publishers have better experience and the merchants can rest assure that the publishers are getting the necessary help, enabling the network to generate MORE merchants and MORE money.

Just my .02 cents.

Affiliate managers are typically good at what I like to call “schmoozing” but are not necessarily good at anything else. They’ll call and chat you up, but they are often ignorant about what will make you more money.

But on the plus side…if you have a relationship with a manager and have produced for the company you can sometimes negotiate a better CPA or commission.