Between numerous affiliate marketing blogs, podcasts, forums and magazine publications, there certainly is no lack of online affiliate marketing education out there. However, when it comes to structured (or even face-to-face) learning, the real opportunities aren’t that many. Today I’d like to bring you seven that deserve attention.

Whether we talk about foundational learning and training (be it for affiliates/publishers or merchants/advertisers), or more advanced affiliate marketing education, I recommend considering the following seven opportunities:

1. Econsultancy’s Affiliate Marketing Training

Location: UK
Target audience: advertisers and affiliate managers
Instructor: Chris Bishop of 7thingsmedia
Fee: $800
Format: one-day course
Description: this training course which provides “a practical understanding of affiliate marketing, outlining the strategies, techniques and tricks to achieve a successful, well-managed programme”.

2. Affiliate Management Days ← next one on March 8-9 in San Francisco, CA

Location: USA
Target audience: advertisers, affiliate managers, agencies, affiliate networks
Instructors: multiple experts
Fee: $1,495
Format: two-day professional forum
Description: this conference provides a unique opportunity for focused education (on a wide array of affiliate management-related subjects), as well as professional networking.

3. Affilorama’s Affiliate Marketing Training

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructors: multiple experts
Fees: $200-$500 range
Format: online education, renewable access licences
Description: they offer a 3-product suite which includes three products — Affilorama Premium, AffiloBlueprint and AffiloJetpack — catering to different needs.

4. Affiliate Management Trainers

Location: virtual or in-person
Target audience: advertisers and affiliate managers
Instructors: multiple experts
Fees: start from $300
Format: individualized training
Description: they custom tailor their training programs to address trainee’s individual needs (be it to “teach you the fundamentals” or to “refine your strategy”) to maximize their success in affiliate marketing.

5. James Martell’s SUPER BootCamp

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructor: James Martell
Fee: $97/month
Format: online education
Description: “unique blend of recorded and live online events with an expanded curriculum, weekly video lessons, expert audio interviews, interactive 24/7 member community, twice a month live Q&A and personal coaching sessions”.

6. University of San Fancisco’s Certificate in Advanced Affiliate Marketing

Location: online
Target audience: affiliates
Instructors: they rotate, but the full list may be found here
Fee: $2,480.
Format: online education
Description: they start with an introduction and “getting started” type of topics, and go on to/through “knowing your audience, maximizing effects from your efforts, connections and communications, legal and ethical considerations, what the pros know and case studies”.

7. Books

There are a few out there, but the three worth highlighting are (i) Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, (ii), Strategic Affiliate Marketing, and (iii) The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web.

Of course, do also consider forums such as affiliates4u, ABestWeb and Affiliate Summit‘s forum; as well as podcasts and affiliate marketing blogs (see my 2011 list as well as 2012 one). And make sure you steer clear of anything “overnight”, “passive”, “easy”, or “revolutionary”.

Every email sent to an affiliate threatening them with “termination” unless they do something (and here it doesn’t matter what the affiliate manager is asking for — putting up links, traffic referrals, or lead/sale generation) is a big thick nail in the coffin of the affiliate program. Even in traditional management contexts threats are demotivating. How could anyone expect them to work in performance marketing contexts? I just don’t understand it…

Here’s a video from one of my Affiliate Summit presentations where I spoke on the topic:

Speaking in Alexander Hiam’s words, we want to present affiliates “with opportunities to succeed instead of telling them what to do”. Merchants should always remember that affiliates were the ones who have chosen to work with them — to invest their effort, time, and money into the promotion of the merchant’s product/service. And that step of theirs should be valued. It — as well as the very idea of performance-based remuneration! — should also dictate our approach to affiliate motivation.

How many different online marketing channels are you employing simultaneously? Let me guess… At least three; maybe five or more. If you’re reading my blog, then you, probably have an affiliate program. Besides it, you’re more than likely also engaged in paid search, SEO, social, possibly display and/or remarketing initiatives; maybe mobile, and video… And then add also email on top of these, and you get quite a borscht!

Last month Zoomerang‘s “2012 Marketing Trends Survey” revealed that in the course of 2012 business executives plan to increase their spend on email (60%), social media (55%), search (37%) and mobile (37%). They are also planning on actively integrating email with social media marketing (68%) as well as with mobile (44%) [see full report in PDF here]. I strongly hope that they’re also planning on investing into a robust platform to help them analyze all of these marketing efforts.

25% of digital marketers admit that their greatest challenge is in arriving at a comprehensive understanding of how all of these different online marketing channels effect their customers. I believe that the reason for this is that it is much easier to gather data than to interpret it — especially, if you’re not properly equipped to effectively do the latter…

One of my favorite multi-channel attribution solutions is being provided by a company called Impact Radius. And I was honored to have been asked to participate in their 2012 Marketing Solutions e-booklet, contributing to a page on “finding clarity in data” (see a snapshot of it below). The full booklet is now available for a free download, and you may request it here. It’s a quick (but important) read on a dozen of topics. I recommend it; and not only because I’ve participated in it. It’ll give you other good food for thought (and action) in 2012.

For numerous times over the past few years (including this recent interview to Smart Insights) I have been asked what I think about multi-click attribution — especially, in the affiliate marketing context. I’m not against it as long as (a) you know what you’re doing, and (b) your affiliate program stays competitive.

A frequent mistake that leaders, and managers of all kinds (including affiliate program managers), commit is failing to admit mistakes. It is a very destructive path to follow. The main reason being that it compromises your integrity, which is, actually, the most important characteristic for any leader.

Addressing this problem in January 2010 at Affiliate Summit West (Las Vegas, NV), I emphasized:

…it really boils down to the problem of integrity and honesty with your affiliates. Very frequently merchants think that admitting a mistake means admitting that they are a failure. It’s quite the contrary: if you don’t admit a mistake, and don’t address it, that‘s when you are a failure.

Decades of leadership research have proven that the most admired characteristic of any leader is honesty.

Here’s the part of my above-quoted session where I addressed this topic:

Years ago when I first heard the phrase “it’s ain’t weak to be meek” it struck me how true these words are… Very similarly, it takes a lot of courage and strength to stick to the path of honesty and integrity. The weak ones, actually, follow an alternative route.

Earlier this morning Fred Wilson published an interesting comparison of his blog’s traffic sources where upon splitting “the top ten” referrers “into three categories”, he discovered the following breakdown:

• Direct — 50%
• Social — 40% (with nearly 1/2 from StumbleUpon)
• Search — 10%

These numbers amused me to say the least, and I decided to perform a quick analysis my own blog’s traffic sources over the past 30 days.

As expected, my situation is quite different:

• Search — 72%
• Direct — 13.3%
• Social — 8.1%

I suspect most blogs will see a breakdown more similar to mine than the one that Fred is witnessing now. But that’s only my guess, and I would love to hear from other bloggers on this one.

I’ve also analyzed my top social media sources, and here’s what I see:

Top 7 Social Media Referrers

4.5% — t.co
1.6% — facebook.com
0.8% — twitterfeed
0.5% — linkedin.com
0.3% — stumbleupon.com
0.2% — bizsugar.com
0.2% — hootsuite.com

I guess, I should get more active on StumbleUpon. Fred’s figures are truly compelling.

Finally, I’ve decided to measure what role news aggregation sites are playing in my blog’s traffic (I could’ve included these in the “social” category too, but on a number of reasons decided to single them out), and it appears that they are referring just a bit less than 3% of all my visitors. Here’s a breakdown of what I see in my case:

Top 3 News Aggregators Sources

1.7% — affbuzz.com
0.5% — affdaily.com
0.3% — marketingland.com

What are you seeing on your blog(s)? What social channels do you see perform most effectively? And how effective is social in your case?

Over the past couple of years, many of the world’s top business schools have become pretty active on social media, Twitter included. In fact, some maintain several accounts (for example, I could count 5 different Twitter account for University of Chicago’s Booth School of Management; yet, since my below ranking is based on follower-count, none of these made it).

Today I’d like to bring you a list of top twenty business school accounts to follow on Twitter. As you already know, the ranking is tied solely to the number of followers each of these has as the time of this post:

1. Wharton at University of Pennsylvania (USA)
2. Harvard Business School & see also Harvard Business Review (USA)
3. MIT Sloan School of Management & MIT Sloan Management Review (USA)
4. Stanford Graduate School of Business (USA)
5. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (USA)
6. London Business School (UK)
7. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley (USA)
8. Columbia Business School (USA)
9. IE Business School (Spain)
10. HEC Paris (École des Hautes Études Commerciales) (France)
11. ESADE (Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas) (Spain)
12. IESE Business School of University of Navarra (worldwide)
13. Saïd Business School at Oxford (UK)
14. McCombs School at The University of Texas at Austin (USA)
15. IMD Business School (Switzerland)
16. Rotman School at University of Toronto (Canada)
17. INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) (worldwide)
18. Thunderbird School of Global Management (worldwide)
19. Yale School of Management (USA)
20. Darden School of Business at University of Virginia (USA)

Again, the above is not to be read as anything else but the ranking of the school’s Twitter activity, and specifically the size of its followership.

A few months ago, at an affiliate marketing conference in Israel, while discussing foundations of affiliate marketing success I touched upon the subject of proactive affiliate program management.

I’m afraid that we hear (and use) the phrase so frequently that it is quickly turning into a cliché (or a phrase that is losing its true effect and meaning as a result of its overuse). So what is “proactive management” exactly? And how do we achieve it in the context of affiliate program management — specifically on the communications front? Here’s a quick video to answer these questions:

So, in short, being a proactive affiliate program manager (or any manager, really) means “acting in ancitipation of future problems, needs of changes”. In any management context a large part of it is being covered by building a healthy two-way communication channel (with followers, affiliates, subordinates, superiors… doesn’t matter).

If you’ve got something to add to this, the “Comments” are all yours.

One of the biggest problems that affiliate program managers have is believing that their job is to manage affiliates (and not the affiliate marketing channel, or the program). Such approach, coupled with two destructive assumptions:

(1) that, by extension, an affiliate program manager is smarter than an affiliate
and
(2) that all affiliates are prone to fraud

…can bury an affiliate program. In this short video from Affiliate Summit West 2010 I explain this in details:

In the above video you will also find my favorite definition of “affiliate marketing”, and real-life illustrations of how not to do things. Enjoy!

Remember my post on picking my brain for free? Today is one of those days when someone is doing it, and, hopefully, for the benefit of others, as his questions are pretty broad and answers to them should address not only in this particular case, but help many others in the future too.

I have received this email:

I’m following your blog for the last half year and it helped me a lot.

There is one issue that is always a problem mostly in the Forex industry.

We have few types of Affiliates/Media partners: (1) CPC (only Google), (2) CPL, (3) CPA, and (4) Offline.

Our cookies are valid for 90 days.

There are few questions that I will be happy if you can answer…

1) Does cookie on CPC is consider same as affiliate cookie? and What about cookies for CPL?
2) Do I need to pay to a CPL in case they send me lead although he came from other affiliate/media partner? and What about CPA in this case?

I want to be fair with everyone but I also want to know what is common do to.

Being fair is a very good place to start. In fact, this (the fact that you’re trying to build a system where everyone is compensated in a just way) is one of the reasons that I’m replying to the above questions.

1. Is “cookie on CPC” the same as an “affiliate cookie” or “cookies for CPL”?

Much depends on the context, or how exactly you’re tracking and paying for the CPC program. It can be handled through an affiliate program (which is not the case in the above-quoted scenario), but even then — click (in the CPC model), lead (in the CPL model) and action/purchase (or deposit, which is frequently the CPA “action” in Forex programs) are three different types of actions. And while the affiliate cookie may be the same, since these qualifying actions (or the basis for payout/commission) are different, they are also tracked separately. So, for example, if you’re paying $0.50 on the CPC front, $1.00 for CPL, and $50.00 for those deposits (or, in other contexts, sales), then, should any one affiliate refer you a visitor that first clicks, then qualifies as a “lead” and then performs the “action”, you’ll end up paying that affiliate $51.50.

2. If before turning into a “lead” (or performing an “action”) a visitor clicks several affiliate links, could I end up paying more than one affiliate?
(I had to paraphrase the original question — I hope I’m reading it correctly)

Neither in CPL, nor in CPA scenarios will you pay twice (provided your tracking is in order, of course). The majority of affiliate programs nowadays go by the last-click-wins rule, which, basically, means that the last affiliate to set/drop the cookie on the end-user’s machine is the one who will receive the full commission. Having said this, should one affiliate refer the customer as a lead, and another set the cookie on their machine prior to them committing to buy (or deposit funds, as is probably your case), the CPL bounty would then go to affiliate #1, while the CPA payout would credit to the account of affiliate #2.

Should you have any questions related to the above scenarios, feel free to post them under this post. I will address every one of them.

It’s Friday again, and the #FollowFriday undertone of this post seems to be more than appropriate.

I don’t know about you, but the amount of information (from quality to mere noise) distributed via social media overwhelms me at times… So, as mentioned not too long ago, one of the methods that I use is that of sorting and filtering.

Now, over the course of the past four years, some of the people that I follow have gained enormous respect in my eyes — mainly, due to the high-quality, thought-provoking information (and thoughts) that they constantly share. Today I’d like to share their names with you (the order is merely alphabetical; descriptions taken from their Twitter profiles):

Lisa Barone
Twitter | Outspoken Media Blog & also Small Business Trends
Co-founder, Branding Officer & PITA at Outspoken Media.

Linda Bustos
Twitter | Elastic Path Blog
Director of Ecommerce Research with Elastic Path Software.

Dave Chaffey
Twitter | Smart Insights Blog
Bestselling author, consultant and speaker. I enjoy sharing the latest strategies, tools and tips to get the most from Digital Marketing.

Bryan Eisenberg
Twitter | BryanEisenberg.com Blog
Marketing Optimization expert, keynote speaker and New York Times best selling author, columnist.

Mitch Joel
Twitter | Six Pixels of Separation Blog
President of Twist Image. Blogger & Podcaster of Six Pixels of Separation. Marketer. Speaker. Author. Journalist. Marketing Reformer. Media Hacker.

Seth Godin
Twitter Stream | Seth’s Blog
Founder of Squidoo.com, author, blogger.

Avinash Kaushik
Twitter | Occam’s Razor Blog
Author, Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day | Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google | Co-Founder, Market Motive

If I have missed a marketer (or researcher) whose thinking and tweeting (or blogging) moves you, please do add them through the “Comments” are below.