Here in the midst of the fearsome jobless recovery, one job remains hard to fill: affiliate manager.

And nobody seems surprised. After all, online affiliate marketing is still a relatively new field. While thousands of corporations have established affiliate programs, many still haven’t figured out the skills required to manage the programs well, much less what they’re worth.

Can you blame them? Anyone who has ever tried to explain affiliate marketing to a friend knows the very concept can be, well, a bit abstract. But now some very large companies are starting to notice there is real money flowing in from that strange little group of people in the affiliate marketing area. And the pressure is on to find someone who can lead them to greatness.

But what exactly goes into that job description? What skills are required? What experience is needed? And how much, exactly, should the affiliate manager earn? Is this a technical job or a marketing position? Or does it require an MBA?

We set out to answer those questions after we discovered salaries spread out, pretty evenly, from $40,000 to $250,000 – a range that reflects a great deal of confusion. (About one in eight AMs makes more than $120,000 annually.) With the help of many experts, we also learned there are some common elements to great affiliate managers. Revenue is proud to present the top 10 traits that the folks in HR absolutely must list when placing an ad that reads: “Help Wanted – Affiliate Manager.”

1. Great Communicator

Perhaps the No. 1 skill desired in an affiliate manager is the ability to communicate well through many media to many affiliates. Affiliates need to know about your products, prices, promotions and a whole lot more. “Tell your affiliates when you’re having a promotion, tell them what your hottest products are,” said Matt Ranta, affiliate manager for electronics retailer Vann’s. “Don’t make them go out and find it.” Monthly or weekly newsletters and regular emails are key to that communication.

Carolyn Tang, AM for CollectiblesToday.com, uses informal, usually weekly, text emails to communicate affiliate stats, merchandising ideas or details on the merchandising manager’s “hot product” picks. “Communication isn’t just the writing,” Tang said. “It’s the ability to communicate with affiliates on different levels, from casual to complete professional, like making sure checks get paid on time and problems are solved.”

Since affiliates come from many backgrounds – single parents with children at their feet, retirees, home-based entrepreneurs and companies sometimes larger than the merchants themselves -“we put marketing tips in the newsletter, from ‘How to increase conversion rates’ to ‘How to increase your average order size,'” Driscoll said.

“I am in contact today with 400 to 450 affiliates that I consider to be the top producers in the industry,” said Andy Rodriguez, an outsourced affiliate manager and owner, Andy Rodriguez Consulting in Miami, Fla. “Our conversations include ‘How’s your family, how’s your dog?’ It’s that information I can draw upon when I bring a new affiliate aboard.”

2. An Entrepreneur

In true entrepreneurial form, AMs must be self-motivated innovators who can create a custom blueprint for growing the merchant’s affiliate program, follow and forecast revenue, select affiliate tracking technology, understand contracts, manage data feeds, and represent the merchant’s brand and interests through the affiliates – often with little support from others within the company.

“The affiliate manager is basically CEO of this little slice of pie within the bigger program,” Driscoll said. “They basically get to run their own show, their own business, with their own sales force through the affiliates.”

Todd Daum, vice president of marketing for Overture, added, “Being able to recognize an opportunity, such as a high-potential affiliate or an opportunity for a new promotion, will go a long way in helping differentiate one affiliate manager from another.”

3. A Bit of a Nerd

Of course, it’s not enough just to be a hotshot entrepreneur. Great AMs should also be, well, a little geeky. They’ll need to understand html, search engines, coordination of search keywords and search URLs. They’ll need to provide quality control for the Web site, as far as researching availability of images, scanning images and uploading images.

It also pays to have hands-on experience with BeFree, Commission Junction, LinkShare and/or Performics management interfaces. And, of course, the AM should be a whiz at communications tools such as instant messaging, PDAs and online chats. Online forums are great learning tools for uncovering current tech issues, such as new parasites and new pop-up or anti-virus software. So managers may want to hang out in some.

Many AMs also are affiliates themselves, giving them the experience of working with technology from the affiliate’s point of view. “Have your own affiliate site, or set up a test account in Commission Junction [or other network interface],” Ranta said. “Go in and see what an affiliate has to go through to get a text link, a banner or individual product links. That way, [you] can walk new affiliates through the process.”

4. A Marketing Maven

Hear ye, hear ye: AMs must be able to sell affiliates on using their program, and sell internal Web designers on creating a site that makes sales once people discover it. “If you’ve got the qualifications [for being an AM], and it’s apples to apples, what breaks the tie is chemistry – someone who could really keep the affiliates motivated and pass on that enthusiasm for our products to them,” Driscoll said.

Marketing goes one step further: “You want to give your affiliates good sales tools – not just banners – that really work,” said Jim Gribble, an outsourced AM and managing director of LinkProfits.com and PartnerIndustry.com. That includes links coded to product tracking information, so affiliates don’t have to log onto a management interface and go through the rigmarole of downloading each individual product.

It also includes having real, personal relationships with at least your top 20 affiliate partners, Gribble said. “Then spend at least 25 percent of your time prospecting for partners. Even if the program is going well, [you should] always be looking for new partners.”

5. Resourceful

AMs face constantly moving challenges: forming alliances with key players who can move the merchant’s program forward and finding creative ways to reach decision makers on the sites they want to partner with. “Maybe pick up the phone, or use regular mail to get their attention,” Gribble said.

The AM also has to know how to adjust quickly to increasingly sophisticated affiliates. “There’s more and more (affiliates) who are really getting smart about their business,” said Michael Brucker, affiliate manager for Yahoo. “They are placing the search engine bids. They’re coming in and asking really targeted questions, and they’re challenging us: What’s our conversion? What are our proprietary keywords?”

6. Good with Numbers

It pays to keep track of sales numbers. “I monitor that on a daily basis,” said Jack Boulant, affiliate manager for InsureMe.com. “We have an amazing IT department, so we can really see the affiliates that are drivers for us.” How does Boulant reward his superaffiliates? “Increase their payouts,” he said. “A fair thing is to pay them 45 percent of what we make – so we’re both making a profit. Together we are growing this company.” AMs also must take care of financial reporting, figure commissions, cut the checks, and analyze what clickthroughs are legitimate and what could be fraudulent.

7. Graphically Inclined

An AM must come up with fresh banner ads and provide design input for Web sites in order to increase sales. “They must know how to work with a designer, or have Photoshop experience,” Ranta said, “and be able to do quite a bit yourself or communicate what’s needed to the design staf
f.” A 30-day version of Adobe Photoshop can be downloaded for free at Adobe.com. AMs will need to create special storefronts for seasonal events, size and process new images, research and load missing images, and coordinate photography of new products with the photo studio and designers.

8. Respectable

AMs must have a commitment to doing the right thing: being truthful, ethical, and quick to resolve problems. “Be true to your word,” Ranta said. “Your word is your bond.” For instance, Ranta recently made a mistake in a contest he was running and errantly told one of his affiliates that she was the winner. “I gave her the prize anyway, and told her in person that I had made a mistake,” Ranta said. “If you tell your affiliates you’re going to have a new data feed available, or you’re going to go in and do new creatives, you need to follow through in a timely fashion. Don’t say something just to get them off your back.”

Because affiliate managers are salaried plus commission, rumors abound that “doing the right thing” with affiliates is held back if that means AMs could lose money on their sales charts. “But it’s been proven that once they do the right thing, such as dropping parasitic relationships, the sales numbers just blow up,” de Poel said. “It doesn’t matter what your competition is doing; it doesn’t matter what search engine optimization guys are doing. It matters what you are doing for your channel, treating your affiliates appropriately and rewarding your affiliates for the business that they drive.”

Remember, said Tang, “We all make mistakes. The ability to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and make up for it is where all the respect comes in.”

9. Contactable

By returning toll-free calls, emails, forum questions or instant messages within 24 hours, affiliates feel like telecommuters and part of a team. Even if the affiliates aren’t contacting you, it’s a good idea to be checking in with them: “I always check in with my affiliates, some more than others,” Boulant said. “I at least try to do it on a monthly basis; some of our top affiliates I talk to on a weekly basis, some more than that.” But what about those affiliates who don’t like to be bothered and are happy just being paid on time? “It’s all part of the relationship process: you have to learn what your affiliates want,” Boulant said. “What I do is I send new affiliates a welcome-mail, and then leave them a voicemail just to introduce myself so they know that there is someone here just to help them. If I get a response by email, I know they’re more responsive to communication that way. Some call, and I respond the same.”

Said Rodriguez: “You have to be able to go home at night, and think that you have people working until 2:30 or 3 in the morning for you, placing links and banners on their pages to sell your products. Be accessible to them, even at that time.”

10. A Team Member

The best AMs can work with cross-functional teams including customer service, sales, technology and administration. “Excellent affiliate managers should have the ability to work closely and effectively with account managers,” said Daum at Overture. “Taking the time to develop those relationships is imperative.”

AMs must also treat affiliates well, be good relationship builders, and know how to reward but not “manage” their affiliate sales team. “The long and the short of it is maintaining and building a relationship with an affiliate,” Boulant said. “Good or bad, it should be ‘Tell me and I’ll take care of it.'”

It boils down to this, said Rodriguez: “Be sure that the merchant and the AMs are on the same page. Treat your affiliates as partners, they are your salespeople. Be sure you have open communications to build a level of trust, so that when everything is going great, everyone is on the same page, but when you have a problem, you can go to them and say, ‘Everything is going to be fixed’. It’s no different than a marriage, [except] the goal here is for everybody to make money.”

JENNIFER MEACHAM, managing editor of Revenue, has been writing about business and technology for more than a decade. She was named the Region X Journalist of the Year by the US Small Business Administration in 2002.