I absolutely concur with this post.  My prior post says pretty much this, and I feel that more notaries and abstracting firms should be offering their own classes for courtesy signing agent certification as a hedge against the slow economic times. 

  Like I said before, run your own classes and certify yourself as well;  again, as if the certificate would likely ever by key to  getting an assignment or not.

  Really, a class like this should be  like a class in records research:  intuitive and self-descriptive.  Just as  official records are based on alpha-numeric "library"-style indices of owners and sellers, borrowers and lenders (i.e. grantor-grantee), so too is a signing agents' job based on fundamental principles, basic education and common sense.  As you said, a signing agent can't do anything more than that which a notary can perform:  picking up the phone and calling the real estate agent or escrow officer to clarify matters, reading aloud the words on a paper, offering the internet to access wikipedia so that a signor can look up the legal definition of a term or phrase, looking at papers to point out where they are and where certain provisions are printed, and executing their notary duties.

  Years on the internet have rarely netted me any new clients whenever I pay dozens or hundreds of dollars for professional association memberships and listings on referal websites;  certainly not as much incoming as outgoing.  So, I've learned to not bother with anything other than the freebie listings in my spare / down-time.  Free is good when you can afford the time.