If you want to make money online as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need to have certain skills. Yes, you need skills to become a successful affiliate marketer. Having the right skill set will help you throughout your affiliate marketing career. You’ll be able to outperform your competitors across all levels such as keyword research, content writing, problem-solving, etc. So, what skills do you need for affiliate marketing and to improve your earning potential?
Let’s find out.
Skills You Need for Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is getting competitive. It isn’t easy to promote products as affiliate marketing is getting too mainstream. You’ll see that a lot of authority websites and influencers promote affiliate products.
On the other hand, affiliate blogs and niche websites have grown exponentially in the past few years. This has made it difficult for the new affiliates to enter any niche. It requires a lot of effort and hard work to rank for your desired keywords.
Skills, however, make a huge difference. If you possess the right and much-needed affiliate marketing skills, you can easily outrank existing players.
Here is a list of the key skills needed for affiliate marketing:
- Problem-solving
- Keyword research
- Marketing
- Data analytics
- Communication.
1. Problem-Solving
Problem-solving is the most important soft skill that is a must for affiliate marketers. You have to deal with problems on a daily basis and have to make several decisions ranging from keyword selection to marketing channels to budget allocation and more.
If you can’t solve problems analytically and can’t make the correct decisions at the right time, success will get difficult. According to WEF, problem-solving is one of the top soft skills that will be in high demand globally by 2025:
Here is a simple problem-solving process:
It involves decision-making too as you have to identify solutions for the problem and pick the best one. You need to learn how to break down complex problems into small tasks that are easy to manage and solve. And it also requires you to have decision-making skills.
As an affiliate marketer, you’ll deal with a new situation every single day. And the ability to solve complex problems is a must-have.
2. Keyword Research
If you are bad at doing keyword research, you’ll end up failing miserably. There are two ways to generate traffic to an affiliate website:
- Organic traffic via search engines
- Paid traffic via ad networks.
You need keyword research skills for both types of traffic. Here is what keyword research skill includes:
- Ability to find keywords based on certain criteria such as monthly search volume, competition, etc.
- Ability to use search operators effectively
- Proficiency in Excel
- Exceptional search skills to find information online
- Understanding of different types of keywords and their best use (such as information keywords and navigational keywords)
- Competitor analysis (manual and competitor spying tools)
- Data collection and analysis.
Here is how a typical keyword research process works:
You must be familiar with all the steps and stages to become a successful affiliate marketer.
3. Marketing
What’s an affiliate marketer without marketing skills?
You have to promote and sell other people’s products. You can’t do it without top-notch marketing skills. And when it comes to marketing skills, there are several soft, technical, and hard abilities that you must possess.
It isn’t a single skill rather it consists of a lot of different subskills. Here is a list of top skills that marketers need to succeed in their careers:
Affiliate marketers, especially top ones, possess all these marketing skills. This is what makes them a top affiliate. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, having marketing skills such as content marketing, email marketing, omnichannel marketing, and more.
4. Data Analytics
Data is the new big thing in the online world. The big data market is expected to cross $274 billion by 2022:
Any business or marketer who doesn’t know how to collect, clean, analyze, and use data for decision-making will eventually fail. You don’t need to be a data scientist but you must know the basics of data analytics such as:
- Microsoft Excel
- Presentation skills
- Data visualization
- Data analysis
- Basic statistical skills
- Reporting and decision-making.
You’ll need data analytics skills when creating buyer personas, analyzing a keyword report, running an ad campaign on Facebook, segmenting a list of subscribers, and so on. If you don’t know a lot about data analytics, it’d be best to take a basic certification course online to improve your skills.
It will pay back big time.
5. Communication
As discussed in another post, communication skill is the backbone of all jobs, businesses, and fields. Your ability to communicate effectively plays a significant role in whatever you do.
Affiliate marketing is no different.
You need to communicate with your affiliate manager, merchants, customers, affiliate network, bloggers, influencers, peers, and subordinates. You can’t work alone. As your affiliate business will grow, you’ll have to hire people and freelancers. Your team will grow with your business.
So having exceptional communication skills is necessary.
How to Acquire Affiliate Marketing Skills
These 5 skills are just the basic skills that you need for affiliate marketing. There are several other skills that you must acquire to perform better. These include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, time management, web development, content writing and editing, video editing, copywriting, …
The list can go on and on.
The important question is how you need to acquire these skills?
There are two best sources for acquiring and polishing your skills.
First, YouTube.
Yes, I’m not kidding. YouTube tutorials are best when it comes to getting the basic knowledge and understanding of a new skill. You’ll find tons of free videos on YouTube that are more than enough to put you on the right track.
Second, online certifications.
Udemy, Coursera, and edX offer several free courses and certifications that range from basic to advanced. Most of the basic courses are free. Udemy charges you a few bucks for certifications that are really great.
Do give these two methods a try.
Featured Image: Pexels
