What skills for affiliate marketing?

38 replies
How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
#affiliate #marketing #skills
  • Profile picture of the author munir ahmed
    Well it all depends,
    Its all a learning process, If you made your mind up that you want to do affiliate in a certain niche that you might have tiny bit of knowledge then dive in and learn while you go along,

    The best place to seek knowledge for is right here in the warrior forum. You have some amazing marketers that help you along your journey. There are many post that answer all your question in this amazing forum.

    When you go in to the internet marketing, go with the right mindset and don't expect to become a millionaire over night, because this is a business and it takes time to brand your self.

    There are many rubbish information on the internet as well as many valuable information.

    You need to take it step at a time.

    If you have no knowledge then start asking questions here as many will help and guide you to the right direction.

    Keep it simple and take good information in and you will pick up over time.

    No one is born as an expert marketer and every one here started with no skills and learnt along.
    so no skill required and learn and pick up all the good information in this amazing forum.
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  • Profile picture of the author mrgoe
    You don`t need to be a website developer to be an affiliate marketer if that`s what you`re asking. In all honesty, everything in aff. marketing can be outsourced, but if you don`t have any skills and don`t want to learn about them, then outsourcing all of the work will be pretty expensive in the end.. So either learn what you need to know for your future project, or outsource the work to professionals.
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  • Profile picture of the author ChrisBa
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
    The more skills you can pick up the better. Other good skills - marketing, advertising, Photoshop, etc
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  • Profile picture of the author Miguelito203
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
    It doesn't take much, actually. Wordpress is the standard when it comes to making money online, and it is quite user-friendly. You can learn to use it in less than a day. Wordpress is so popular that you can already find tons of free themes and plugins to fit your needs. Outside of that, I'd say being a decent writer and researcher (and possibly being good at making videos - depends on the niche) are the most basic skills you need. Oh, you also need to be the kind of person that's persistent - rare for things to work out right on your very first try.

    Joey
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  • Profile picture of the author brewmeister
    Definitely making landing pages, unless u always want to find someone. But that's madness. You can outsources logos and other things but landing pages should be chop chop. At the minimum scraping LP's if u need too.

    Then obviously running traffic some how.
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  • Profile picture of the author AkosSzalai
    An affiliate marketer is not a specialist. You have to be good in multiple areas. As an affiliate marketer, you have to create ads, manage your money, negotiate with people, manage your team, and solve one problem after another.
    • Problem-Solving & Decision-Making
      Affiliate marketing means you're constantly solving problems.
    • Creativity & Marketing
      The name affiliate marketing, so being a good marketer is necessary for this business. How should you improve your marketing? I would start by understanding the psychology behind what makes humans buy. What are their motivations? What words trigger them to buy?
    • Technical
      Being an affiliate marketer does require some basic technical knowledge. You need to learn how to build landing pages, set up your tracker and deal with various issues that come up. This is the bare minimum of technical knowledge you will need.
    • People Skills
      Affiliate marketing isn't as people-oriented as some other industries are, but developing social and communication skills will help you.
    • Data Analysis
      Affiliate marketing is all about buying traffic. You have to analyze the data so you can take the right actions. Make decisions based on data, not emotions.
    • Money Management
      Managing your money is essential in affiliate marketing because your cash flow is the lifeblood of your campaigns.
    • Productivity
      There are only 24 hours in a day, but some people get much more out of them than others do. You have to be very effective in your work. This industry is very competitive.
    • Leadership
      Sooner or later, you'll realize that you are the bottleneck, and you need to start building a team. Most super affiliates I know operate teams of people. It's not easy to learn how to delegate. Almost everybody is a control freak. First, you will drown in your tasks, and only after that you will learn how to delegate your tasks.

    It seems a little bit too much, but you don't need the excel in all areas when you start. You just need to learn and develop yourself. As it's been suggested above, you can outsource some of them once you have the budget to do that.

    I had ZERO skills when I first started in affiliate marketing, and I had to develop each one slowly, over time. It'll come, you just need to stay focused and work hard.
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    • Profile picture of the author Peter Lessard
      One of the most intelligent and clear answers I have seen in some time to this question. It is so accurate it will sadly likely be ignored.

      Originally Posted by AkosSzalai View Post

      An affiliate marketer is not a specialist. You have to be good in multiple areas. As an affiliate marketer, you have to create ads, manage your money, negotiate with people, manage your team, and solve one problem after another.
      • Problem-Solving & Decision-Making
        Affiliate marketing means you're constantly solving problems.
      • Creativity & Marketing
        The name affiliate marketing, so being a good marketer is necessary for this business. How should you improve your marketing? I would start by understanding the psychology behind what makes humans buy. What are their motivations? What words trigger them to buy?
      • Technical
        Being an affiliate marketer does require some basic technical knowledge. You need to learn how to build landing pages, set up your tracker and deal with various issues that come up. This is the bare minimum of technical knowledge you will need.
      • People Skills
        Affiliate marketing isn't as people-oriented as some other industries are, but developing social and communication skills will help you.
      • Data Analysis
        Affiliate marketing is all about buying traffic. You have to analyze the data so you can take the right actions. Make decisions based on data, not emotions.
      • Money Management
        Managing your money is essential in affiliate marketing because your cash flow is the lifeblood of your campaigns.
      • Productivity
        There are only 24 hours in a day, but some people get much more out of them than others do. You have to be very effective in your work. This industry is very competitive.
      • Leadership
        Sooner or later, you'll realize that you are the bottleneck, and you need to start building a team. Most super affiliates I know operate teams of people. It's not easy to learn how to delegate. Almost everybody is a control freak. First, you will drown in your tasks, and only after that you will learn how to delegate your tasks.

      It seems a little bit too much, but you don't need the excel in all areas when you start. You just need to learn and develop yourself. As it's been suggested above, you can outsource some of them once you have the budget to do that.

      I had ZERO skills when I first started in affiliate marketing, and I had to develop each one slowly, over time. It'll come, you just need to stay focused and work hard.
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      Ready to generate the next million in sales? The Next Million Agency
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  • Profile picture of the author Dyk Estrada
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
    The only skill you need to know is selling.

    Once you know that, it is easy to find creative means to make money as an affiliate. Sure, you may need to know some basic English to write some content but SEO, social media promotion and other forms of promotion are optional. After all, there is no ONE way of selling as an affiliate. You have to be creative.

    Selling is really just about finding your market and selling a product that they need in such a way that will get them to take out their wallets and buy. It takes a while to learn but once mastered, you'll be amazed with all its possibilities.
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    • Profile picture of the author Boris Qs
      Being an affiliate marketer in one thing but being an online affiliate marketer all you need to be good at is creating valuable content.That can be articles,blog post, videos, slide shows you name it.You can use any of those to make money online as an affiliate
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  • Profile picture of the author Alex The Lion
    As an affiliate marketer or any marketer for that matter, you are going to need to be adaptable and courageous in the face of new challenges.

    Most of the skills you will need can be learned and the few that require a lot of technical knowledge can also be outsourced.

    Rather than pondering what skills you need and how your current skillset might limit you, I suggest you get going and start being a marketer.

    If you need help on the learning side, there's a plethora of great podcasts, blogs and videos out there, plus Lynda and Udemy can help you on the technical side of things.

    In the words of Jim Rohn - "If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse."
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  • Profile picture of the author dustinthigpen
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
    Simple answer-
    You don't need to be skilled at all in web development. If you really need to create a blog/landing page/sales funnel, there are a ton of tools out there that pretty much do all the heavy lifting for you.

    Even if you don't want to use the tools, you could always outsource like others have said here.

    What you really need...
    The main thing you need in this industry is Drive, Focus, and Determination. The ability to keep yourself going during the low times and keep your goals in perspective. In short, to believe in yourself, and your ability to succeed. You need to have something that fuels this desire (a why), maybe it's quitting your job, or a new house, or a new car. In my experience though, it needs to be close to your heart, but everyone is different.

    Sure, learn new skills, become better, but don't focus on perfecting those skills before you take action. Learn it, implement it, and then fix the stuff that breaks along the way.

    Don't get hung up on learning and trying to make everything perfect before you take action...

    Hope that helps.
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    • Profile picture of the author discrat
      Hey Coral,
      One of the attractive things that drew me to Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing is that I did not have to be technically an expert when it came to Website development.

      You really don't. And thats one of the many the beauties of this



      - Robert Andrew
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  • Profile picture of the author CoralBayLover
    Thanks everybody for the awesome answers!
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  • Profile picture of the author Manish Sapkota
    You just need to be honest and provide value to users to become successful affiliate marketer.
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  • Profile picture of the author eliach807
    If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to have a website, where you can get traffic, the general people need to know about the product. After reaching there, if they get general information, they may buy the product, if they buy the products, by clicking on your referral link, you will get the commission. So you may need to have some Idea about the HTML & CSS. Then you can use some social media site & you can use some relevant block comment & Forum posting. So you also need to know how to do the Forum posting & blog commenting. If you know how to do these work, you may gain in this section. Carry on. Best of luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author nazreenmdaud
    Being an affiliate marketer, you need to be updated with the latest trends - traffic generation, new marketing tools, etc. There's no need for you to be an expert in everything. These days you can actually outsource people to do the job for you. Work smart, but don't go on short cuts! Web development is a plus if you know at least the basic of it - when it comes to HTML, PHP, etc.

    Hope that helps.
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  • Profile picture of the author mark toughill
    I think it pays to have some knowledge in website creation, it just gives you more control overall and your not constantly outsourcing it all the time. Little things like changing payment buttons, linking images etc, it just helps speed things up if you pick up some website experience. Wordpress is a great place to begin and training is readily available on the web.
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  • Profile picture of the author Samfakroon
    The Skills you will need are as follows

    - Research the Top Selling Products in your Niche of Your Choice,
    - Research Top Marketers of that Product.
    - Research Top Marketers Strategies be in display ads, banners, landing pages, angles they use, Keywords and so on.
    - Swipe their strategy remodel their work is what I mean.
    - Track Conversions.
    - Optimise
    - Scale.

    And this way you will not be an affiliate Marketer but a Super Affiliate Marketer. These are the skills you will need.

    Now I will show you how to simply do a research with the below video, Just to show you its do-able.


    hope this helps you.

    Thank You

    Sameer
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  • Profile picture of the author myron92
    to become an affiliate you are going to need to learn how to generate traffic and then convert that traffic
    you can do that by learning how to create converting landing pages, so try to learn how to use tools such as lead pages, optimize press and click funnels.

    pick one of these tools and master it, they all have their pros and cons so just pick one, it does not really matter

    now you are going to need to learn how generate good quality traffic, the traffic source you pick will depend on different factors like what niche you are in and how you are trying to promote your offer

    for example if you are trying to do a direct link campaign in the biz op niche , then you can not use facebook or google you are going to need to use direct to site buys / banners or email drops

    now once you have picked your traffic source and created your landing page you are going to need track your results so you are going to need to use some sort of tracking solution.
    you can use proseper, cpv lab ,voluum, click magic or any other tool you can even use the conversion pixels of the traffic source you are using

    once you have everything in place you are going to need to test and optimize your campaign you can do this by running different ads and split testing your landing pages

    you can split test using google experiments (free), visual website optimizer , cpv lab or click magic

    once you test and get some data you will eventually start to see what is working and you can focus your energy on whats is working to try and get a winning campaign

    so here is a recap of the skills needed to learn

    traffic generation
    how to create ads
    how to create landing pages
    how to track
    copy writing to create converting ads/ landing pages
    how to split test

    hope this helps
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  • Profile picture of the author LesterRussell
    The barrier of entry for Internet Marketing is extremely low. The only skills i would say you need is hard work and determination. You don't need complicated coding knowledge or years of sales experience to do well. In fact, marketing tactics that works in a physical store might not be effective on the internet.

    The good old fashion method of trial and error is what works here and there is no skill set needed for that.
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  • Profile picture of the author extrememan
    You will be surprised to hear that you don't need any experience at all. I'm completely self-taught. I learned from trail and error. Some paid and free courses here and there.
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    • Profile picture of the author Andre Slater
      No skills needed don't think too hard on the word Affiliate marketing...

      Affiliate Marketing means that you market your product using affiliate paying them commission. So you make a commission for promoting a product.

      So what you are doing in essence is referring someone to buy a product and you get a cut...

      Internet Marketing means you market your product using the internet.

      Network Marketing means you market your product using a network of people

      Online Marketing means you market your products online.

      Content Marketing means you use content to market your product...

      Don't get caught up with the fancy titles

      Just pick something that you like and tell others about it for a commission.
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  • Profile picture of the author TheOne26
    I think the most important skill for an affiliate marketer is selling without selling... Yep it might sound cliche but really in order to succeed in the affiliate business, you need to know the right way to recommend a product to people, without hard-selling the product to them. It took me quite a while to learn this skill, and now I do most of my affiliate marketing through emails because so far it's the best way to market affiliate products for me
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  • Profile picture of the author EPoltrack77
    Good question because its vital to your success as an affiliate to be able to separate yourself from the competition.

    Nice thing today is they have many different software programs that make it easy for anybody to create a landing page. I actually find it fun creating these and sending the traffic and testing. Some are duds while others take right off... I have fun doing it.

    On the other hand I have a few resources or people that I use to have things done 1 I don't want do it or just to see what the other person can come up with.
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  • Profile picture of the author harshdarji
    First you have to know about EPC (estimate per click) for cost, then you have to check out click rate for products and then check payout, you can workout with many ways using seo, smo and sem (google adwords, bing and many more ad network).
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  • Profile picture of the author FromCook2King
    You dont need any skills other than knowing how to use wordpress/social media sites and maybe seo if that's where you want to go. Nut ultimatly nothing.

    HOWEVER
    - the more skills you have the better but dont let your lack if skills stop you from starting. I suffered from that.
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  • Profile picture of the author Randall Magwood
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
    If you want to be a succesful affiliate marketer, then you essentially need an email autoresponder, content (in multiple forms), and more than 1 way to drive traffic to your site.

    You either get a nice site from Wordpress, or Optimize Press, or have someone create one for you easily.... or just use a simple website builder tool. Online marketing is easy. Don't over-complicate it.
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  • Profile picture of the author fated82
    Besides website development,you also need to know:

    1) List building
    2) tracking
    3) paid advertising
    4) copywriting
    5) conversion optimization
    6) email marketing

    The most important being conversion optimization and tracking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Brent Stangel
    to become an affiliate you are going to need to learn how to generate traffic and then convert that traffic
    As an affiliate your job is traffic generation. Without traffic the rest is moot. If you can generate targeted traffic the rest can be learned or outsourced as the need arises.

    If you can't generate traffic you won't need any of the skills mentioned in this thread.

    In case it's not clear, you should learn traffic generation.
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    • Profile picture of the author stevefox88
      Originally Posted by Brent Stangel View Post

      As an affiliate your job is traffic generation. Without traffic the rest is moot. If you can generate targeted traffic the rest can be learned or outsourced as the need arises.

      If you can't generate traffic you won't need any of the skills mentioned in this thread.

      In case it's not clear, you should learn traffic generation.
      traffic is the key!
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      Give Up? Do it now so that you regret later

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  • Profile picture of the author tomkidotiptrick
    product marketing to be clear about that product, seek all information related to promotional products, to create a website using wordpress, post about your evaluation of marketing products, publish news post news-related products such as how-to, the benefits that the product that gives people ... Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author discrat
    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    What other skills do I need?
    It will serve you far if you can really communicate effectively.

    It does NOT necessarily have to be by the written word ( although this helps)

    You can deliver effective communication through Video, Podcasts, Webinars, Seminars etc..


    - Robert Andrew
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  • Profile picture of the author SherimanAF
    Hi,

    Web development is not a required skill to be an affiliate marketer.

    It helps but not it's not important.

    The no. 1 skill is - know how to sell.

    Only then, next is copywriting skill, etc.

    All the best and take care.

    Sheriman



    Originally Posted by CoralBayLover View Post

    How skilled do you need to be at web development to be an affiliate marketer? What other skills do I need?
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  • Profile picture of the author Anton543
    You don't need web development skills but it helps to have some knowledge in html, CSS, basically the ability to edit files inside Wordpress so you don't need to call for help every single time something goes wrong.
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  • Profile picture of the author unicom
    A best affiliate marketer should have a good knowledge in good product research and marketing the same. He/she should be highly skilled in internet marketing skills and optimization skills
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  • Profile picture of the author PVGUY
    You mean an affiliate marketer who makes a living - right? Like everything else, learn the trade. When you know the process well enough to teach someone else you will make money at IM. Skills? Willingness to learn from those who are successfully doing it. Put your voice of judgement aside. Use common sense. Build your list, work your list, develop your brand, then create your own product. Become expert at one advertising form before you move on to another. I suggest starting with Bing PPC. Promote one product only - make that product profitable before adding another product. Be focused - don't shotgun. People do business with: People they like, people who act like they want their business, people who deliver what they promise, and people who don't give them a headache. Good luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author silentsal
    Probably one of the most important skills to learn is list building, as well as how to develop a good relationship with that list. If they know, like and trust you, they are more likely to buy from your affiliate link

    You don't need to be that skilled at web development, although you'll have to learn how to build a squeeze page. The easiest way is with WordPress and a suitable plugin such as InstaBuilder, which makes it point and click simple.

    You also need to know how to make that squeeze page convert - so you need to know a bit of copywriting.

    And you'll need to learn how to drive traffic too - there are both free and paid methods.

    You'll also need to know how to use an autoresponder - Aweber and GetResponse are the most popular and how to do email copywriting.

    Plus you need to know how to pick a high-converting offer which is a good fit for your list, but also has a decent commission for you.

    Simple really

    ~ Sally
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