Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest places to start on the web. Read about the handful of (quite easy) skills that you need to be a successful affiliate marketer.

1. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of those areas of internet marketing
where you don’t need many skills and those you do need can be
quite rudimentary.
You can get away with being the proverbial jack of all trades and
master of none so long as you can pick some products and find
ways of getting your affiliate links in front of people.

2. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
In approximate order and with no definitive skill level other than
basic or beginner, you’ll need at least several of the following skills
to start making your affiliate marketing a success.
It could even be a case of less knowledge is better in some areas
as you’re less likely to overthink them.

3. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
1. The Ability to Choose a Niche
Choosing a niche is probably the most important part of affiliate
marketing.
Choose too narrowly and there won’t be enough products to
promote and you may struggle to get enough customers and
affiliate commission.
Choose too widely and you’ll be competing with seemingly every
other affiliate on the planet plus generalist sites such as Wikipedia.

4. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
Choosing a niche for your affiliate marketing doesn’t have to take
long:
● Go to Amazon and choose the “shop by department” option
that seems to get smaller with every redesign
● Choose Books
● Drill down – there were over 1.8 million books in the Business
& Money section when I just checked, that’s too big.

5. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
● Use the number of books available as a quick guide as to
whether the niche is likely to be good for you. It won’t tell you the
number of affiliate products available and it won’t tell you the
number of duplicate formats (Kindle, paperback, hardback,
different editions) – you have to drill down further for that – but it’s
a quick and easy guide. You also get a quick snapshot of the
number of new titles published in the last 30 and 90 days plus
Amazon’s estimate of how many are “coming soon”.
● Pick two or three areas or niches that interest you. Don’t make
a bucket list, just enough to be able to move on to Plan B if the
first one you research doesn’t turn out to be as interesting as you
first thought. That said, if you’re feeling lucky you’d probably get
away with just choosing one niche and going back to Amazon if
that didn’t work once you did a bit more research.
.

6. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
2. The Ability to do some Quick Research
You need to know whether or not you can monetise your chosen
niche.
If you’re somewhere that Amazon is still accepting affiliates then
you might decide to just use the research from step 1, create some
content and see whether or not the niche interests you longer term.

7. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
That may sound lazy but given that none of us knows what the true
search figures are and none of us knows how well or badly our
sites will perform, it could be a good attitude.
You might decide to be that jack of all trades, concentrate on one
niche per month for the next year and then come back to each site
in 11 months time (roughly when you get the domain renewal
notice) to see whether it’s getting traffic. Keep the ones that are
getting traffic, drop the ones that aren’t.
Just a thought.

8. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
If Amazon don’t like your State or country then you’ll need to do a
bit more research.
Clickbank is going through some turmoil at the time of writing but
they’ve got a lot of potential digital products (albeit of very variable
quality) and so long as you can work with their sub-par
marketplace search you’ll be able to do a quick test as to whether
or not there are products you could promote as an affiliate.

9. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
There are lots of other product marketplaces out there –
Commission Junction, Shareasale, etc.
Or you could just do a search on Google for your niche and affiliate
program. That will turn up enough results most of the time.
At this stage you’re just finding out whether or not there are
products you could earn an affiliate commission on.

10. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
If yes, you’re good to go.
If no, it’s back to Plan B (the second niche you may or may not
have researched).
Or you could outsource steps 1 & 2:
If all that sounds too much like hard work, you could splash out $5
on Fiverr and let someone else do the research for you.

11. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
Most of them major on whether or not you could make money by
putting Google AdSense on your site but that’s a good enough
proxy for whether or not there are products being sold in that niche.
And if there are products being sold, there’s a high chance that
affiliate commissions are available.
Sometimes you may need to do a bit of lateral thinking. For
instance, most landscape gardeners are unlikely to have an
affiliate program or even know what one is. But quite a few of those
same landscape gardeners (or other real world niche) would
probably be happy to pay you a nice commission for every lead
that you found for them especially if a decent number of those
leads turned into sales.

12. What Skills do you need for
Affiliate Marketing?
It’s not strictly an affiliate deal but it’s very close – you’re a
commission only salesman.
3. Create a website
You’ll need a domain name and some hosting for this.

13. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
The domain name should probably be at least loosely related to
your niche – use an extra short word or even a single letter at the
end of your chosen words rather than choose a domain name that
would compete for the longest ever word. And don’t use hyphens
or numbers – they usually look spammy.
Hosting: choose a shared hosting package (normally the cheapest
option) and start small. You can pay to add extra domains later.
Use the simple install to put WordPress onto your site.

14. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
And install some useful plugins to get your new site up and running
smoothly.
Depending on your technical skillset you can do all this in an hour
or two. Or you could use Fiverr again – $5 to research the domain
name, another $5 for someone to click the one click install for
WordPress plus maybe some extra money if they install some
plugins.

15. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
There’s not really much skill involved in this step. All the “best”
domain names got taken years ago but there are still some very
nice ones around if you put your thinking cap on for a while.
The rest of the process is basically clicking “next” and doing a few
searches or following some YouTube videos.
Don’t worry about the theme – leave it at the default until you get
some traffic or just leave it at the default and get over the worry.
You’ll be the only one fretting over the new look and feel – your
visitors are just visiting for your content.

16. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
4. Add content to your website
Arguably this is the most skilled part of the process.
A lot of people make a big deal out of creating content.
But if you’re able to explain your niche to someone else, you’re
perfectly able to create content for that niche.

17. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
Answering questions is probably the easiest route to follow. Mainly
because most people can answer a question on a topic they’re
interested in.
If you can’t think of the questions people are likely to ask, use
Google or Quora or Yahoo Answers or a forum.
Choose the questions that crop up with monotonous regularity.

18. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
Why?
Because those are the ones people are always asking!
It doesn’t matter that the question has been answered so many
times that even an insomniac would fall asleep before the number
of sheep they counted got to the end of the number of times the
question has been asked.

19. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
By definition, people aren’t finding an answer or aren’t finding an
answer they want.
You won’t fill the complete gap but that doesn’t matter, you just
need to fill enough of it to get the occasional visitor.
Then move on to the next question.

20. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
If you run out of questions to answer, ask them a slightly different
way. Or expand on part of your answer and make it an extra piece
of content on your website, linked from the previous answer if you
remember to do that.
If you don’t like typing content, do videos or audios instead and just
put a few words around them.
That’s not ideal (search engines thrive on the written word) but it
can still work.

21. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
And if all that is too daunting, take a lead from sites like YouTube
and let other people create the content for you.
Yes, you really can get free content for your website.
You may even be able to get people to pay you to put their content
onto your site (I do on one of my sites) and be happy to do that.
Whichever methods you decide to use, do something reasonably
regularly.

22. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
Because one lone piece of content will drown in the oceans of
content that make up the web.
An individual page rarely gets many visitors.
There’s even a site that hunts down unplayed tracks on Spotify (it’s
thought that maybe 1 in 5 of the tracks on that site have never
been played).

23. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
So don’t sulk if no-one visits one of your pages for a while – that’s
normal.
Just keep creating more content and every now and then check
which is the most popular and then create more of the same.
And while you’re creating content, put in appropriate affiliate links.
Because it’s easier to do that while it’s fresh in your mind rather
than leaving it for another day.

24. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
5. The Ability to Keep Going
We can all do this – it’s not really much of a skill, even though it’s
treated as one.
Persistence is necessary.
It takes time for things to happen on the web.
So if you give up too early, all your efforts will be in vain.

25. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
OK, there’s a fine line between being persistent and being foolish.
You’ll need to judge for yourself when that’s happening – I find that
the affiliate payments are a good monitor once you start to get
momentum.
But so long as you don’t leave your profitable domains to expire
and so long as you don’t pursue the unprofitable ones for too long,
you should be fine.
Remember that a domain is roughly $10 a year, hosting is probably
no more than $10 a month and can be shared across many sites,
so your sites don’t need to earn much in the way of affiliate
commission to keep their head above water.

26. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
6. The Ability to know when you need help
OK, this is where I do a quick sales plug.
Because you can get help from me – starting with the
free video linked here and, if you want to, moving on to other
things.

27. What Skills do you need for Affiliate
Marketing?
Your choice. But I think it’s better to seek help when you need it
than it is to stubbornly think you know everything.
Get more help here.