The Top 10 Skills You Need for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to sell products online and also get paid for your efforts. It’s also one of the most accessible types of digital marketing, with no startup costs or previous experience needed.
Before you start your affiliate marketing journey, it’s important to understand what it means and whether it’s the right fit for you. Affiliate marketers partner with brands and vendors in order to promote their products as an unofficial spokesperson and get a commission for every sale they drive.

While there are many skills that will help you succeed at any type of marketing, affiliate marketing requires some specific competencies. Here are the top 10 skills that you need to thrive as an affiliate marketer:

Content Marketing Skills

If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, you need to get clear on your niche. You’ll want to find a specific niche that you’re knowledgeable about, and that has demand, so you can make sales from day one. This is a great way to avoid the common “spray and pray” method of link building, where you just build links to your website from anywhere possible, without any rhyme or reason.

To get started with niche research, try using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to identify trending topics and opportunities. Once you’ve found a niche that you’re interested in, you can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to get a deeper understanding of the competition level, how much organic traffic the top ranking results are getting, and how much it would cost to buy a comparable amount of traffic.

Marketing Skills

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance marketing, so you need to be able to clearly communicate the benefits of your product, and why your audience should buy from you instead of your competitors. You don’t want to be pushy with your sales messages, but you also need to be very clear and specific about what your product offers.

Having an excellent marketing strategy is key to growing your business as an affiliate. If you don’t have a marketing plan set up yet, try using this marketing strategy for affiliate marketing as a guide.
You should also be creating marketing materials that are tailored to your audience. For example, if you’re marketing to parents, you’ll want to use a different messaging style than if you’re marketing to millennials.

Networking Skills

One of the best ways to get new affiliate marketing leads is through networking. At conferences, industry events, and local meetups, you can seek out people who are interested in your niche and offer to help them with their business. If you can add value to their lives while also building your own network, you’ll be on the path to affiliate marketing success.

Affiliate marketing networks like FlexOffers are a great way to make connections with other marketers and brands, and get direct access to product owners who can partner with you.

These networks use cookies to track your activities on websites with affiliate programs. For example, if you click on a link for a product on Amazon, and then purchase that product within a certain timeframe, the affiliate network will track your click and sales to know that you generated that sale.

Writing Skills

To get sales from your affiliate marketing efforts, you’ll need to write compelling sales copy that convinces people to purchase products from you. You can start by reading sales copy from other successful affiliate marketers, and then try to emulate their tone and style.
You can also use online tools like Hemingway App or Ginger to check the readability of your sales copy and make sure it’s not too difficult for your audience to understand.

Excel Skills

One of the most important skills for affiliate marketers to have is the ability to track their sales and earnings. If you’re not tracking your affiliate marketing efforts, you won’t understand which products are bringing in sales, and which ones are falling short.

You also won’t be able to forecast future earnings, or know when you need to shift your efforts to different products or vendors. You can use a tool like HubSpot’s Affiliate Tracking Software to keep tabs on your earnings and sales.

HTML and CSS Skills

Affiliate marketing is a form of link building, and one of the most important ways to get started is by finding other websites in your niche and adding links to your website in a non-spammy way. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find other websites in your niche and see what other links point back to your competitors.

Then, visit those sites and look for places where you can add your own links. For example, if you’re promoting a product on Amazon, you can add a link to your site underneath the “Amazon” banner on that page.

Computer Software Skills

One of the most important software skills for an affiliate marketer is the ability to use Google Analytics to track your website traffic and conversions. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be able to set up a Google Analytics account and correctly track your website traffic.
While you can always outsource your analytics tracking to a freelancer, it’s important to have a basic understanding of what you’re looking at so you can make adjustments to your marketing strategies.

Scarcity Selling Skills

Affiliate marketing is a type of sales funnel. You’ll want to get your audience’s attention, show them that you have a solution to their problems, and then get them to take action and purchase your products. You can use a scarcity-based sales tactic to get your audience to take action now, instead of thinking about buying from you sometime in the future.

For example, if you’re marketing a product that helps entrepreneurs with their scheduling, you can offer the first 10 people who purchase a month’s worth of access to the product for free. Now, the person reading your sales copy knows that they need to buy right now, before the offer ends and they miss their chance.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible ways to start your marketing career. You can begin by partnering with brands that you love and recommending their products to your friends and family. Affiliate marketing scales well, so as your audience grows, you’ll have the opportunity to scale your efforts as well.

With the right skills, you can quickly grow your affiliate marketing business and become an expert in your niche as you earn more money and free up your time.