In this guide, you’ll discover the most important affiliate marketing skills to learn to build a successful online business in 2022.
These are things you should be learning you should be practicing you should be leveling up because at the end of the day your business generally is a reflection of your personal development and your skillset.
Affiliate marketing is basically focusing on the very specific action which is promoting products and getting commissions through sales.
Essentially it’s just marketing but that in this industry there are very specific things that you can do that are tailored to getting more sales.
So let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
1. Market Research
As I explained in my affiliate marketing PDF, market research is one of the most important skills for affiliates. And the reason I say that is because if you go after let’s say a certain keyword or a term and there’s not enough of a market and the keyword that you’re targeting doesn’t get a lot of searches., there it is going to be very difficult for you to have success.
So even if you’re successful with the ranking for that keyword you’re not going to get a lot of sales or those sales are not even going to be worth it because they’re so minuscule.
What I mean by this is the more years you spend in any sort of business or industry you’re going to get better at identifying opportunities that are worth going after and then opportunities that are not worth going after.
If would you like to dive deeper into market research here is a great market research guide from HubSpot
2. SEO
Now with that, you have to learn how to capitalize on market research with SEO.
So let’s say you do find a great market you need to be able to use search engine optimization so that you can actually rank for those terms and actually get sales and get in front of the right customers.
SEO is all about connecting your content and your brand with the right customers your target customer who are willing to buy and who’s going to purchase those products.
SEO I mean that’s a whole world. There are people who literally devote their entire job and career to just SEO.
Now I don’t think you have to go that far I think you just need to learn the 80/20 rule of what’s the 20% that’s going to generate 80% of the SEO results.
For example, there’s a plug-in WordPress called Yoast SEO. It’s a free plug-in and it tells you what to do to optimize your content for Google search rankings.
Or my favorite SEO tool SemRush that literally allows you to spy on your competitors.
SEMrush helps you monitor your rivals’ SEO, PPC, content & social media activities which is great for affiliate marketing.
And I think that’s part of the 80/20 rule.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Now, this primarily relates to your website. CRO is kind of like a compassing skill can you get your conversion rate up whether that’s getting email subscribers whether that’s getting sales whether that’s getting lowering your bounce rate.
And there are a lot of principles when it comes to designing your website that can help you to get more sales.
But in general, you should learn things like:
You want to make sure that people are actually taking the action that you are wanting them to take because if they don’t, then it’s just going to be very difficult for you to make money.
4. Email Marketing
The next affiliate marketing skill is email marketing because this will help you build relationships with your prospects and then also develop brand loyalty where they come back to you time and time again. Email marketing still has the highest ROI according to a recent study.
Email marketing has been around for a very long time and yet, it’s still one of the best ways to get your message across.
If you don’t have any sort of email marketing in your affiliate marketing business you’re wasting traffic without having an email list.
This will help you build relationships with your prospects and then also develop brand loyalty where they come back to you time and time again.
When you’re an affiliate you don’t own the company so you need to build your own audience as fast as possible and as sustainably as possible.
If you’re on building an email list you’re living money on the table even if you make some sales here and there.
The thing about email marketing that makes affiliate marketing passive income is the autoresponder sequence.
5. Copywriting
Copywriting and email marketing go hand in hand.
Copywriting is one of the high-income skills. It’s essentially just marketing through words and so the better you can do this then obviously the better you can probably get sales the better you can persuade people to take action.
Again copywriting is something that people spend their entire lives or career.
So this is something that you’re gonna have to learn and you’re gonna have to get to a certain level of understanding.
Later on and I’ll talk about this in a bit but you can outsource any of these things but I think that every competent affiliate marketer should at least know these things to a degree.
I’m not saying you have to be an expert in each thing I’m just saying you must understand the basic fundamentals.
6. Video Marketing
This is skill is not necessary to have a successful affiliate marketing business.
But considering that 90% of consumers claim that a video will help them make a purchasing decision, video creation and editing skills might really help you when it comes to paid advertising.
This is interesting because again this is one of the things you can outsource and you don’t necessarily have to know yourself.
I personally edited, created, and filmed all of my first videos and the thing is I had zero video experience coming into this game.
I learned on the fly and my videos just got better and better and better because I just kept making more and understanding and learning from my mistakes along the way.
And the key is you just get better with each video it’s not you have to be perfect from day one you just have to get better as time goes on.
If you never get better then that’s a problem.
7. Sales Psychology
Sales psychology is simply how a customer goes through a sales funnel process. It’s how do you close that customer to going from just a visitor to a paid customer and a client.
So sales and psychology are one the same as if you learn psychology and why humans do things and you understand human nature it’s going to be way easier selling because you know what people want.
It’s all about people having customer pains and so you’re just offering a solution to pain and that’s the simplest way I can put it.
8. Paid Advertising
Some marketers opt for paid advertising instead of getting traffic by blogging or SEO efforts. You can get your ads in front of millions of people and if one makes a purchase, you will get a commission for your efforts.
There are a number of different PPC platforms you can use, such as:
And other less popular advertising channels like Linkedin, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest.
And when it comes paid traffic for affiliate marketing it’s something that’s interesting because beginners I think you should focus on the first things on this list before you get to the paid advertising.
Because digital advertising is a skill just like any other it’s learnable but you’re risking money.
And if you don’t know how to do an effective ad and how to get something that converts then you’re just throwing money out the window.
If you don’t know what you’re doing it’s very easy to just waste money on all those platforms.
Because of how easy they made it to get started but it’s harder to actually get results.
But generally paid advertising works if you know how to do it the right way.
Some affiliates focus only on organic traffic like SEO their whole career and that’s fine and that totally works.
But I think if you want to scale up your online business sooner or later you’ll need to master one of the paid advertising platforms.
And if you would like to learn more, check out my Top Affiliate Training and see how to do paid advertising like a pro but for now let’s move on just, to sum up, all of the affiliate marketing skills that lead to more sales
9. Social Media Marketing
Successful affiliate marketers know how to use social media to their advantage. If you want to be successful, you need social media marketing skills, which means learning how to create and share great content with your followers on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
There are a number of other social media sites you can use as well. Each site is different and you need to learn how to use them in your business.
10. Sales Funnels
Another affiliate marketing skill to learn is sales funnel skills because you want to make sure that people go through this whole process, which will help you inform them of your products, get them to take an action, and then make a sale.
Sales funnels will help you get your audience from point A to point B, where they can purchase a product or service. They will also help you do things like up-selling and cross-selling.
Do I Have To Learn All Of These Skills?
The first thing I want to say is you don’t have to do everything by yourself you can outsource anything that I put on that list.
You have to figure out how much your time is worth and what you can outsource to experts who are better than you but charge less than how much it would cost you to learn or to do.
Again you should learn a basic fundamental understanding of all these things.
Because if you do know that it will help you with identifying what’s a good freelancer and what does good SEO or content even look like.
You just get a better understanding of these things.
So when it comes to outsourcing again it’s like if it takes you 6-12 months to learn video editing but someone else will do it for let’s say $5/hour then you might want to just do that because it’s gonna cost you so much just to learn that one skill when someone’s willing to do it for a few bucks.
I outsourced even at the beginning like logos and stuff but I wish I did more as time went on I had more money to reinvest I kept doing everything by myself which is a mistake. You don’t need to.
The best ways to learn these skills I recommend you buy or borrow books for cheap I mean it’s crazy how like you can spend less than ten dollars and learn from basically the most brilliant minds on the planets.
I have paid thousands of dollars to learn from the world’s digital marketing experts. But you don’t need to spend that much.
You can sign up for my Free Affiliate Marketing Training.
Affiliate Marketing Skills Final Words
So these are the most important affiliate marketing skills you need to build a successful online business faster than you ever thought possible.
So, make sure you take action and apply those strategies that you’ve learned.
