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.

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.

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.

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.
• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 this free video and, if you want to, moving on to other things.

Your choice. But I think it’s better to seek help when you need it than it is to stubbornly think you know everything.