Affiliate business is a type of business that requires extremely low investment and rewards can be very quick and very huge. For some. For most of us it takes years maybe even decades to achieve real success online. Whenever you start something new you fail. Failing when your personal money is at stake is not a sexy thing. You success depends on how hard you want it and how much you’re willing to work at it. If you have some money, maybe you have business, side income, you can invest money into hiring pros to do all the work for you. If you’re like most newbies starting out and have no cash, then your best bet is to acquire skills you’ll need later for success.
Programming
One of the most important skills I see people have is the ability to program. Yep, as weird as it sounds, PHP guys are always ahead in affiliate, CPA game. They know how to automate things with this technology and save themselves a lot of time. Creating their own automated blog content scripts, URL scrapers, data feed systems and so on… There are a ton I haven’t heard of yet. But programming is very useful skill to have. So if you’re in this or planning to learn, I suggest you do so. I haven’t, but I make monies so I hire folks to do whatever I want for me 😉
Web Design/Development
This is probably crucial for you. If you’re going to go anywhere in this game you need to learn how to make at least basic landing page, how to copy someone else’s and change what you need. How to FTP pages to your servers and all the stuff. I don’t think I would be anywhere without this skill. As much as you might hate it, this stuff is important. I constantly make, tweak landing pages myself, cuz I love to do that and know what works and what doesn’t. You can get Dreamweaver cheap or find free web development software to help you do basic editing of HTML, CSS. It’s not rocket science, but it takes time to learn.
Photoshop
I’m not even gonna categorize it. Photoshop is the major player in town and it’s really useful. Making banners, web graphics especially. I find image I want to turn into Facebook 110×80 size format. All I need is drag n’ drop into PSD interface and re-size it to whatever I need. Plus other tricks. There are tons really. I use it on almost a daily basis. It’s a great tool and help you immensely. It’s not hard to use. I’m sure you can find some free ones to help you with basic editing, but this is what I love to use.
These are just major ones I mentioned, but frankly, you will go into obstacles each and everyday. And you’ll need to learn some new things to get things moving. It’s never ending. The more you stick around and educate yourself, the more you’re going to learn and the sooner you’ll achieve financial success.