I first started my affiliate marketing journey 4 years ago.

Intrigued by the business model, I liked the fact that you could put forth a ton of effort and have it pay you back for months, even years to come.

Designing has been, and always will be something I love to do, and having built my own affiliate niche websites, creating websites was really a fun part.

It's easy to outsource this part, or even build one yourself using a tutorial off YouTube.

But as an affiliate marketer, you need to separate yourself from the crowd, right?

So in that case, it's important to at least know the basics of HTML/CSS, especially if you work off Wordpress.
There are many times where knowing HTML/CSS have saved me thousands of dollars.

And below I will explain it in greater detail.

1. The Design Of Your Blog Post Is Important For Backlinking

No one wants to link out to a website that looks like it was built in 2008.

Before you start a backlinking process, it's important for you to clean up your website.

If the businesses care about who they link out to (which is often the case), then having a great design will sway them the right way.

2. You Will Learn How To Brand Your Website Properly

At the end of the day, no matter if you have a niche site or an authority site, you will need to have a strong brand.

When I learned HTML/CSS, I also learnt about "brand" colors, how to have a "responsive" layout and many other skills related to branding.

3. You Can Save A Ton Of Money Coding Yourself

Outsourcing is expensive and time consuming.

Unless you are in a position to be able to outsource this kind of stuff, designing and coding projects yourself is extremely rewarding.

Money buys time, and if you have no money, you need to invest your time.

After you have built your website for a while, you will come across many different elements you would like to add to your website.

You don't have to re-invent the wheel, rather, you can copy some nice design elements that you know are converting for your competition.

You will also be able to fix any HTML/CSS issues if they arise, and break out of the limitations of Drag & Drop page builders.

4. You Can Start An Agency And Add Web Design As A Service

If you know how to design and develop websites from scratch, you can start to offer it as a service.

In fact, you could offer it as a service on it's own (without any SEO packages) and still make money.

Knowing SEO will only make you more valuable, and thus you can provide a high-quality, results-oriented service to many clients.

Conclusion

Let me get one thing clear, learning HTML/CSS was never on my pathway when I started my journey.

But as I built more websites, I found myself needing to outsource to developers and designers more, which was eating into my budget.

Having the ability to solve these problems myself took me a fair few months, but the end results were well worth it.

References
HTML
CSS
Battlestation Setups
Photo by Carlos Muza