Since the year 2007 – the year Facebook opened their doors to the world outside American university campuses – the term digital marketing has been a prominent feature in the modern marketing lexicon.

This went hand in hand with every person that managed to amass a few thousand followers on either Facebook or Twitter suddenly becoming a marketing maven. So digital marketing started getting thrown around like an insatiable whore on a ship full of horny sailors.

Everybody and their mama were suddenly proficient in digital marketing. Even bloggers.

But to do digital marketing really well you need a specific skill set (no.. having lots of money or rich friends is not one of them). Unlike traditional marketing where you could attend a university, AAA School of Advertising or Vega for 3 years and come out of there thinking that you know what you’re doing on the other side.. it’s not as easy with digital.

Digital marketing has been hailed as cheaper and better than what we know to be marketing (that is not a lie), but it takes more than a degree or a diploma. So here are the skills we believe you need to be successful at this:

1. Intellect. Digital marketing involves things like analytics, strategy, project management, reporting, client liaison, account management and data extraction. You cannot afford to be dim when it comes to these things. These are the things a client will want to know you have locked down. So being really smart is one of the main ingredients.

2. Creativity. In the content creation process you will need to create, edit, amend, re-purpose, attach or somehow include photos, videos, infographics or aspects of the company’s corporate identity. A level of creativity is required. Whether it’s proficiency in Photoshop, knowing how to lower glare in a photo you took yourself or resizing a logo for branding purposes. Creativity can get you a lot further along than not being creative at all.

3. Computer Love. For a task like Search Engine Optimization to be done effectively, one has to spend countless hours online analyzing data, doing keyword research, and doing industry and competitive analyses. You will never do something like this to the best of your ability in the absence of genuine love for the online space. It’s like the amount of time spent talking to your girlfriend when you two first met, but in this instance, the phone calls never get shorter and they never go away. You must love being online.

4. Write-ability. Whether it’s a report to a client, a pitch to a client, a proposal for funding, a tweet, a Linkedin discussion comment (flip we really miss Linkedin Answers) or a Facebook status update. If you hate writing you may as well become a car mechanic or a zookeeper. At its very core, writing forms the basis of a lot of what digital marketing is about. To do marketing effectively in the years beyond 2010 you must be able to become a marketer-slash-publisher. Links drive traffic, and links are nothing but words. Written words.

5. Love people. People don’t buy from companies. They buy from people. People don’t buy products. They buy brands. The average customer is 66% swayed about a purchase before they begin to engage the seller. But they HAVE to engage the seller whether they like it or not. How the seller or those that represent his business interact with the buyer will determine the speed at which the sale happens. Being people-oriented is the new black.

If you have these 5 skills, you’ll not only be all you can be in the digital marketing space. You’ll be more than most will ever be.

Nobody has them all at first or even knows they have these skills. However, as time pass and you intensify your efforts as you venture deeper and deeper into the digital forest. The fog disappears and things become more apparent. If you don’t have any of these skills, don’t worry too much about it. Some of us took more than 15 years to find ourselves. Others took a bit less time. Just do what you believe to be the right thing and could work for you. You will learn from the mistakes you make and improve on those mistakes. Ultimately as you develop and refine one skill after the other. You’ll become an unstoppable force in digital marketing.