Affiliate Marketing is a highly effective way to make money online.
It's most certainly an easy way to get a business off the ground. As an affiliate marketer you connect with a product creator, and advertise his product(s) for sell. When you sell a product the product owner pays you a percentage of the selling price in the form of a commission.
You don't have to worry about collecting the money, packaging & shipping the product, or dealing with customer complaints. You just advertise the product with your affiliate link that leads the customer straight to the product site.
Both sides win with affiliate marketing.
The product owner makes a little money on each sale, but his bigger benefit is that he gains a customer name for his mailing list. He can mail future product advertising to everyone on his list. That means future sales with little or no added advertising costs.
Also, the affiliate group that advertises his products becomes a powerful sales force for his business.
You, as the affiliate, get a ready made product to market for relatively easy profits. (Provided the product you select has genuine value.)
The product owner maintains the product website, so you have no costs in time or dollars for the online real estate maintenance.
The product is already tested, and proven to sell. The sales letter is already created. (It costs sometimes thousands to get a sales letter written that converts to sales.) In fact, most product creators also create, or pay to have created, marketing materials for the affiliate's advertising use, and those are also normally tested for effectiveness before they're released.
All you have to do is find ways to get the right people to see those marketing messages. And that means very little experience needed on your part.
(You need to discover how to get inside their heads to learn what problems they want to solve, or what wants they're looking to satisfy.)
There's normally no cost to join an affiliate program. You have a wide variety of products to select from, from physical product that ships to your customer to digital information that your customer downloads to his computer.
That's a big reason why affiliate marketing is ideal for the beginner.
It's a low cost marketing technique that's easy to get into. It helps you start your business, and earn while you learn to create your own product.
You aren't tied to any one product. If the product you select doesn't sell, or doesn't have enough value to satisfy your customer, you can stop marketing that product, and find one that does what you need it to do.
You have a lot of techniques available for attracting customers.
Basically there are only two methods, free traffic and paid traffic. But those two methods contain many niche ways to advertise.
Some free methods are social media marketing, blogging, article marketing, and forum marketing.
Some paid methods are solo ads, purchased advertisements, and joint venture marketing.
Paid marketing gives you the fastest results, but you'll want to combine both of these techniques for optimum success.
Some of these methods you don't even need a computer to work.
Affiliate marketing gives the beginner an ideal way to start building a business online. Use it as a stepping stone to your business growth.