In my opinion, affiliate marketing is the best business for a complete beginner.

What is affiliate marketing in the first place?

In layman’s term, affiliate marketing is the selling of other company's products for a commission.

Here are the main benefits of affiliate marketing.

Creating a product is not that straightforward. First, you have to know what your target audience really want.

Once you have created the product, you need to test whether your product can convert into sales. Just because you have a product doesn't mean people will automatically want to buy it.

From the creation of the product to the testing of whether your product converts, that can take months and probably thousands of dollars.

Even then, there is no guarantee that your product will sell because you may not have the skills to pull it off especially if you are a complete beginner with no marketing or sales experience.

With affiliate marketing, you can skip all these complicated processes and start promoting products that are already proven to convert to sales.

You can literally start earning immediately. Of course, I am not saying that you will start earning on day 1. You still need learn the necessary skills to succeed with affiliate marketing.

With that said, with the right training, it is possible to generating your first sale within weeks.

Compared to other online business models such as drop shipping or creating your own product, affiliate marketing has the least number of moving parts.

It requires the least number of skills to succeed.

If you want to succeed with creating your own product, you need to learn the following skills.

1. Driving Traffic

2. Building a List

3. Email Marketing

4. Marketing Research

5. Copy writing

6. Tracking

7. Split Testing

8. Conversion Optimization

9. Customer Support

10. Outsourcing

Compare that with affiliate marketing.

You only need to learn 3 skills in the beginning to succeed with affiliate marketing.

1. Driving Traffic

2. Building a List

3. Email Marketing

Yes, learning other skills such as copy writing, tracking, split testing etc can also help with affiliate marketing.

But they are not that critical in the beginning.

That's why it is a lot easier to succeed with affiliate marketing compared to other more complicated business model.

Of course, that doesn't mean that affiliate marketing is push button easy.

You still need to learn that few skills well in order to succeed.

The same set of skills you will learn from affiliate marketing are the same skills you will need to succeed with other online business models.

By getting involved with affiliate marketing, you are building yourself a strong foundation.

This will give you a much better chance of success when you decided to try the more complicated business model such as creating your own product.

On the other hand, if you try to jump into product creation straightaway without the skills you learn from affiliate marketing, you are much more likely to fail.

If you are an introvert like me, you probably don't like to sell face to face.

Traditionally, if you want to become wealthy, you have to become really good at selling face to face.

With affiliate marketing, everything can be done online. You can leverage marketing system and sales funnel to do the selling for you without having to talk to anyone and still generate sales.

When done right, you can grow your passive income with affiliate marketing.

Of course, some people may argue that affiliate marketing is not passive and need maintenance.

Well, in the beginning, you definitely need to put in a lot of work. But once you laid the foundation, the amount of time you need to maintain the income is really minimal.

So you can probably call it semi passive income.

Here are 2 ways to generate passive income with affiliate marketing.

First, you can promote products that pay you recurring commission.

In other words, you promote the product once and as long as the customers you referred continue to pay for the product, you continue to earn commission.

For example, anyone who has a business online will need tools such as auto responder and landing page builders.

These tools are charged on a recurring basis because people will need to use these tools as long as they are in business.

So when you promote these tools, people tend to stick around for years which mean you continue earning recurring commission for a very long time.

Second, you can focus on growing search engine based traffic such as Youtube, Blogging and Pinterest.

For example, let say you have a number of Youtube videos that are ranking on the first page, those ranking tend to stick for a long period of time.

This means you will be able to attract potential customers automatically even while you are sleeping, as long as the ranking stays.