You can earn an ethical and satisfying income from affiliate marketing. But is it for beginners? In this article, I am going to show you how to get started.

It's a bit like learning to walk.

Really, really difficult at first. You have some stumbles and falls. But you pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes and try again.

But then suddenly everything falls into place and you never look back.

But it sure helps to have someone there, guiding and encouraging you every step of the way. In the case of walking, it's someone to show you how to do it, to hold your hand as you take your first stumbling steps and to help you back on to your feet when you stumble and fall. And to help you keep that goal firmly in mind.

Anyone who has ever raised a child knows how important each of those factors is.

It's the same with affiliate marketing for beginners.

Affiliate Marketer Success Factors

Your success as an affiliate marketer depends on many factors.

Having a fast, attractive website is one. Posting great content is another. You need to understand keyword research so that your great content is seen by the people who will benefit from it when they enter a search term into Google, Bing or Yahoo. And you need backlinks from other sites operating in the same or similar niches.

But all of that is aimed at just two things. One, getting traffic to your website and two, making it very attractive for your visitors to click on your links.

But what happens when a visitor clicks on one of your links?

Affiliate Marketing Failure

They say you  need to fail at something many times before you succeed.

I tried to join the success stories of other internet affiliate marketers many times over the past few years. And failed many times.

I had no plan. I set no goals and I didn't have a to-do list.

But I bought lots of stuff that promised to make me successful. Build a site using this magic software. Get traffic by pushing this magic button. Get the internet marketing secrets of this guru, who's revealing them for the first time ever and become an internet marketing millionaire just like them.

It was all nonsense, but I fell for it.

What Is a Passive Income Stream?

Do you need extra cash?

Or is that a silly question?

Perhaps a better question is would you like your extra cash to come from an active or a passive income stream.

Do you understand the difference?

You can easily make extra cash from an active income stream.

If you have a suitable motor vehicle, you can sign up with a rideshare company like Uber or Lyft. Depending on where you live, this can be expensive. You will probably require some or all of a special driver's authorization, a permit for your car, a medical examination, a police check, annual vehicle inspections and increases to your registration, third party insurance and comprehensive insurance costs. In fact, you'll probably need special, much more expensive rideshare insurance.

But once you've got past all that, uploaded photos and installed the Uber and Lyft apps on your smartphone, you're ready to go.

Your income is then entirely dependent on how many hours you can spend driving. That makes it an active income stream.

You and the Internet: An Awesome Combination

The internet has created many opportunities for you to earn an extra income working at home.

You might be a single mom, a college student, a retiree or simply someone who wants to get out of the 9 to 5 rat race, a soul sucking job (JOB = Just Over Broke) and become your own boss.

You might simply be sick and tired of the awful commute to and from work in grid-locked traffic. Or any other reason at all. There are internet based businesses that you can run for total personal satisfaction and a nice income.

Let me ask you a simple question. 

Will you have enough money to fund an enjoyable lifestyle retirement? 

If you're relying on a pension or government welfare, the answer is no. 

If you're relying on a superannuation fund of less than a million dollars, the answer is probably no. 

These are some of the reasons so many retirees are turning to alternative sources of income, such as driving for rideshare companies like Uber or Lyft. But this has serious problems. There's a better way. More enjoyable and much more rewarding.

Shortly after I entered Wealthy Affiliate's Super Affiliate Challenge, I posted a blog on the WA site offering to create a group of WA members interested in mutual help while participating in the challenge.

A fairly large number of members took this up.

That's what this article is for.

Any member of the group may log in to this post and leave a question, which can be answered by any other member, including myself of course.

This website https://superaffiliatechallenge.com is the actual website that I am building out as my part of the challenge.

You are welcome to comment on any aspect of it and, if there is any part of it that you particularly like, please ask questions and I'll explain how it was done.

There are two other things I'm inviting you to do.

The first is to include a link back to your website when you post a comment on this thread. This will give you backlinks from a site (this one) in a related niche, which will help to improve your Google rankings.

The second is to leave comments on other members' posts, including mine and I will do so on yours as well. Let's run an informal 1 for 1 here. So for every comment you receive, you post a comment on another member's post. Preferably not the same member as we don't want Google seeing too many reciprocal comments.

Let's get this started by leaving a comment below.