The standard approach to affiliate marketing is certainly through a website. Your own web space represents the basis for your online business and is generally a good idea to have. But does that mean that you absolutely cannot do successfull affiliate marketing without a website? No, it does not.
There are indeed ways to make a lot of money through affiliate marketing without your own website. As a matter of fact, affiliate marketing is likely the one branch within the general online marketing spectrum, where a website is not an absolute must (certainly a nice-to-have asset though).
There are a lot of approaches to affiliate promotions and many simply do not require you to have an own site. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving high-converting traffic to your affiliate offer. If you find a good method to do so without a website, then you’re good to go.
As mentioned, there are many ways to make lots of money through affiliate marketing without a website. These following 5 are generally recognized as the most profitable ones:
5 Ways to Affiliate Marketing Without a Website
Basically, making money online through affiliate marketing can be done through the following alternatives to a website:
1. Affiliate Marketing through Social Media
This is likely the most common way of earn affiliate commissions outside a website. In a way, a social media profile can be compared to an own website. You post your own content and hope to reach as many people as possible interested in your content. But unlike with your own website, you don’t have to worry about choosing a web hoster, designing the site, SEO aspects, etc. And perhaps the best thing of it all: Registering a Social Media account is absolutely free (no hosting costs either).
The only downside here is that you have to adhere to the rules and properties of the respective social media platform. And not every platform is affiliate-friendly unfortunately. Platforms like Instagram for example heavily limit your chances to link to a relevant affiliate product of yours. Facebook or Pinterest are therefore generally better suited in this regard.
But at the end of the day it all comes down to the quality AND quantity of your posts, regardless of which platform you choose. Post highly engaging content consistently and you will relatively quickly amass a decent following who you can then promote your products to.
Building up your affiliate marketing business solely around social media certainly requires a certain amount of patience, but if you keep producing quality content, it will gain you a highly engaged target audience which you can then easily transform into clients for your relevant affiliate vendors.
2. Affiliate Marketing through YouTube
In a way, YouTube can also be considered a Social Media platform. But first and foremost, it is the world’s biggest, most popular video sharing platform with over a billion active users every month. Producing videos that are relevant to your affiliate offers can therefore be an extremely powerful way to make huge amounts of money online
In fact, most YouTubers these days don’t even make most of their money through the ad revenue generated from their videos, but precisely through affiliate marketing. Just make a relevant video (you don’t even have to necessarily show your face or talk) and then send the interested viewers to your affiliate offer through a link the video description under the video.
If you manage to consistently produce videos which are either educational, informative, otherwise helpful or funny, entertaining, thought-provoking or simply just interesting, you will quite quickly gain a lot of subscribers and from thereon after, your affiliate revenues will grow accordingly.
3. Affiliate Marketing through E-Mail Marketing
There was a time not too long ago where E-Mail Marketing seemed dead. Many bad apples among Email marketers used their emails to send spammy promotions to millions of harvested email addresses whose owners in many cases haven’t even subscribed and agreed to receive these mails.
However, thankfully, in recent years E-Mail marketing has definitely made a big comeback. Improved spam filters by E-Mail services such as Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook have made it much less attractive to send out Spam mails to random E-Mail addresses.
Instead, modern-day E-Mail Marketing is all about building your own subscribers list. This means targeted people in your affiliate niche opt-in voluntarily to receive regular offers from you. You can then use these addresses to send out emails with the links to your affiliate products which are in line with the interests of the owners of said addresses (otherwise they likely wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place).
Typically you build up your email list through a website. However, you can technically also use other ways. You can, for example, use the above mentioned social media channels to get your followers to subscribe to your email list. You can achieve that through a so-called click funnel which is sort of a mini-website made specifically for the purpose of getting leads (e.g. E-Mail addresses).
4. Affiliate Marketing through Comment & Forum Postings
Just because you don’t have your own website doesn’t mean you can’t use websites in general to promote your affiliate links.
The most typical way of doing so is to participate in the comment sections of niche relevant websites that offer them. Just discuss an article or blog post and find a way to include your affiliate link in the comment. People who will come to the relevant site, may then read your comment and use your link to purchase the affiliate product relevant to their interest.
Post such links on a number of relevant articles and you can generate a decent amount of traffic that way. But make sure that your comment doesn’t come off as spammy, because that way the website owner will likely delete your comment or not even publish it in the first place.
A similar but alternative way to take advantage of this method is to post on relevant forums. Just register in a forum which community includes your target audience. Then just consistently take part in discussions that are related to the product you’re trying to promote and then once in a while offer your fellow community member products relevant to their interest through your affiliate link.
But before posting your affiliate links you should definitely first gain a good reputation among your fellow forum users. This way you will also be able to achieve MUCH higher conversion rates since the people you’re sending to the affiliate product will trust you. You should of course also make sure that the respective forum allows the posting of links in the first place.
5. Affiliate Marketing through Guest Postings
This method is similar in nature to the previous one, but a more sophisticated version of it. Instead of leaving comments underneath articles or posting in forums, you may just write guest posts on relevant sites. There are many websites who allow and even actively search for guest authors. Write a relevant article and you will usually be allowed to include a relevant link within your published text.
Compared to comments or forum posts, writing a high-quality guest post obviously requires a bit more work on your part. But it can definitely be worth it. Just make sure the website you’re guest posting on is a) read by your target audience and b) has a decent amount of visitors (the more visitors the more clicks your article will generate on there).
So can you truly be a successful Affiliate Marketer without a website?
The short answer is: Yes, absolutely!
Any of the above methods can definitely be very profitable for you if you use them right. However, that being said, owning your own website still comes with a lot of advantages that will profit you. So generally, it is recommended to create your website if you want to build a business around your affiliate marketing.
But if you really don’t want to go through the hassle of paying for and setting up your website, then there is no reason to not have success with any of the methods described above. But consider not just focusing on one of these, but perhaps trying out more or all at the same time. That way you’ll maximize your success and earning potential.
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