Can You Earn Affiliate Marketing Income Without Your Own Website?

[barilj]

Affiliate marketing income works well for many people because you can start a business with very little or no upfront capitol. In addition, the best affiliate marketing programs will supply you with all of the free promotional materials that you will need to market your business.

Many online affiliate marketing programs also supply you with a standard affiliate website with all the product sales material and payment processing preloaded onto it. A common question is, can you succeed with an affiliate marketing income business without your own website and simply direct customers to the generic website that your affiliate program supplies?

The consensus of expert opinion is that it is much better to set up a website of your own so that you can present your products in your own words. Unique content looks good with the search engines and will help you a lot with your traffic building efforts. When visitors arrive on your site your unique sales copy will also pre-sell the benefits of the products to them, making it much more likely that they will purchase the product when they click through to the affiliate page from your website.

Nevertheless, if you really want to market your affiliate program without the hassle of building and maintaining a website, there are several ways that you could do it. Here are some examples.

You can run email marketing campaigns without a website of your own. You can plug your affiliate links directly into the e-mail messages. Use the email to discuss the product and pre-sell it to the readers and direct them to your affiliate sales page via a link in the email.

You can purchase or generate opt-in leads in various ways and import them directly into an auto-responder that you have pre-loaded with messages about the product you are promoting.

You can also advertise your auto-responder address in various ways, such as on appropriate discussion forums, via articles that you can publish on directories, or by starting a blog of your own and posting the link on it.

You could also create a series of e-books and give them away. Dedicate each ebook to a specific theme and fill it with useful information that people would want to read and that would make them more likely to buy the product via your link embedded in the ebook. Your writing style does not have to be great and you do not need to write a large book. Twenty or so pages is certainly large enough. You can insert links to your affiliate products at appropriate places in the book and generate some extra sales or sign-ups.

Some article directories and discussion forums prohibit you from placing links to affiliate sales pages in your signature file. On the other hand they will allow you to link to a website or a blog. So if you do not want to set up and manage a website, why not start a free blog with Blogger.com instead? If the blog is simply there as a surrogate website you would not even need to make regular posts. All you would need to do would be to place a sign-up form along with an article to pre-sell the affiliate product you are promoting. By doing that you will be able to participate in discussion forums and send traffic to your pre-sell blog article via the link in your signature file at the same time.

You could do much the same thing with articles that you post on directories. This is a great way to run an online affiliate marketing business without a website. Simply write a series of interesting articles and place a resource box at the foot of each article with a link either to your affiliate page or to the pre-sell page on your blog.

In conclusion, it is much more effective to run an affiliate marketing income business using your own website, however, it is not absolutely necessary to do it this way. Can you promote your affiliate program successfully using the methods mentioned in this article without your own unique website.

[dave1]

affiliate marketing is the ideal online business for those without a website

[tan]

Originally Posted by dave1

affiliate marketing is the ideal online business for those without a website

Agree with you To Affilate marketing is income-generating production

[Joseph Ratliff]

I disagree.

With the exception of very low cost, or free offers that pay you commissions based on very simple actions...

The methods mentioned above are POSSIBLE to use...but it is EXTREMELY difficult to earn a living online as an affiliate without a website of some sort for your promotions. Direct linking in most forms will be a less and less effective manner of making money online as time goes on, in my opinion.

Why?

People seek information on the internet, and a website is a natural part of the information gathering process. If you remove/don't have part of that natural information gathering process, it will be much more challenging to promote affiliate products.

Review sites, blogs, conduit sites, simple HTML sites...all are easy to create nowadays, and domain registration / hosting is SOOOOO cheap and easy to obtain...it almost doesn't make sense not to use a website of some type (depending on what you're promoting).

So, in summary, it seems as though everything in barilj's article here is accurate...but your results may suffer if you don't include a website of some type in your promotions in addition to your direct linking.

Just my opinion, based on recent testing of course.

[Linda Buquet]

I totally agree with Joseph!

In affiliate marketing as with most things in life - you get back what you put in.
If you put in next to nothing i.e. - no time (building a good resource site) and no money - you likely won't earn much either.

Think of it this way. As an affiliate you can earn as much money as a Doctor. A Dr has to invest lots of time and money in college to get to that level of income. As an affiliate you need to invest some time in training and building your site and learning the trade as well as at least just a little money for a domain and hosting if you expect to make anything even resembling 'real money'.

[Joseph Ratliff]

I think it goes back to "making money online as an affiliate" or "building an affiliate business online"...there is a distinct difference between the two.

And since you brought up the cool Dr. analogy Linda ...here's something to carry that a little further...

Would a Doctor operate without an office? LOL...

I don't think so...

So why would an affiliate operate without an "online office" ?

I love this stuff! (and it gives me an excuse to click all of those emoticon icons on the right of the posting screen too)