How to Start Affiliate Marketing Without a Website

If you don’t have web development skills but you want to make money online, one of the best ways to go about it is to start affiliate marketing.

You would be surprised to know that a lot of affiliate marketers have been making considerable amounts of money online WITHOUT even having a website! While a vast majority of affiliate marketers are of the opinion that having a website puts them in an advantageous position, there are also many marketers who are doing pretty well without having their own websites.

Of course, there are umpteen benefits of owning a website, especially if you are into affiliate marketing. However, if you wish to get started today but you don’t have a website, fret not. There are other ways to stay ahead of the competition.

While you may want to have a website of your own sooner or later, here are some practical tips to help you get started with affiliate marketing without having a website.

What Is Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy?

For registering your first referred sale, you need to build a strong sales funnel first. This is why understanding how affiliate marketing works and having an obvious strategy is important.

Understanding what is a good affiliate marketing strategy is all the more essential if you are starting your journey without a website. Try to grasp the basic concepts of affiliate marketing first. This is crucial if you wish to have an obvious strategy and make a difference.

If you wish to delve into the basics, here’s a detailed guide on how affiliate programs work.

The Three Main Pillars

There are many tips, tricks, and strategies that you can garner along the way. DO NOT ignore these tips and tricks as all these tips have some value. If you want to make sales and earn commissions as an affiliate marketer, you need to experiment with more than one method until you find the most effective method. Every affiliate marketer ought to focus on three things – trust, traffic, and conversion rates. These are the three main pillars of affiliate marketing.

Trust

Heard of anyone who trusts spammers? No, certainly not! From add-on messages and links to spam mails – these unsolicited messages are hated by everyone. Like everyone else, you might also be a BIG hater of spams. However, if your friend sends a link, wouldn’t you click on it? You’re likely to click on almost any link sent by them, isn’t it?

Whether you choose to be a member of affiliate marketing forums that deliver great posts, or create some great YouTube videos to generate optimum traffic, or simply make pins on Pinterest, it is all about value addition. Building trust is essentially adding value. The more value you can bring to the table, the more trust you can build over time.

But DO NOT SPAM. If you fall into that trap, you might very well get banned sooner or later. Have the intent to make money by promoting products without getting labeled as a spammer.

Traffic

Traffic is the holy grail of the affiliate marketing industry.

If you don’t have any traffic, you can’t drive a sale. It’s a given.

Getting traffic and getting the right kind of traffic takes a lot of skills and hard work.

Affiliate marketing has a lot to do with numbers. Even an average skilled affiliate marketer can drive a lot of sales quickly enough if they can bring targeted traffic to their website. In fact, this is one of the many reasons why many affiliate marketers choose to start their journey with a website, as they want their targeted traffic to land somewhere where they can control and convert those visitors into buyers.

YouTube videos, on the other hand, are great traffic sources as you can place your affiliate link and earn commissions on qualified referrals through YouTube.

How much traffic can you drive to your affiliate links? How much of that traffic is quality and targeted traffic? These are some important questions you should ask yourself before starting a campaign.

Conversion Rates

Trust and traffic determine the conversion rate. The percentage of clicks that convert into commissionable actions, such as purchasing or filling out an email capture form, is the conversion rate. This keeps varying as it depends on the traffic source, the price of the products, niche, website ranking, plus a lot of other factors.

Analyze each data as you can gather lots of useful information that would help you learn how to get affiliate marketing success.

Always try to focus on the bigger picture. This way, you will learn about every method, product, and strategy that works best.

Does that social media post attract more clicks than other posts?

Does a YouTube video get fewer clicks but a better conversion rate?

Do products from smaller sellers convert better than Amazon products? Or the other way around?

While using forums, YouTube videos, online classified advertisements, and email marketing, always keep track of the numbers. It’s the conversion rate that matters at the end of the day and not the other two pillars.

Choose A Good Niche

In order to make money with your content, it is massively important to choose a perfect niche. If you are trying to sell a product worth $6,000 without a website, it’s going to be a hard sale.

Each of the niches has its own jargon. Car geeks know how other car geeks talk. Vapers know what terms other vapers use.

If you choose to promote something that you are passionate about, it will get easier for you to add value. You can use jargon that your target audience is familiar with and they won’t think you are a robot just trying to sell something.

We also have a very detailed guide on how to find affiliate marketing programs that are relevant to you. Feel free to check it out.

Use YouTube For Affiliate Marketing

If you are a YouTuber or a niche blogger, your chance to strike gold is bigger than many other affiliate marketers. This is because search engines love video content from YouTube and these videos often get placed among the top search results.

Most internet marketers who have YouTube channels drive sales by putting affiliate links in the video descriptions. Then they point to those links through their videos.

If you wish to cash in the trust and fan following you have earned by producing great video content, you shouldn’t look any further than YouTube marketing. Your primary task is to produce good video content. If you can produce palatable video content, YouTube can turn out to be a great traffic source. Yes, you don’t need a website to bring home the bacon sans a website.

Ace Email Marketing

Email marketing as a marketing technique has been around for more than two decades and it has not lost its charm till now. You need to get the real email addresses of people first and you need to build trust so people can feel comfortable sharing their email addresses with you.

If you have the email list, take good care of it. Don’t spam the people who are on your list. Cultivate trust as much as you can. When you finally promote an affiliate product to them, chances are there that they will go with your recommendations and make the purchase.

If you can pull it off correctly, there are both short- and long-term rewards awaiting you.

Harness The Power Of Social Media

Social media offers a plethora of opportunities. There are quite a few social media platforms that are considered ideal for affiliate marketing. It’s just that you should pay attention to the rules of those sites. Do not try to game the system and you’ll be good.

Quora is one of the major social media sites where affiliate marketing is completely prohibited.

Pinterest banned all forms of affiliate links way back in 2015, but the decision was reversed in 2016.

Facebook allows you to promote your affiliate links, with a few exceptions. It’s mostly to do with the way these ads can be displayed (no spamming via direct messages or other people’s Facebook pages). Also, there are specific ad networks that are allowed on Facebook.

LinkedIn as a social media platform does allow affiliate marketing. The way you create content using your personal account on LinkedIn blogs is an effective way to be found by friends, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and everyone else on your contact list.

Depending on your needs and the niche you are in, you can choose a social site and harness its full potential.

Online Forums

Online forums are great sources for driving affiliate sales without a website. However, there’s a catch.

If you didn’t know this, online forums attract a lot of spammers. For this reason, forums that have a solid community and a good reputation would kick out anyone at the hint of possible spam.

So how can you promote your products on a forum if they look at all links suspiciously?

Share links only in those forums where you’ve been recognized as a contributing (and value-adding) member for quite some time now. You can’t just join a forum, drop a few links, and move on. It just doesn’t work that way.

Yes, everybody knows it’s spamming – plain and simple.

None of the members would care about a spammy link, and you may just get banned sooner or later.

If you are thinking about dropping a few links here and there and cash out, online forums are not the best place for you.

Any Other Way To Start Affiliate Marketing Without A Website?

The internet is transforming every day. Old opportunities are dying out, whereas new opportunities are coming to the fore. People who have been keeping tabs on these changes know that Pinterest banned affiliate activities in 2015, only to reverse their decision four years down the line.

Medium.com affiliate marketing is another great way to drive sales without having a website. It’s one large website that reaches almost millions of visitors every month.

The site lets publishers weave affiliate links in their content. If you have good writing skills, you can use the site to reach out to patient readers who might end up buying through the affiliate links you place on Medium.com.

The trick is to keep your eyes and ears open to opportunities. Making a serious income as an affiliate without a website is no mean feat, but you must be smart enough to spot these potential chances.

Should You Consider Having A Website?

If it’s about generating affiliate income, having a website is not a basic requirement. But there are other good reasons that you should take into account. A website would give you better control over your traffic. After all, it’s your online property that you can customize to your needs and preferences.

You can try mixing and matching different links to see what combination works best. A website is undoubtedly a great tool for boosting your conversion rate. You can collect email addresses quickly, build your authority, and definitely, offer more value to your end-users.

On top of everything, you can attract organic traffic with a website. This implies your hard work won’t go in vain and real people who visit your website once would keep coming back for personalized recommendations and buying tips. This would lead to more sales.

Final Thoughts

A vast majority of the affiliate marketers around the world use what is known as a ‘website model’. There’s no denying that a website comes with an array of benefits that affiliate marketers can reap.

If you have already reached this section, you already know that it is very much possible to get started as an affiliate marketer even if you don’t have a website. We suggest starting your campaign without a website and reinvest the money you earn as affiliate commissions on a website, or maybe a couple of websites.

Also, since you are already here, here are some free traffic sources for you to check out. Good luck with your campaign!