Affiliate marketing is one of those internet-based businesses that lure everyone. However, some people are dissuaded when they learn that they’ll have to set up a blog or a website in order to start their affiliate income journey.
If you too are stung by the same fact, don’t lose heart. While having a blog or a website can be useful for your affiliate business, it’s not an absolute requirement. You can start earning even without them. How? Well, that’s what we’re going to explain in this article. Let’s get started!
Is Affiliate Marketing Without A Website Possible?
The short answer is: Yes! It’s definitely possible to start affiliate marketing with a website.
In order to earn money through affiliate marketing, all you need is a traffic source that can send people interested in the products you’re promoting to your affiliate links. It doesn’t matter whether that source requires you to spend any money or not. There are dozens of free traffic sources on the internet nowadays, and if you can identify one from where you can send relevant traffic to your affiliate links, then you’re good to go!
Having said that, now let’s take a look at some of those methods that can be used to start affiliate marketing without a website.
What Do You Need To Become An Affiliate Marketer?
Before we dive into starting affiliate marketing without a website, let us explain how you can become an affiliate marketer and what things you would need. If you have an affiliate website, then becoming an affiliate marketer is pretty easy, but when we think about the fundamentals of becoming an affiliate marketer, none of them require you to have a website. You would only need three things to become an affiliate marketer: an affiliate partner, an audience, and a traffic source.
The first thing you should focus on is finding the right product to promote to your audience; only after that, you should apply for its affiliate. Because you can’t just promote any product and expect your audience to buy it using your affiliate link. You should find a product that connects you with your audience. You can promote that product through your social media accounts, email marketing, or any other channel.
7+ Methods To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Website
Here are some of the best steps methods to do affiliate marketing without a website guide here.
#1. Using Social Networks
There’s no dearth of social media platforms nowadays, and as a result, no dearth of marketing opportunities that come with them. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat — all can be utilized to promote your affiliate links and drive traffic to them. Here are a couple of ways how you can use the power of social media to promote your affiliate marketing business without any blog/website:
- On Facebook, you can create pages or groups that are related to your niche and helpful for the members. Then once in a while, you can use that group to directly or indirectly (through a page) promote your affiliate links.
- On Twitter and Instagram, you can create profiles that share useful content related to your niche to build an audience. Once you build an audience, that profile can then be used to promote your affiliate links occasionally.
You can get creative and modify either of these methods or even create your own method to promote your affiliate links through social networking platforms. It’s entirely up to you!
#2. Using YouTube And Other Video-Sharing Platforms
Who says creating content is only about writing articles? There are other avenues too that can serve you (and your affiliate links) better than blog posts and articles, and YouTube is one among them. With a user base of more than 2.8 billion active users, it’s a marketer’s haven!
That’s why YouTube can be a great choice for you to start affiliate marketing without a website. No matter what your niche is, you can create video content that’s useful for your audience, and put it up on your YouTube channel to start building a base of loyal subscribers. Then as your subscribers grow, you can use your videos to promote your affiliate links by including them in the video descriptions. A similar methodology can be applied to Vimeo and other video-sharing platforms too.
#3. Through Online Forums And QA Websites
Forums and Question-Answer (QA) websites like Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow, and others can also be excellent sources of traffic for your affiliate links. When you answer the questions relevant to your affiliate niche on these sites, you can include affiliate links in your answers for driving traffic to them. You just need to make sure that you’re doing two things:
- You’re participating in a forum where people interested in your niche are hanging out;
- You’re adding real value to the forums with your answers. Mediocre answers that don’t solve any problem of forum members won’t get you anywhere.
As you answer more and more questions related to your niche, people will eventually start recognizing you on these forums and QA websites. Some of them will also follow you to look up to your other answers in the future, and then every time you include an affiliate link in your answers, it’ll be shown to a larger base of followers, thus increasing your potential earnings.
Pro Tip:
You can supercharge this method by including your social media profile links (i.e. Twitter profile, Facebook profile, Instagram profile, etc.) in your bio on these forums and websites. That can allow people who read your answers to connect with you on social media too, thus giving you another channel to communicate with them.
#4. Using eBooks, Cheat Sheets, etc.
The Internet is completely packed with fluff that leads people nowhere. As more and more blogs and websites emerge on the web, it’s getting difficult to find concise and useful advice on the web. In such a situation, people are now starting to look for concise and to-the-point pieces of content that can help them achieve specific goals rather than giving a bit of generalized advice.
And that’s where things like ebooks, cheat sheets and other such forms of content (i.e. crash courses, infographics, etc.) come into the picture. All these things help people by providing precise and to-the-point instructions about a specific problem, and that’s why people love them.
You too can create eBooks, cheat sheets, and other such content that can be shared as PDF files and include your affiliate links in them. Then once you’ve created them, you can start sharing them either through forums and social media platforms, or you can partner with some other bloggers in your niche and ask them to share your ebook, with affiliate revenue being split between you and them.
But keep in mind that utility is even more important for this type of content than it is for any other type of content. Your ebooks, cheat sheets and whatever else you create must be really useful for the reader and solve a precise problem, otherwise, no one would like to share your PDF with someone else and your affiliate business will be doomed even before starting.
#5. Using PPC Ads
When we have a blog or a website, we first drive traffic to them, and then some of the people visiting our site click on the affiliate links included in it. But if you wish, you can also send ad traffic directly to your affiliate links.
That’s right — you can send the traffic of your PPC ads directly to your affiliate links. You can use both Google as well as Facebook ads to promote your affiliate links through this method and start generating affiliate income without building a blog or a website. However, there are some limitations to this method:
- First of all, you can’t promote Amazon Affiliate links with this method because those are classified as Google Shopping links, and Google allows shopping links to be run only by the original owner of a domain name (which is not you, obviously).
- Second, there are some niches that are restricted by Google Ads. For instance, you can’t create ads for adult products, gambling products, or hacking software.
- Third, the traffic of Google ads and Facebook ads sent directly to your affiliate links doesn’t build your audience. So it works only for as long as you keep spending money.
As long as these limitations don’t bother you, there’s nothing wrong in promoting your affiliate links through PPC ads as well.
#6. Using Content Publishing Platforms (Medium, Steemit, Or LinkedIn)
Content publishing platforms like Medium, Steemit, or LinkedIn are not the natural choice that comes to mind when we think of content creation for affiliate marketing, but if you use them carefully you can build a strong following on them, which can be extended to other social media platforms too. Then once you’ve built a solid fan-following through your Medium, LinkedIn or Steemit posts, you can start promoting your affiliate links in front of them to start earning.
Or if you wish, you can also take a more direct approach and include affiliate links in your Medium or LinkedIn posts themselves. Just keep in mind that whenever and wherever you include affiliate links on these platforms, you have to provide disclosure about them to let your audience know that they’re affiliate links — that’s a mandatory requirement for all these platforms.
#7. Through Email Marketing
Finally, there’s the option of email marketing. While this method usually requires building an email subscriber list first using a blog or a website, you can use it even if you don’t have a blog or website by investing in an email database.
Once you’ve bought a database, you can conduct research on the preferences of people whose email addresses are included in the database by sending them short surveys. Then once you’ve gathered data about their preferences, you can create email marketing campaigns tailored to the preferences of people included in your database. As long as your emails are informative, educational, and provide some real value, most people won’t mind from where you got their email address.
Occasionally, as people start interacting with your emails, you can start including affiliate links in your emails to start earning. That’s it!
Related Read:
- Best High Paying Affiliate Programs Of
- Best Affiliate Marketing Conferences
- Best Affiliate Marketing Courses
Conclusion: Affiliate Marketing Without Website
Affiliate marketing is one of the most affordable and effective ways to start earning money online. As long as you choose your traffic source right, you can start making affiliate income even without a website. We hope the methods explained above will help you with that, and you’ll be able to start earning affiliate income easily.
Share your feedback about these methods in the comments. If you still have any doubts, feel free to shoot them as well. We shall try to answer your questions as soon as possible!
