Affiliate Marketing Without a Website
Let’s face it, website have solidified themselves as an essential part of modern day business strategies.
But when it comes to affiliate marketing, is it really necessary?
With the various ways we can now reach out and connect with our prospective clients and fans the answer is a resounding ‘NOPE’!
There are many methods at our disposal to promote our affiliate marketing businesses.
The list is long, but the most important methods are email marketing, content creation, joining discussion board, etc.
Let’s look over some of the methods to promote your affiliate products without having your own website.
Email Marketing
Since the rise of social media, and the ease of access to websites email marketing seems to have taken a backseat in peoples minds.
Emails are a powerful tool you can use to promote your affiliate links without the need of a personal website.
People can click on the affiliate links present in your emails and be immediately directed to the merchant website to purchase the products.
The secret to make this strategy work?
Try to keep your emails interesting and brief.
Your email should introduce the product while clearly identifying why it would be a good fit for the recipient.
For this strategy to have maximum impact, it’s important to continuously be expanding your email lists.
Use as many different methods as you can to capture the email addresses of new prospects.
Some great ways to do this include online forums, groups, social media posts and contests etc.
Ideally an email list should contain a hundred or more contacts, at least.
But don’t spam. Don’t send emails to the people who don’t know about you or who haven’t opted in to receive your emails.
Otherwise they may block your emails and report you as spam and overtime loose the list you spent your time growing.
Remember to keep your emails short and interesting to get the reader’s attention before reeling them in with a compelling call to action.
Offline Promotion
Offline promotion methods such as classified ads, and flyers can also be a great solution to reach a large market.
The best choice being classified ads because of their larger exposure.
It is important to note that this strategy offers the highest barrier to entry because it requires its recipients to transition from offline to an online medium.
Writing free eBooks
Similar to email marketing, in this technique you will be creating highly-targeted content in the form of an e-book.
These e-books should be easy to read and offer helpful tips and tricks to its readers.
The topic of the book should be related to your affiliate products so that you can easily recommend them in the body of the e-books.
Alternatively you can add a brief note about your affiliate products and affiliate links throughout the e-book.
If the readers like your eBook, they may visit the merchant website and make a purchase.
This technique builds on the one mentioned above. Using social media platforms like Facebook you can post about your products in groups, on pages, in paid promotions.
Running Paid promotions on Facebook, you can take advantage of the in-platform lead-forms to collect key information in exchange for something of value like an e-book.
YouTube
YouTube is a very powerful tool for affiliate marketing.
Product reviews and demonstrations give viewers the opportunity to see your affiliate product in action thus making it easier for them to make a decision.
Adding links underneath your videos will allow your viewers to visit your affiliate website directly, while they are still feeling the excitement.
Writing in Forums
Search for forums, at least a handful, that are related to your product and have high reader/responder activity.
Register on these forums and start a discussion or join a discussion in the forum, where maximum people are involved.
Just post your questions there or answer some questions of other members.
But don’t add any promotion text in the body of your posts, at risk of coming off as a scammer.
You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post. Here you can write you name and your affiliate links.
When you become an active member of this forum then you may get some traffic from these forums to your merchant website through your affiliate links.
This will ultimately result in more sales of the products you are promoting.
Writing Articles
Writing articles and publishing them in article directories is another surefire way to garner you some traffic.
You can embed your affiliate links in your article text.
If your article is well formatted, informative and targeted to the right market, you can expect some decent return on time investment.
And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.
BONUS: Tracking is EVERYTHING
Using URL shorteners like bitly will allow you to
- Track the amount of clicks to your link
- Find out what your most popular days are
- Know which one of your strategies is producing the most return.
Like everything else in life, there is no easy way to turn interested visitors into buyers. Choose your strategy find the ones that work best for you and then double down!
Conclusion
The use of a website to promote your affiliate products is a good idea but it is not necessary. You can use the alternate methods to promote your affiliate products and links. The most popular among these methods are email marketing, writing to forums, article writing and offline promotion like classified ads. The main idea is that instead of promoting your website you will directly promote your affiliate links and people will go directly to the merchant website by clicking your affiliate links to purchase the products. This way you do not have to pay extra for your website creation and maintenance.