Do You Need a Website?

Do You Need A Website To Make Money As An Affiliate Marketer?

You have reached a decision and decided you want to make money through the Internet. But you don't have any start up money and not a lot of experience in setting up an online business. Ther first thing that comes to mind for many marketers is that they need to have a website and have no idea about setting one up. Yes having your own website does have benefits, and we will be discussing how you can get yours set up in other articles. But there are a few options available to get you started that don't require a website. Today we will address some simple methods to get you started on your affiliate marketing career.

Affiliate marketing provides first time (newbies) online marketers like you the chance to market something online even without needing to have a product of your own to sell.  All you need to do is sign up with an affiliate marketing program (ie: Clickbank or Paydotcom) and start picking the products you want to promote. To find other affiliate companies just do a search in google. As an affiliate, you are paid a commission by the merchant for your services. Specifically, you are paid whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant's site and the visitor actually buys something. When you sign up with a company make sure you read their terms & conditions and check their payment methods, the most common being through PayPal or by cheque.

You have reached a decision and decided you want to make money through the Internet. But you don't have any start up money and not a lot of experience in setting up an online business. Now there are a few options available to you, but in this article I am going to address the most simple startup to get you moving in the right direction and that is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing provides first time (newbies) online marketers like you the chance to market something online even without needing to have a product of your own to sell.  All you need to do is sign up with an affiliate marketing program (ie: Clickbank or Patdotcom) and start picking the products you want to promote. To find other affiliate companies just do a search in google. As an affiliate, you are paid a commission by the merchant for your services. Specifically, you are paid whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant's site and the visitor actually buys something. When you sign up with a company make sure you read their terms & conditions and check their payment methods, the most common being through PayPal or by cheque.

The actual signup with an affiliate marketing program is fairly simple, and in most cases free. However people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing worrying that they need a website to start marketing products with. Which now leads us to the question of whether a website is required or necessary in affiliate marketing or not.

If you do a bit of research you will see numerous articles from people telling you how successful they are in affiliate marketing even without a website. The reality is yes, you can promote and market affiliate products without a website; and there are numerous ways this can be done. You will see a number of strategies promoted as being successful without the need for a website or blog. The key ones that come to mind are email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, and message boards.

Email Marketing

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually one of the most popular affiliate marketing strategies that doesn't require an affiliate to maintain a website. Basically what you do is maintain a list of the email addresses of your prospective customers and send them articles that are relevant to the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. These articles don't neccessarily have to always be promotional, for many individuals find such types of email annoying. Rather, it would be better if you provide them with something informative and just add small text ads that link to your merchant's site. You need to be very careful that you have your customers consent to receiving emails as spam can get you banned very quickly if your customer complains to the merchant.

Offline Promotion

There are many ways you you can promote an affiliate product offline. The most common mediums used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals frequently get a wider audience.

Writing Free e-books

If you have some writing skills, then writing an e-book may be another way for you to promote your affiliate products in the absence of an actual website. Just like with emails and newsletters, your readers will better appreciate your e-book if it is not all about promotions, but but contains information that is informative or useful to them. Be sure, however, to make the contents of your e-book related to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. And the same as email marketing, you can just place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of your e-book that link to the merchant's site.

Writing Free Ezines

Ezines are publications or articles that have an objective to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don't have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can use ezines to promote your affiliate products or to insert links to your merchant's site. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But since you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various websites that host ezines, such as ezinearticles.com and others.

Online discussions (Forums, Chats, Message Boards, etc.)

With or without a website, you just can't ignore online discussions because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. If you join chatrooms, forums, message boards and discussion boards with topics related to your products, you will easily find people who may be interested inthe products you are promoting.

With all these strategies and little or no startup costs, you can see that it is not essential to have a website to start marketing affiliate products. Now having said all that, you need to consider just how successful you intend to be? Because whilst we have shown there are ways to market without a website, actually having one gives you a lot more power and opportunity to promote your products. 

Having a website is not really a prerequisite to join affiliate programs, unless the program owner requires you to have one. But my own personal recommendation is that you plan on building a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates many advantages in affiliate marketing. For one, it provides you a place where you can creatively promote not only one of your affiliate products, but all of your affiliate products. With a website, you can also advertise your affiliate products to a wider market as well as making your site interesting for people to come back and visit.

In conclusion a website is not an essential requirement in affiliate marketing but it is an important access contributing toward your success when used wisely. Don't panic if you have no idea where to start in regard to your website you will find we have provided articles on starting from scratch for even the most inexperienced marketer.