Can You Do Affiliate Marketing without a Website?
You may think the answer is “no”….but in fact there are ways to start affiliate marketing without a website AND with no money. As a matter of fact, I did exactly this for the first 10 months before starting this blog.
I’ll share with you the strategy that worked best for me, as well as 4 other methods to make money online as a beginner affiliate marketer with no website.
Now while you CAN do this without a website, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should…. especially if you plan on turning this into a long-term online business….one that will allow you to leave your 9-5 job.
Here are two things you need to consider before starting:
- Number 1 – Many Affiliate Programs require you to have a website in order to start promoting their products. So you will find yourself with limited options on what you can promote.
- Number #2 – You are not building something you own. When you promote your affiliate links on platforms you do not own, you are at the mercy of those platforms.
So if one day Facebook or Pinterest decide for whatever reason to kick you off their platform…then there goes your entire affiliate business and income.
But when you own your traffic, such as having an email list of prospects, then you have an asset that is truly worth it’s weight in gold, and has the ability to make you more money for years to come.
Here’s the truth of the matter – Most people don’t make a purchase the first time they learn about a new product.
The chances of your prospect buying your affiliate product increase after multiple exposures. That’s where owning a blog where your audience can get to know you better, or doing email marketing becomes a crucial part to making $10k+ per month with affiliate marketing.
Prior to starting this blog, I used a one pager lander page to build my email list to over 4,600 subscribers.
Now, I also use blogging as a free means to grow my email list, which in turn has helped me to earn more affiliate commissions.
It’s something to consider for a long-term approach to having success with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing without a Website
Before you start using the methods I share with you below, you first need to register for affiliate programs you wish to promote. Once you have your affiliate links ready, you’ll be able to implement these strategies immediately.
1. Medium.com
Now let’s look at the first way in which you can make money online doing Affiliate Marketing with no blog – and that is, posting helpful articles on medium.com.
Medium.com is an open publishing platform that nearly anyone can publish on. So if you don’t want to go through the hassle of building and maintaining your own website, you can still create content and build up a following using medium.com.
You can even create your own branded space on the site from stories around a common theme or topic and drive highly targeted traffic to you. This way, you’ll be able to place the right affiliate offer in front of your niche audience.
So where do you make the money?
Well, these pooled publications from multiple writers help to push up the Google ranking of the Medium website as a whole….giving your publication a better chance of being found.
Let’s say for example someone is interested in buying a copy of the Traffic Secrets book by Russell Brunson. Oftentimes, people will Google a review of the book prior to purchasing. They Google ‘Traffic Secrets book’, and there in the search results shows up your medium article book review.
You write a helpful review on the book and have a call-to-action for people to purchase the book from you with your affiliate link. They click to purchase, and you make an affiliate sale from a simple Medium review article you posted.
But let’s say you’re like me and writing is not your thing. Going along the same lines of doing product reviews, you can do video reviews on YouTube.
Which brings us to method number two in doing Affiliate Marketing without a website…and that’s YouTube Affiliate Marketing.
2. YouTube Affiliate Marketing
YouTube is the second largest search engine platform behind Google.
And that makes it one of my top choices and favorite ways to make money with Affiliate Marketing. Not to mention, statistics everywhere show that video consumption is increasing…meaning more and more people are indicating that their favorite way to get information, is to watch it versus reading it.
And the sooner you start creating content on YouTube, the further ahead you’ll be on this trend.
Here for example is one of my videos discussing Jim Edwards Book, Copywriting Secrets, that I promote as an affiliate.
Similar to a book review, you can do a cliff notes version of the book that gets someone interested in buying it.
I actually learned this technique from Jim himself by reading his Copywriting Secrets book.
Getting people thirsty for more is one of the 3 Selling Formulas Jim shares with us. And it’s worked really well for me in getting more affiliate sales to his book.
And just like in a Medium article, you want to give a call to action. Throughout my video, I invite people to grab a free copy of the book by going into the description of the YouTube video, where I have my affiliate link. There, they can grab a free copy, as long as they cover the shipping and handling to them.
The best part about this way of doing affiliate marketing without a website, is that YouTube will eventually also pay you for the content you upload on their channel. Once you reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in a 12-month period, you can apply for YouTube Monetization.
Making affiliate sales and getting paid by YouTube to upload free videos is a perfect double payout opportunity!
3. Pinterest Affiliate Marketing
Method number three for making affiliate sales without a website is by pinning affiliate links on Pinterest. I talk about this extensively in my Pinterest Affiliate Marketing YouTube Playlist, but essentially Pinterest allows you and I to pin affiliate links directly onto their platform.
While that may make you want to run off and start pinning your affiliate links onto the platform right now, you may want to finish listening to the rest of this.
Pinterest does not want to be a site where people are spamming their affiliate links onto their users. And it makes sense. If Pinterest users don’t enjoy their experience on Pinterest, then they’ll leave in droves. And that’s not good.
See, Pinterest is a platform where roughly 80% of their user base is women. And on top of that, the average annual household income of 40% of these users is over $75,000 dollars. These are some sophisticated buyers and simply throwing affiliate links at them is not going to work.
Plus, direct affiliate links will only get a small handful of views, not nearly enough volume necessary to make this a feasible long-term strategy.
BUUUUUT WAIT…..I don’t want to discourage you from doing Pinterest Affiliate Marketing without a Blog, because there is a strategy that has worked well for me and netted me thousands of views, clicks, and sales to my affiliate offers – And it involves Method number four of making money with affiliate links with no website.
4. Landing Page
ClickFunnels is a software that allows affiliate marketers and small business owners to automate and increase their sales with a series of landing pages. You can think about it as a one-page website that has your product or service being offered, and a checkout button for easy payment.
Here for example is a one page checkout that I have re-pinned multiple times on Pinterest that offers business owners my 5 Day ClickFunnels sales Funnel Challenge for only $7. It has information about my offer and a way to purchase the product. When they purchase the product, it takes them to my next offer.
For my affiliate offers, I bridge them over with a one page ClickFunnels page. This allows me to potentially get thousands more views to my affiliate offer since I’m not pinning my affiliate link directly onto Pinterest. But similar to blogging, my affiliate link is embedded on this one page.
You can use these one page websites on any platform you want to promote on, including Pinterest. ClickFunnels offers a 14-Day free trial for any new user of the platform. So definitely check it out!
5. Facebook Affiliate Marketing
And now to method number five for doing affiliate marketing without a website – Use Social Media Networks such as Facebook.
Facebook has pockets of communities that congregate within FB Groups. These communities share common interests and behaviors… align these interests with specific affiliate products and you have a goldmine of sales on your hands!
Simply find an affiliate product to promote and look for an appropriate FB Group where people who are interested in the product would congregate. Become an active participant in these groups…share your knowledge freely and when help people whenever possible.
Oftentimes, many of these groups have certain days out of the week where they allow you to promote your product. Use these days to openly promote your perfectly aligned affiliate product to the audience at hand.
And if the FB Group doesn’t allow you to promote at all within the group, then don’t fret. You can always start your own FB Group and invite members from other groups to join. When you have your own FB Group, you can promote your affiliate products freely.
I detail my exact strategy to making affiliate sales on Facebook in this YouTube video.
Conclusion
There are many ways to do affiliate marketing without a website, but if you wish to build a long term affiliate marketing business, then you’ll want to build an asset.
Building an asset such as an email list or affiliate marketing blog will give you a greater chance of long-term success with affiliate marketing.
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