Affiliate Marketing - Website Or No Website

Written by Allen Jarocha Monday, 18 April 2011 09:45

Affiliate marketing programs are quick and easy to join. Most affiliate programs allow you to sign up for free. Many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One reason people remain hesitant is they lack a website to start marketing their affiliate products. So the question is - Does you need a website in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing programs are quick and easy to join. Most affiliate programs allow you to sign up for free. Many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One reason people remain hesitant is they lack a website to start marketing their affiliate products. So the question is - Does you need a website in affiliate marketing.

Some people say that one can do affiliate marketing even without a website to start with. Actually, one can really start promoting and marketing affiliate products without a website. In fact, many affiliate marketing strategies that lead to success can exist without a website. Among these strategies is email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, message boards and others.

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually the most popular affiliate marketing strategy that doesn't require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this affiliate marketing strategy, what you basically do is maintain a list of the email ads of your prospective customers and provide them with articles that are relevant with the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. Articles that you provide your contacts with need not 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.

There are many ways on how you can promote your affiliate products offline. Among the common medium used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads would generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audience.

If you like to write you could write an e-book as a way to promote your affiliate products. No website is required. Like with emails marketing readers will generally appreciate and e-book more if it is not too promotional and is more informative. Make sure the content of your e-books are relative to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. Like with email marketing you can place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of the e-book that links to the merchant's site.

Ezines are publications or articles that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don't have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can well 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 hosts ezines.

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

With all these strategies it may appear that one really doesn't need a website. While running an affiliate program without a website may be easy it is often difficult to become successful without one. While one can actually have enormous success in affiliate marketing without a website it is rare for a "newbie" to reach the same levels of success as experienced marketers without one.

Having a website is not really a pre-requisite in entering into an affiliate program, unless otherwise the program owner would require you to have one. But while this is so, I would still recommend that you have for yourself a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates a lot of 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. Again, having a website is not a requirement in affiliate marketing. But with the advantages that a website can provide, I'd rather have one for myself and make affiliate marketing a lot easier for me.