Affiliate Marketing without a website?

[phamilton]

Can anyone realistically succeed in affiliate marketing without a website? I have done several websites in the past and have never been happy with my site and it's content. I'm not creative enough to come up with a focus for my site that would draw people.

Can you do just as well by joining a lot of forums?

[Yuliya Mironova]

Originally Posted by phamilton

Can you do just as well by joining a lot of forums?

My friends who do affiliate marketing for a living tell me that the answer's a big, firm "no".

The problem is that however many forums you join with your affiliate-links in your signature-file, where that's allowed, (or, for article marketers, however many articles you write with your affiliate-links in the author's resource-box), all that people who click on it are seeing is the vendor's sales-page, whereas your competitors are mostly sending their traffic first to a "pre-selling page" - whether it's a "web site", "blog", "review" or whatever, and the people who subsequently click from that to the vendor's sales-page are the real buyers rather than just the browsers. So however much traffic you get, you're severely limited in the proportion of it that you can convert, because you're not doing anything to "qualify the traffic".

The other huge disadvantage of not having your own site/blog/review is that without your own opt-in (which would be there) and without building your own list, you're possibly making sales only to people who buy immediately. Most people don't. I hear that the average number of follow-ups before a sale is 7(!), and you really need to be building your own list, as an affiliate, and using an autoresponder to follow up your potential customers, in order to make any real money.

So, without your own site (of whatever kind) you're only getting a very small percentage of what you could be getting.

[angienewton]

Nope! You really do need a blog and/or website to make affiliate marketing work. Forums are not that reliable. You need to do it all, SEO/keyword research, massive content both on and off site and more. As for not being creative enough, you can always hire a ghostwriter or buy PLR and then change it up. PLR gives you a good base to start.

[Yelena]

No you can't do that. If you try, you will be just spinning the wheels.
To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to own traffic, and for that you need your own website, which in turn will help you to build a big list of active subscribers. Once you build relationships with your list, selling will become a breeze, because it will look more like a personal recommendation from a friend.

[#1Nonna]

Originally Posted by angienewton

Nope! You really do need a blog and/or website to make affiliate marketing work. Forums are not that reliable. You need to do it all, SEO/keyword research, massive content both on and off site and more. As for not being creative enough, you can always hire a ghostwriter or buy PLR and then change it up. PLR gives you a good base to start.

Sorry but what's PLR?

[TiffanyB]

I have never tried it, but I know people who have been successful with search engine marketing (SEM). You don't need your own website as you use things like Adwords to buy keywords for your campaigns and then instead of pointing the links to your own website, you simply place your affiliate link there and it goes straight to the vendor's landing page. If you are really against having your own site, this may be something that you can look into and find more about. It's not easy though, as you have to spend money to make money and it is much riskier than simply driving traffic to your own site.

[Yelena]

Nonna,

PLR stands for private label rights.
When you buy a PLR product (usually it's an ebook), you are allowed to change it any way you want, re-package it, or just put your name on it - in other words, treat it as your own creation, and then sell it.

Yelena

[melmeiko]

You can submit articles to different article sites with links containing your affiliate link, shortened. Or you can always advertise your link within places like Twitter or Facebook. Or Myspace. Any social networking site.

But that is only my opinion.

[Williamneo]

No, that's not possible. A website is must for affiliate marketing. All the company in the world have their site for this purpose. The company gives all information about theirself in this web site.

[tigerconceptsmarketing]

Have you heard of Bum marketing? If you can write good content, just put together a squidoo lens and use that as your page until you earn enough from affiliate marketing to get your own domain.

Squidoo has plugins that you can use. You can go with the regular html and plug into the text portion or use one of the many options for Amazon to promote your links.

So yes, you will need a website. However there are ways to get started without investing in a domain in the beginning. You might even look into a blogger account and use that as well. This way if have a good niche and can convert, you should be making money in no time and able to upgrade to your own domain using word press.

Check it out and see what you can do.