Affiliate Marketing without a Website
of your own
This article contains all the tips and tricks on how to successfully embark on
this journey and start building a passive income source like a pro without a
website.
How to
Make Money Online Without a Website in Affiliate Marketing Without
Outlining
and building a website can be both time-consuming and expensive, but
fortunately, you don’t need a website to make money online with affiliate
marketing! Yes, a website can help your affiliate marketing business and your
brand, but ultimately, it doesn’t mean you can’t have success without one.
There are countless alternatives besides creating an affiliate
website, regardless if you’re just looking to make a quick buck, or plan to do
this long-term and have affiliate marketing replace your full-time income.
As an affiliate, especially early on, one of your main goals should be figuring
out clever ways to send quality traffic to the offer(s) you’re promoting.
Thankfully, this can be done through various ways, including email marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising, and more. But
before we jump into the ultimate guide on how to make money online without a
website as an affiliate, let’s break down the basics of affiliate marketing.
We also did an article on how to learn affiliate marketing for free, so you can also
check that one out when you have a moment.
What is
Affiliate Marketing? The Basics to Get You Started
If you’re
wondering how you can become a successful affiliate marketer, you first need to
understand how things work. We won’t be going into fully explaining all the
details, however, we’ll outline a couple of basic tips to put you on the right
track.
Essentially, affiliate marketing encompasses any form of marketing where an
affiliate (marketer) earns commissions and generates passive income by
promoting someone else’s existing product through online channels, like
YouTube, forums, email, Facebook, ads, and more, and then referring them sales.
What is an Affiliate Offer?
In order to
make serious money online, you first need something to market, ie an affiliate
product or offer. An affiliate product or offer can be a physical product, like
a supplement, or a digital offer like an online webinar or eBook. Before
anything else, make sure you find & select the right affiliate niche to
pick a product or offer from to promote. Usually, try picking something you are
already familiar with, so you won’t have to spend too much time doing research
on a topic. Choosing the best affiliate marketing product to promote in the
beginning can mean a lot for your affiliate marketing business - and ultimately
whether you’ll have success or not.
Picking a
Traffic Source
Picking
the best
traffic sources for affiliate marketing is equally as important as
picking the right niche and offer. For example, if you choose to promote
a fitness and health vertical, you need to position your
ads to target people who are interested in this niche. You can either place ads
on specific websites, create content on social media, or get your hands on a
mailing list. Ultimately, a great chunk of your success will boil down to how
well you can connect your offer with the right audience, and what marketing
channel you use.
So, now that we went over some of the basics, let’s explore one more element
you could play around with before we jump into the top 6 ways to do affiliate
marketing without a website.
How to
Make Money Online in Affiliate Marketing with a Landing Page
The next
best thing to a website is a landing page. If you go on the Digistore24
Marketplace, you’ll realize all available offers all have their own affiliate
sales pages, as well as likely other landing pages with different hooks or
for different traffic sources. If by chance you stumble upon an
offer you’d like to promote that only has a sales page that doesn’t fit with
your traffic source’s compliance or your audience, you can create a landing
page by yourself to act as a squeeze page. But let’s slow down a bit…
What is
an Affiliate Marketing Landing Page?
A landing
page is like a one-page website. For affiliate marketing, it basically serves
as an intermediary between your ad or promo and the sales page. A strong lander
with informative content increases credibility and can drastically improve the
customer experience and your conversions. Plus, if you’re running ads on your social media accounts, having a landing
page is pretty much a must, especially on Facebook, due to their strict
compliance requirements. According to Facebook, some sales pages are not
compliant for their platform.
Creating a landing page isn’t that difficult. You don’t need to be tech-savvy
or spend hours on researching how to do it. If you want to have a stable
passive income source and earn money online with your own landing page, make
sure to check out Digibiz24.
It’s a highly intuitive tool that lets you easily create and build landing
pages to attract customers.
Top 5
Ways to Make Money Online Without a Website in Affiliate Marketing
Now that we
have established the basics of affiliate marketing and explored what a landing
page is, it’s time to dive into several proven affiliate marketing strategies
that will land you some extra money and don’t require you to have a domain. The
following techniques can definitely put some money in your pocket, but you
still need to put in the necessary time and effort to learn how each of these
work in order to actually be successful sustainably.
Let’s start the top 5 list with social media.
1.
Leverage Every Social Media Platform
Look, most
of us already spend too much time on social media, but few of us know how to use social media for affiliate marketing - so
why not try to harness its power and learn how to make some money while we’re
at it? Making money as an affiliate marketer on social media is by no means
easy. There’s a lot of hard work involved and a tremendous amount of research.
However, most people are already familiar with all the popular social media
platforms, so embarking on this affiliate marketing journey might not feel like
you’re starting from scratch if you start with Facebook or Instagram.
Let’s explore some of the most popular social platforms that can be a great fit
to promote affiliate offers.
How to
Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Facebook
We’ll just
assume you already have a Facebook page or account, but if you don’t, it’s
pretty easy to create one. Facebook might not be an extremely popular social
media platform these days, but there’s a lot of potential there for affiliate
marketing. Boasting over 2.9 billion users, you can pretty much tap into any
audience in the world when you learn the ins and outs of the platform.
But if you’re just starting out, we recommend starting small and building your
way up. Initially, you don’t even need to pour any of your money into ads on
the platform; you can simply try growing organically. Facebook is tough on
compliance nowadays, so make sure to review their terms and conditions to avoid
your statuses or posts getting flagged.
If you already have a personal account, it’s highly unlikely your current
“Friends” list will provide the engagement you’re looking for. What we
recommend doing is picking a niche, like personal development, for example, and start adding people
to your “Friends” that you think will be interested in what you are promoting.
You can also join specific Facebook groups to promote offers, although try to
provide value to avoid the risk of getting kicked out for just spamming
affiliate links. The best strategy here is to join a group where people share a
common problem (ex, losing weight), then providing them with weight loss tips,
ultimately linking to a weight loss affiliate product. The best thing about
Facebook, as you can probably tell, is that you can utilize many free affiliate
marketing techniques.
If you want to jump into paid advertisement, you can take your affiliate promos
to the next level with Facebook Ads, but make sure you get a hang of
their Business
Suite Manager first. Plus, don’t forget to check out Digistore24’s
Facebook CAPI tool for further assistance.
Here are some of the best types of affiliate marketing offers that you
could promote on Facebook.
How to
Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Instagram
Instagram is
a very visual platform, so one of your main focuses here should be creating
content that is pleasing to the eye and stands out. If you want to be
successful on this platform, your posts should be high-quality, your stories
engaging and fun, and the overall tone of your content should be informative.
When people see that you are trying to help them with your content, they will
be more inclined to buy from you.
When starting out with affiliate marketing on Instagram, try not to focus on
sales, but rather on being of value to your audience. If you do a good job, sales
will most definitely follow. Remember to make use of Instagram’s Story Link
feature to guide your traffic to your lander, and don’t forget to set up
a Linktree account
to post both educational & affiliate offer links in your bio. In addition,
remember to always focus on building connections and partnerships. Lastly, make
sure you post frequently & consistently!
How to
Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest
Pinterest
might seem a bit underrated when it comes to affiliate marketing, but it’s
definitely not, and it’s worth checking out to make some extra money. The
platform has tremendous potential for sending traffic to the offer you’re
promoting, and conversions are usually pretty high through this marketing
medium.
All you need to do is create different category Boards and populate them with
Pins. Just make sure the photos you upload are yours, or they don’t infringe
any copyright if you get them from somewhere else.
Pinterest essentially works as a search engine, so when people search for a
specific topic, one of your Pins might pop up. Just make sure you hyperlink
your Pins, so when the user clicks on them, they are taken to the affiliate
offer.
2.
Harness the Power of Ads
Growing
organically on social media takes more time and energy, but working with ads
allows you to see results much quicker. So, let’s check out how you can
increase your earnings by leveraging ads.
Solo Ads
Making money
online with solo ads as is extremely profitable. It is a go-to choice for many
affiliates without a website. In case you don’t know how these work, we’ll
explain briefly to put you on the right track.
Essentially, solo ads are featured in emails or newsletters in which your ad is
the only promotional piece. Once users click it, they are taken to the offer's
sales page.
So how do you get featured in these emails? Well, let’s say you’re promoting
offers on love & relationships, try to make connections with professionals
within this sphere, and negotiate a dedicated spot in their email list. Many
email list managers in direct response marketing offer CPM drops, aka dedicated
paid email drops to their list.
Once your ad is up and running, all you have to do is keep an eye on the traffic
coming from your solo ad, and look for ways to optimize it.
PPC
Marketing
Increasing
your earnings as an affiliate marketer using PPC is quite lucrative. Even if
pay-per-click advertising promises faster results, you have to be good at
making & optimizing ads. We already discussed Facebook Ads briefly, but
haven’t touched on Google
Ads yet. Google Ads aren't very different from Facebook, but it does
have key differentiators.
You can earn significant money with paid ads as an affiliate and have your
passive income soar, regardless of the platforms you’re running the ads on.
However, your ad strategy has to be on point. Knowing some of the basics will
help you get started, but for more in-depth knowledge, you have to do some
extra research.
With PPC, you only pay when a user clicks your ad. To get started, all you have
to do is create the ad copy, set a budget, and make sure you’re targeting the
right audience. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?
It’s actually pretty straightforward, but when you factor in your competitors,
the niche you are targeting, and the price of certain keywords, just to name a
few, it can get a bit challenging to generate positive ROI.
Native
Ads
If you’re
not familiar with native ads, one of the main things you need to know is that
this type of advertising matches the content of the platform upon which it
appears on - so it doesn’t come off as an ad to end users. They can be found on
search engines, different websites, social media, and more.
When it comes to native advertising for affiliate marketing, don’t forget to
make visuals your greatest asset, nail the content, and target the right
audience with the right offers. Even though native ads sometimes lead to a blog
post or even your own website, they can still be used to link to a pre-lander,
or even directly to a sales page if it’s compliant to the platform or medium
being used.
3. Visit Forums
This is one
of the more direct approaches. Finding online communities nowadays is pretty
easy. Most of the time all you have to do is jump on Reddit and search for a
specific subreddit where you can talk about your interests, or ask questions.
And let’s not forget the most important aspect: you can also earn some extra
money on forums.
Affiliate marketers can easily join many online forums and start providing
value to the community. Answer questions, provide insight and slowly start
promoting your affiliate link when you gain a little bit of credibility.
Pro tip: Regardless of the forum you join, always read the community guidelines
to determine whether or not promotional activity is allowed.
4. Get
Creative on YouTube
There are
two ways you can go about increasing revenue as an affiliate on YouTube: paid
advertising on YouTube and content creation.
Organic advertising on YouTube basically means you become a content creator.
First decide what type of YouTube channel you’re going to be, and what offers
you plan to advertise - and then build on that. For instance, you can create
unboxing and review videos of different products. You can also choose to keep
it digital and establish a channel for business and investment topics, for
example. The possibilities are truly endless.
Pro tip: Create relevant content, and always mention the products you’re
trying to sell in your videos, and link them in the video description. Earning money on YouTube with affiliate marketing is
not that hard... However, you need to put in the necessary work to become
successful.
As far as paid advertising on YouTube goes, you can create any type of ad you’d
like, and see what works best with your niche. You can play around with
in-video ads, bumper ads, or overlay ads, just to name a few, depending on your
budget and skills.
5. Build
a Community Through Email Marketing
We mentioned
email marketing briefly when we spoke about solo ads (this is another great way
to do affiliate marketing without a website). Besides solo ads, one of the main
ways you can use email marketing is by building your own email lists and sending personalized
offers, newsletters, or content pieces to your traffic. The best thing
about email marketing in affiliate marketing is you own that
data, and so, you can promote as many affiliate products to your list as you
want. And on top of that, you can link directly to any sales page you’d like.
You can easily earn additional income as an affiliate without your own site by
leveraging email. All you need is a list of subscribers - which you can build
out & grow by yourself.
One of the ways you can do this is by leveraging the emails of your existing
customers. You can also create surveys or quiz funnels and ask for the email
address at the end. You can share these survey sites on forums or social media.
Also, consider offering free courses or a free ebook via ads where the customer
has to provide an email in order to receive the goods.
Once you have a decent amount of email addresses, you can start sending out
content and affiliate marketing promotions to your subscribers.
Pro tip: Make sure your emails are written well, look professional and
don’t contain spammy words so you don’t end up in the Promotions tab or Spam
folder.
How to
Make Your First Sale
If you need
a little bit of extra help to make your first sale, make sure to tune into this
Affiliate Marketing Academy episode, and let Olivia, Digistore24 Social Media
Manager, guide you through the entire process.
Final
Thoughts
Making money
online as an affiliate without a website isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s
actually very doable. By leveraging a multitude of outlets, you can
successfully promote products for a long period of time before even considering
building your own website or blog. Sometimes, a slick affiliate landing page is
enough, and most of the time, you won’t even need that.
If you’re looking to earn money online fast, you can start with paid
advertising campaigns, or if you want to make a mark in this industry and don’t
mind taking it slow, you can focus on building a community on social media
and/or with email. However, a good approach is sometimes combining a little bit
of everything, but taking it one step at a time.
You can have some ads running while also building your social media following; once
you gather details about your traffic, you can create your own email list, and
if you have the time, you can even hop on forums to provide value, as well as
create YouTube videos.