Affiliate Marketing Without a Website – Comprehensive Guide on How to Work as an Affiliate and Make Money

Many people today dream of working as affiliate marketers to drive traffic to promoted products and get a share of the brand’s profits. However, there is a perception that in order to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to have your own website with high traffic. However, is having your own website a prerequisite for working as an affiliate?

 

Developing and promoting your own website capable of bringing in large volumes of quality traffic is probably the most difficult part of starting out as an affiliate marketer. Moreover, it requires you to make a serious time and financial investment that not every affiliate marketer can afford. However, what if we told you that you can do affiliate marketing without a website?

 

If you know how to negotiate and encourage people to click on your links, you don’t need a website at all to earn profits from directing traffic. So, if not having your own website was the only reason why you’re still not a marketing guru, then we have good news for you. Keep reading to learn how affiliate marketing works, how to become an affiliate and what you’ll need to succeed in this field.

 

How Affiliate Marketing Works – Basic Things You Should Know About

To succeed in any business, you need some knowledge and some necessary tools. Luckily, having your own website is not a mandatory thing on the list of tools you need to get a successful start in affiliate marketing. Below, you’ll find all the things that will enhance your understanding of how affiliate marketing works and help you better navigate this rather complicated landscape.

 

Offers: Things You Promote to Generate Profits

So, before we talk about the offers, let’s find out what is affiliate marketing in general. In simple words, it’s all about your marketing efforts to promote products or services on the internet. Let’s say there’s an online service that wants to expand its base of buyer-capable users. You, as an affiliate, can make a deal with the owner of this online service according to which you will receive part of the money from the profits generated by the new users brought by you.

 

So, affiliate marketing is about the interactions of three parties: the advertiser (a company that wants to increase sales by attracting new users), the affiliate (you, directing traffic to the promoted online platform) and the target audience (people interested in the product you are promoting). However, most companies and brands looking to utilize affiliate marketing as a priority or additional sales channel often don’t work with affiliate marketers directly. Instead, they partner with affiliate programs or affiliate networks.

 

Acting as an intermediary between affiliates and advertisers, affiliate programs aggregate the efforts of affiliate marketers to ensure maximum traffic results. So, to get started as an affiliate, you need to choose an affiliate program as well as an offer, i.e., the product or service you will be promoting.

 

Keep in mind that an affiliate program is not the same as an affiliate network. Typically, an affiliate program is committed to one specific brand, while affiliate networks may partner with multiple advertisers. For you as an affiliate, the difference between an affiliate program and an affiliate network will be in the requirements that are placed on you. Working with an affiliate network can be more straightforward, and, therefore, it is the best option for beginners. However, experienced affiliates work with affiliate programs because they have more attractive offers in terms of earning potential.

 

Advertising Space for Product Promotion

So, let’s say you have chosen a good affiliate program or network, and you have a good offer to promote. As you remember, the key goal of this article is to answer the question: can you do affiliate marketing without a website? As we said above, an affiliate without a website is a viable venture. However, you still need a platform where you can reach out to people and tell them about the product you are promoting to entice them to click on your affiliate link.

 

So, in this day and age where social platforms like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube have become an integral part of most people’s daily lives, you can easily make money as an affiliate without a website. However, to increase the probability that your offer will interest users, you need to find a traffic source with a suitable audience. Keep in mind that advertising products directly is not the best strategy to say the least, especially when you are using social platforms as a source of traffic. And that’s exactly when a landing page comes into the picture.

 

Using a Website as a Landing Page

A modern website is a feature-packed online service with many sections and tools, and this may be too much for you as an affiliate marketer. Instead, you can run a simple one-page website designed as a landing page. As proven in practice, landing pages increase conversions. Working as a middle ground between the traffic source and the product you’re promoting, a landing page is a must-have item in an affiliate marketer’s arsenal.

 

What a Landing Page Is

So, a landing page is a one-page website designed to engage visitors and incentivize them to take targeted action. So, since a landing page is a website, technically, you can’t promote your affiliate link without a website. However, there are a lot of landing page builders with which you can quickly customize a one-page website tailored to your offer, making it attractive to visitors. Below, we will talk about the key features of landing pages that make them such an effective tool for affiliate marketers.

 

More Informative Offers with Landings

One of the reasons why many people refuse to make a purchase online is because they cannot find detailed information about the product they are interested in. To convince people to buy what you are promoting, you need to give them a clear idea of the product.

 

You can use a landing page to explain the features and benefits of the product. By writing quality text content with illustrations and beautifully designing your landing page, you will create an effective marketing funnel that will work for you. Thus, a good landing page can significantly increase the conversion rate, thereby generating profits for you.

Landing Makes You More Credible

To join a major affiliate program, you need to have a good track record. That is, affiliate programs can evaluate you based on your history of online presence. Having one or more landing pages belonging to you can be an important factor, so you should take it seriously. So, while checking you for expertise and effectiveness, affiliate program recruiters will surely inspect your landing pages by evaluating the quality of content, design, traffic, conversion rate and other things.

 

Landing and Pre-Landing Are Not the Same Thing

Working as an affiliate marketer, you will often deal with people who realize their problem but do not yet know what product they need to solve it. To warm up such an audience and bring them to the next step on their path to purchase (the landing page), marketers use additional one-page sites (pre-landings) designed to give visitors a common understanding of the product you are promoting.

 

When building a path to purchase, you should place the pre-landing just before your offer. By telling people about you, the offer or a specific product, the pre-landing helps you capture your audience’s attention and increase conversion rates. When it comes to a landing page, it can be a great option for lead generation.

 

Ultimately, it comes out that you can’t do affiliate marketing without a web site. However, creating and customizing landing pages and pre-landings is not too challenging. Moreover, you don’t have to invest huge amounts of money in developing one-page websites. Nevertheless, you will have to put some effort to make everything work smoothly as an orchestra, and ad trackers will help you with that.

 

Things to Know About Ad Trackers

To create effective marketing campaigns, you as an affiliate must utilize ad trackers. Like digital detectives, ad trackers follow consumers throughout their buying journey, collecting a lot of important data. Here’s what you can learn using ad trackers:

• Where users are coming from? As an affiliate, you’re likely using multiple traffic sources, such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube. By utilizing a tracker, you’ll always know where the next new visitor came from so you can make inferences for each traffic source.
• What actions do visitors perform? To better understand your target audience, you need to know what they are doing on your pre-landing, landing page, and the page with the product you are promoting. By using an ad tracker, you’ll learn about how long users look at product information before adding it to a cart, how many shopping carts are abandoned, and other important things.
• Have visitors converted? With a tracker, you can find out at what stage of the shopping journey users may drop off.

 

Ad trackers are of high value to affiliate marketers. First, they help you determine which marketing channels are driving the most qualified traffic and conversions, helping you focus your efforts where they matter most. Secondly, with a tracker, you can find out which content, creative or offer resonates best with your audience. Finally, you can use tracker data to show potential advertisers how effective your campaigns are.

 

From first- and third-party cookies to pixels, there are several options of ad trackers available for affiliate marketers. By employing them, you will have a more accurate view of visitor behaviour, be able to track specific actions and get a more precise picture of the online consumer journey.

 

Affiliate Marketing without a Blog or Website

So, if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing as quickly as possible, having a website with a lot of traffic as well as landing pages and pre-landings is a real boon for you. However, if you don’t have a website, you can still succeed by partnering with a good affiliate program. Thus, if you have been on the lookout for affiliate marketing no website option, then you have finally come to the right place.

 

However, before we go any further, it won’t be out of place to tell you about a few things that can make you start an affiliate marketing website. So, here are a few things that make affiliate marketing without a website challenging:

• You will find it difficult – or even impossible – to get people to find you through search engines such as Google.
• You’ll lose the benefits of branding because you won’t be able to create an asset that makes you unique and visible.
• You will always face additional risks related to the ever-changing algorithms and rules of social platforms.
• Many well-established affiliate programs accept affiliates who have their own websites with large volumes of quality traffic.

 

However, if the above does not stop you from the idea of doing affiliate marketing without a website, then below we have listed a few ways how you can still have a chance to succeed in this very promising niche.

 

Find Traffic in Various Places on the Internet

So, the question is how can you promote affiliate links without a website? Fortunately, there are many online platforms, social media, forums and video hosting sites where you can connect with your audience. Choose any online service where there may be people interested in the product you are promoting and place your affiliate links. The main advantage of such online platforms is that they already have huge volumes of traffic. As for the website, you need to invest a lot of time, effort and money to make it visible on the internet and attract users.

 

Use the Power of Social Media Platforms to Promote Products

After looking at some of the best affiliate programs for beginners without a website, you will see that you don’t need to have your own online resource to make money from referral traffic. In the 21st century, almost everyone has a presence on one or even several social media sites. While more mature people prefer Facebook, the youth use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and other online platforms where you can connect with your target audience.

 

Most importantly, you need to learn how to create content that catches people’s attention and encourages them to click on your links. To succeed with social media platforms, you need to make posts that contain useful information and attractive visual elements. In addition, your posts should be relevant to your niche and the product you are promoting. Try to earn the trust of your audience on social media by posting only interesting and genuinely useful content.

 

While social platforms can be a good source of organic traffic, you can also buy traffic by running ads on Facebook, Instagram and other popular social platforms. However, keep in mind that you may encounter a lot of pitfalls and challenges when working with social platforms, including regulatory issues.

 

Cooperate with Affiliate Programs Accepting Affiliates without a Website

There are many big brands with affiliate programs, ready to cooperate even with newbie affiliates who do not have powerful tools to attract traffic such as their own website or blog. For example, you can join Amazon’s affiliate program to get your percentage of sales. However, having your own landing pages and pre-landings will be a major advantage for you as it will open the way for you to more advanced affiliate networks and programs, advertising companies and brands.

 

Use a Lead Magnet

To attract the attention of potential customers to the product you are promoting, you can also use a lead magnet that works as a kind of shiny lure. In fact, it is some kind of incentive that you offer to visitors in exchange for their contact information, such as email address or phone number.

 

For instance, if you sell cameras, you could write a guide on how to take quality pictures, also focusing on how to use the products you are promoting. However, this guide should not explicitly advertise your products so as not to scare away potential customers. By offering such a guide in return for contact information, you build a bridge between curious visitors and paying customers interested in what you offer.

 

If you’re still not using lead magnets in your work as an affiliate marketer, here are a few reasons why you should fill the gap as soon as possible:

• Building relationships. Offering something of real value for free will help you build trust with potential customers. This increases the likelihood that they will listen to you and see you as a valuable resource.
• Turning casual visitors into potential customers. By getting contact information, you have the opportunity to turn them into paying customers over time.
• Segmenting your audience. Those who are interested in your offer become qualified customers, and you will be able to focus your marketing efforts on this part of your target audience.

 

For your lead magnet to work effectively, it must have high relevance and perceived value. In addition, it should contain easy-to-digest content as well as a clear call to action. Finally, don’t forget to make your lead magnet mobile-friendly, as the number of people using online services on the go is growing rapidly.

 

Run Contextual Advertising

While it is much better to attract traffic without spending your own money, you always have the option of paying for traffic. There are many ad networks offering advanced targeting tools to show your ads in the right place and at the right time to reach the maximum number of potential customers. To increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, you can also use landing pages as an intermediary between the ad and the offer. However, depending on the niche you are working in, a landing page may not be necessary, so you can still do affiliate marketing without a website.

 

Do Email and SMS Newsletters

Although email is about as old as the global web itself, email marketing is still a viable concept. And that’s why we recommended above that you use lead magnets to collect personal user data such as phone numbers and email addresses. By creating interesting, engaging and action-provoking content for your emails and text messages, you’ll be able to direct potential customers straight to your offer.

 

So, despite the competitive nature of affiliate marketing, email newsletters still work effectively. And if you doubt this, here are a few things that will convince you that you don’t need to ignore the power of email and SMS newsletters:

• Direct access to potential customers. By using email newsletters, you can avoid the noise of social media by connecting with your audience directly and building trust.
• Personalized Interaction. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence-based tools, you’ll be able to tailor newsletters to the interests and needs of your target audience.
• The ability to distribute diverse and useful content. By making quality newsletters, you’ll be able to share industry news, exclusive deals, and provide early access to new products and helpful guides. This way you can keep your audience highly engaged.

 

Last but not least, email and SMS newsletters allow you to track important performance metrics such as opens, clicks and conversions. By analyzing your newsletter data, you will be able to make changes to your marketing strategies to achieve better results.

 

Place Affiliate Links on Thematic Forums

Although social media has reached extraordinary proportions today, online forums are still in high demand. Moreover, there are still many people who prefer to look for relevant information and answers to their questions in forums. All this makes internet forums a great place to publish your affiliate links to drive traffic to the products you are promoting.

 

So, to do affiliate marketing without a website, you need to find forums where they discuss things related to the products you are promoting. Before you start being active, carefully read the rules of the community or forum to find out what formats of postings and affiliate links are allowed. By being active on relevant forums, you will be able to communicate directly with people who may become your customers, provide answers to their questions and participate in finding solutions to their problems. Over time, forum members will begin to trust you and are more likely to click on your affiliate links.

 

Bottom Line

So, after reading the first part of this article, you probably concluded that it is quite a challenge to work as an affiliate marketer without a website. However, we hope that the second part of our rather long article has made you optimistic. Working as an affiliate marketer, you will always face risks such as low-quality or fraudulent traffic, difficulties in managing and optimizing multiple campaigns, and challenges in choosing good affiliate programs and offers.

 

The truth is that you can still do affiliate marketing without having your own website or blog. However, with a website in place, you are more credible in the eyes of many affiliate programs. Moreover, to handle traffic from social platforms, you will most likely need landing pages and pre-landings which are also essentially websites. However, if you’re determined to try to become visible to your target audience without having a website, we’ve left you with a few last tips:

• Use quality ad trackers with functionality that automates much of your marketing efforts.
• Research key user queries online, even if you don’t have your own website. This will allow you to create content that is more visible to your target audience.
• Study your audience’s behavioural traits, interests, needs, and pain points to optimize your campaigns.

 

Finally, don’t forget that content is king. So, create a short, concise and genuinely useful copy without using AI-based content generation tools to stand out from the crowd.