A very common misconception about Internet entrepreneurs is that you need to have your own website in order to be successful with affiliate marketing.
This is why there are articles on improving the SEO of your affiliate marketing websites, for example, as well as guides on optimizing the design and layout of your affiliate landing pages. However, even if you do not have a dedicated website of your own, you can still stand to earn a substantial income from affiliate marketing if you apply a more creative approach.
How can you earn money with affiliate marketing when you don’t have a website? Here are a few great examples.
Forum and Blog Posting
Start by being an active and useful contributor to forums in the niche of your choice. Other members of the forum will come to see you as a knowledgeable and respectable expert in your industry. Once you have established yourself in this way, there is no harm in including relevant affiliate links in your forum signature, assuming that the forum rules allow for them.
With strategic posting and careful monitoring, good money can be made through affiliate marketing this way.
A similar tactic can be employed with blog commenting–remember that you must add value to the conversation and not simply be commenting for the sake of including an affiliate link–and with guest blogging on relevant sites. Don’t spam. Be strategic and provide value.
Email Marketing
While the conventional school of thought will say that the only way you can grow your mailing list is by capturing emails through your website, there are many other methods that can be used. Social media marketing is one such example. As you continue to build and develop your email list, you’ll find that you have an increasingly large group of engaged people who are interested in what you have to offer.
When you let subscribers on your list know about a relevant product or service of value, using an affiliate link for referrals, you are providing your subscribers with a valuable service. Indeed, the open and conversion rates through email marketing can sometimes be even better than through landing pages and direct marketing.
CPC Arbitrage
It has been said time and time again that you have to spend money to make money. Arbitrage takes this on quite the literal level. In effect, you purchase CPC advertising through a network like Google AdWords, targeting specific keywords for your niche and for the affiliate offer that you’d like to promote. People who click on these ads are inherently self-selecting, so they have already expressed interest in the product or service.
Profit is earned from the difference between the cost of the CPC campaign and the revenue earned from the affiliate offer. Depending on the volume of clicks and the conversion level, this profit margin can be remarkably substantial. The key is careful monitoring and lots of testing.
E-Book Publishing
The barriers to entry for book publishing are far lower than they have ever been before. It is easier than ever to publish a book on such huge platforms as Amazon’s Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Apple’s iBook Store. While there is some money to be made from the actual sale of these books through these channels, an even greater opportunity can be found on the back-end.
Again, it is critical that the book comes from a place of value first. This way, readers are engaged and are enthusiastic about reading the book from cover to cover. Relevant and useful affiliate links can be easily inserted in these eBooks, directing readers to the corresponding affiliate offers to generate additional income for you.
YouTube Video Series
It’s undeniable that YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the Internet and for good reason. People love watching videos, whether they’re funny, entertaining or informative. Relating right back to establishing yourself as an expert in your field, just as you can do with forum posting, email marketing and e-book publishing, you can build quite the following on YouTube without your own website too.
Affiliate products can be mentioned in the video itself, highlighted with YouTube annotations, and affiliate links can also be included as part of the video description. As with all affiliate marketing, it is advisable to mask your links here too.
Thinking Outside the Website Box
An important thing to note here is that individual advertisers may place individual restrictions on their offers. They may not allow for incentivized traffic or search engine traffic, for instance. As you make your way through a catalog of offers, like those on the international affiliate network WOW Trk, be sure to read through each offer description carefully to ensure you are adhering to the advertiser’s instructions and restrictions.
What additional traffic sources and methods have you used in your affiliate marketing?
About the author:
Matt Lovett is the Managing Director of WOW Media, based in the UK. Its largest website is WOW Trk, a leading international affiliate network with unique features and tools aimed to help affiliates increase leads and generate more revenue. Matt can be reached by email to matt@wowmedia.eu or via telephone at +44 (0)1636 612598.
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