Do You Need a Website to Do Affiliate Marketing?

If you’re aware of the ways of affiliate marketing, you’ll know that it’s a skill that’s gained through experience. You can do it effortlessly and effectively with the wealth of knowledge that you have as you can devote your time getting to know products, reviewing and recommending them to your network and finally making money. But often you come across affiliate promotion, you find them on websites. So, does it mean that you must have a website to do affiliate marketing? I’ve personally always thought that website was the most critical aspect of starting my affiliate marketing career however the truth is affiliate marketing doesn’t necessarily require a website With that said, it is highly recommended that you do use a website. We will now look at the benefits and disadvantages of using a website, various risks you need to consider as well as the numerous alternatives that are available to you. Why Does Most Digital Marketing Training Tell You To Have a Website? When you visit numerous digital marketing training courses and services, they often say that you need to have a website to do affiliate marketing. So, why is it? You may find it strange but in actual, website often acts as a bridge between your potential customers and your affiliate links. It can help you build credibility and increase sales as it is one of the best ways to optimize your site for search engines and make it easily visible. There are various other benefits provided by the website, let’s get into it.

5 Benefits of Having a Website to Do Affiliate Marketing

1. With a well-designed website and regular content updates, you can rank high in search engines.
2. Having a website is one of the best ways to give credibility to your website among your promotion. It helps to spread positive signals regarding your credibility so that people know about the authenticity of your recommendations. If you don’t have a website you will not get initial credibility.
3. A website can let you personalize your content according to your audience. It lets you add a personal touch to your content. This is not possible without a website.
4. You can monetize your website and generate a passive income.
5. You can build a community of regular readers, followers and customers

The above are some of the benefits you can get by having a website but there are other ones as well. You can learn how to use a website here.

The Disadvantages of Having a Website

1. A website requires regular maintenance as you need to update your content regularly, add new posts, improving your design, adding tools for your website etc. This is not easy and something every beginner does not know.
2. More often than not, most affiliate marketers fail to convert visitors into customers which is very common among newbie affiliate marketers.
3. You need to spend time and money in maintaining a website. If you lack in time or money, then it will never reach the position and size required to get you the desired traffic.
4. If you don’t have proper experience, you can easily mess up your website and ruin it completely.

Is there a “Quick Route”? – Website vs. No Website

If you don’t want to spend any time in maintaining a website and getting its popularity, you can choose to have no website. You can use your Facebook page or a simple business page on a social network to increase your credibility. Or you can also invest in landing pages which often are more optimized for conversion than a website. However, if you are into building a brand, then having website that conveys your brand image is definitely required. A website with a proper design gives your brand a dimension of credibility. It will help you reach your audience easily. Further, you also get the must needed opportunity to build connection with your customers which should be the main goal of your brand.

The Alternatives to Having a Website

There are so many reasons why you wouldn’t want to have a website. One, it’s too expensive to implement the technology needed to draw visitors, and two, so that you have a presence that is simplified to capture all the benefits provided by affiliate marketing. So, how do you go about doing this? Let me share with you various alternatives that you can consider if you do not desire to have a website for your affiliate marketing business.

1. Youtube

Youtube is unarguably the most important video hosting site across the world. It is also the second most visited website after Google and nearly 400 hours of videos are uploaded every minutes which makes it quite an engaging site for every video fanatic. And as an internet marketer you can agree that youtube has evolved to become one of the most potent marketing platform in this digital age. But, don’t this leave you penniless as it has helped us save and generate money through affiliate marketing. This video sharing site is a great platform for you to post affiliate marketing videos. This is more so, if you’re going to be doing product reviews and suggestions. As a platform that believes that everyone has right to express themselves, Youtube gives you an opportunity to connect with your audience on an avenue that they trust. With Youtube being the biggest video hosting site, it’s more likely that you’ll attract customers and achieve your goals as an affiliate marketer. However the key to success on Youtube is creating content that has some substance to it. This means that anything that is inauthentic and not related to your niche is likely to get many hits but it won’t translate to building a relationship with your customers. Also, Youtube is a community and you must understand that the community always holds the power. Thus, you need to have an understanding of when to mute the microphone and just listen. When you get your Youtube channel set up, remember that you have 8 seconds to capture your audience’s attention. If they are not excited from the very beginning, you’ll lose some of them. You can ensure they listen to you by hooking them with some interesting questions that will trigger their curiosity. Further before you being your affiliate marketing career on Youtube ensure you have sufficient subscribers and audience to share your reviews with. If not, then first focus on creating content that resonates with your audience from the beginning. Focus on creating content related to your niche and something that will be of interest to your audience. Most importantly, ensure that the content you post have a good viewership as this will help you get leads via YouTube and turn them into your subscribers. Objective should be to create enough subscribers that keep coming back to check out your new content daily. This will ensure that they don’t forget with you and when you have a sales funnel that automatically follows YouTube with your website, it becomes even easier to make money.

2. Podcast

Podcasts have been around for quite some time but they have greatly gained popularity today making it one of the best ways to grow your subscriber base and build authority for your brand. However, Podcasts are currently experiencing a dip in terms of the number of listeners today. That said, I believe Podcasts could still likely be a potent tool for you to use in your affiliate marketing business. If it is not, then you shouldn’t feel discouraged as there are still some ways you can use this software to your advantage. You can very easily create and upload your Podcasts to Youtube, iTunes and other podcast hosting sites for an affiliated website. With that said, the best way to use podcasting is to use it along with website as a supplement. This is because your podcast can be a great boost to the content on your website just as Youtube has the same effect.

3. Landing Pages

When you’re starting out you probably have a small website with a catchy domain name that you’ll be using to promote your affiliate products and services. However, not many people know that you can use landing pages to do your affiliate marketing on. You can simply create your landing pages once you have your visitor captured. Your landing page is the page that you show the visitor after you have grabbed their attention and interest. This is a page that will provide the information that the prospect needs to know. You can create a very simplified landing page to capture leads but to create one that is effective you will have to do considerable research. Also, ensure that it captures the lead perfectly and assists them in some way. A well-designed landing page can be a great way to do affiliate marketing as it is a very good place for outsourcing, you can make per sale commission. Further, with evolving technology driven by users needs, today creating landing page is as simple as dragging and dropping few content blocks or using many of the pre-built templates as a draft for your own creative work. Plugins like Elementor, Thrive Architect, etc can be used to create landing page that has a great design and functionality.

4. Funnel Software

One of the most effective ways of doing affiliate marketing is using funnel software like Click Funnels, Optimizepress, SamCart, etc. This software will help you to build relationships with your customers, providing relevant information to them and convincing them to complete the funnel with you. The best thing about these software is that they help you track your visitors in an easier way and contain very good sales funnel building tools to get the job done. However, sales funnel software is quite expensive. Some of them are quite buggy too and can cost you as much as $200 or more depending on the software. Also, it is important to note that you won’t be able to use the sales funnel until you have subscribers or leads.

5. Medium.com

Medium is a very amazing platform for affiliate marketers. It is a very cool platform that works almost just like a blog. However, the platform is very flexible and allows you to connect with your customers and build a relationship with them. Medium is very easy to use and it gets better still when you start to use it with a sub-domain. That means that you can move all your blog posts to medium once you have written them and they will stay there. Your subscribers are now able to follow you on medium when you start posting to it. This becomes a great way to get others access to you and your content. Further, you can relate your affiliate marketing to the content personalization that shows up when someone visits your website. This will help you track people and get into a better position come to you and buy your products or services. Though you can use Medium to your advantage, remember that it is still quite cheap. Medium will capture email addresses so you will be required to upgrade to a paid account. Besides, when you have someone who wants to connect with you, use contact forms or any other contact method so as to get them to personally talk to you

6. Social Media

Social media is a must if you plan on doing affiliate marketing. A simple search on google will take you to several affiliate marketing gurus’ guides to affiliate marketing wherein you’ll see that one of the most things they’ll tell you to include in your affiliate marketing strategy is social media. Social media is a great way to promote affiliate products and services as it is an open platform that the users are free to use. Too many times affiliate marketers are weary of using social media and this is because many states that it is quite expensive to advertise on this platform. But this is not true as you can get more audience from different social media sites and at a fraction of the cost as compared to sites like Facebook, Instagram and others. However, I must agree that as a marketer, starting on social media would seem so simple to you. However, it is quite easy for you to fail here. You need to be committed to the task at hand and more so be ready to work your way through the numerous challenges that you will be faced with as a social media marketer. Where social media is more of a place where regular people hang out and network, affiliate marketing is where you get your silent help from your fans. You need to be careful on how you go about promoting your affiliate products on social media so as not to lose your popularity and also lose your customers on the long run.

Over to You Now…

I hope the information above has been helpful to you. So, do you think a website is the only way to go about affiliate marketing?