Can You Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog/Website?

Blogging and owning a website are some of the most common ways to do affiliate marketing. But there are other ways to promote your links without a website. So I will be sharing exactly how you can do that in this article from zero to $$ budget.

Yes. You can do affiliate marketing and still make good online income from your links without using a website or a blog. A blog and having a website are mediums you can use to promote your affiliate links. That means they are totally dispensable if you do not want to deal with any of those strategies.

Blogging depends heavily on content marketing, SEO, writing, and building authority within your niche, which is a good thing. But for some reason, if you do not find it a strategy you want to pursue, it is totally possible to rely on other platforms such as social media.

In case you like the idea of content marketing, you can create content on lots of platforms, not just on a blog or website. Social media is a good starting point to create content and build your audience.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Imagine you buy a new piece of product which simplifies your life today. You are excited and happy about your discovery. Yet, you wonder where it has been all this while that you scrambled for even a bare-bones solution. It’s amazing.

Next thing, you realize you are telling your family, friends, and work colleagues about your discovery. The chances are that some of them may be facing the same problem. Through your excitement, they get convinced that the product is worth trying.

They go on and purchase the product. You may not even know they have purchased the product. But you have just got the company’s new business. You have brought them revenue.

Yet you don’t get the benefits of the sale. No one recognizes your efforts. You did it for passion. You did it to help. But wouldn’t it be nice if you got compensated? Say you get a cut from the sale money? If you are thinking what I am thinking, you get the affiliate marketing concept.

Affiliate marketing is a type of referral marketing where you get paid for referring people to buy a product or service. While affiliate marketing has become a career and some people promote lots of products that they do not even love or know how exactly they help people, that is not the goal of real affiliate marketing.

Now there are different forms of referral marketing. So, what makes affiliate marketing different? It’s in the model. Affiliate marketers get a special or unique link to invite friends to buy their favorite products and services. This makes it both scalable and easy to implement.

Instead of talking a boatload about the new product that excites you yet you haven’t fully figured it out, you could share a link, and your friends can be fully educated on the company’s website and make their own decision. It’s that simple.

Affiliate marketing is a good way to build passive income because a link shared on the internet is available forever, and at any point in time that someone uses the link to make a purchase, you get paid.

This works in a simple way. The special link has unique tracking attached, making it possible for the company to know which affiliate made the referral that led to each sale. How beautiful?

The good thing is that it is all transparent. You can see the activity surrounding your marketing efforts with respect to sales and the revenue you have generated for the company and your commission. Yes, affiliates are paid a commission that differs from one company and affiliate program to the next.

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog/Website?

The only true way to be successful with affiliate marketing is to build an audience and use paid ads as a strategy to generate leads.

1. Build An Audience

An audience is a sort of tribe, a group or online community you have built over time, often years in the making. An online audience keeps expanding, and you can grow into millions or even billions of fans if you master the art of content creation, virality, and how to manage communities online.

This may seem like a lot of work because it is. But building an audience is something you will never regret doing as an affiliate marketer or any marketer for the fact. This is because a community is more than people who watch or read your content. They are active.

An audience pays attention to what you do. They are concerned about your growth because you entertain, inform or help them in some way that they feel connected to you at some level. Your audience could get big enough that you can organize a conference around what you do and have thousands of people show up.

For any marketer, the skill set involved in building an audience is a must. In our age and time, the internet is only bound to grow, especially with web 3.0. People will most likely spend even more time on the internet. How are you looking to stay sustainable? An audience is the best way to stay throughout the times.

An audience built on a specific niche or industry is as valuable as your business as you can easily promote your affiliate links to them. New companies will fall onto you to help them enter the market and build a following. You will become a super affiliate–a member of the upper echelon of affiliate marketers worldwide.

Super affiliates can easily start their own companies, help launch successful companies and still maintain the love of their audience because a well-built audience will be loyal to you, your journey, and your growth.

2. Use Paid Ads

Building an audience is gruesomely slow and takes a ton of time that most affiliate marketers simply cannot afford. The kind of strategy to pursue is particularly crucial if you promote high-ticket products and services. In most cases, you do not need to appeal to the masses with such products.

If you are in an industry that deals in high-ticket, you can rely on paid ads, display ads, and native ads to promote your affiliate products and services.

However, using ads is not for the faint of heart, as you can quickly burn through your budget without any sales or compelling leads. On the other hand, paid ads are a fast way to get leads, and quality leads are at that. In addition, through specific targeting, you can show your links to the people most likely to need the product or services increases the likelihood of getting higher conversions, which means more commissions for you.

Google ads are a good starting point for search engine marketing, while there are other options such as Taboola for native ads. For eCommerce products, you can rely on Google shopping listings and ads to put your links at the top of Google, which means more qualified eyeballs seeing your stuff.

Best Free Ways To Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog/Website

1. Social Media

Social media is one of the most pervasive things on the internet. It is everywhere. This makes it one of the common and also the best ways to promote your affiliate marketing links. It doesn’t matter the platform you choose. Whether Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, there is a strategy for affiliate marketers for every platform.

People manage to make a thousand a year through just Twitter. Other marketers focus on Instagram and perhaps make money as influencers as well.

2. YouTube channel

A YouTube channel is another good way to promote your affiliate links. It’s a time-consuming way of doing so. But as with most of the tactics that bring in the most commissions, they take time in creating content, helping your audience, and building a community that lasts as long as you are in the game.

You can educate your audience on the products and services you promote through your videos. By adding your links to your video descriptions, you can start generating cash flow from your YouTube videos. A good thing about building an audience on platforms like youtube is that you can make money from other sources such as brand deals.

YouTube is a special platform. You can make money from the platform when you get a thousand subscribers and four thousand public watch hours. This means you do not have to depend on only affiliate income if you choose to go with YouTube. How sweet, right?

3. Podcasting

Podcasting is slowly becoming a major channel that we consume content. This is due to the rise in the preference for audio content. In addition, a podcast pays in several ways, including but not limited to affiliate income, sponsors, ads, and more.

4. Guest Posting

While blogging and owning a website involve a lot, you could reap the benefits of blogging without actually owning a blog. By contributing to already established blogs with tons of readers, you can quickly get your content in the eyes of ready buyers who will use your links to buy products and services, bringing you passive commissions without owning a website.

Look for top blogs in your niche. Filter for those that take guest posts. Read their guidelines to find out how they like their content. Then, shoot the editors an email pitching your post idea. Some of them take only already written content, so you must check for each blog or website.

Once you are done with your research, follow their instructions and stick to a posting schedule. This will keep you disciplined and committed to your business.

While guest posting is great, you do not have as much control as you would if you owned the blog. For example, your content could get pulled down or your links removed. So keep an eye on your content. Also, contribute to more blogs to keep getting traffic.

5. Online Forums

Forums on the internet are not only a great place to promote your links, but if you do it right, you could get a lot of conversions. Do not just go to forums and start spamming users to promote your links. Fact check: no one cares about your links until they know that you care.

The best, and although not easy way to get people to click on your links, is to show them that you care about them and their problems. If you can get on that level with each forum you join and make a name for yourself as the solutions guy, the trust you build with each person in the can become a network of marketers for you.

Most people will readily tell others if your suggested products solve their problems. Popular forums you can start with are Reddit, Quora, Discord, StackOverFlow/Stack Exchange, Medium, etc.

Do You Have To Have A Blog To Do Affiliate Marketing?

Not at all. Affiliate marketing gives you the freedom to use multiple or any of the channels and platforms that you are comfortable with using.

Based on your skillset and experience, as well as where your audience hangs out, you can promote your links wherever you can get the right kind of attention for them.

How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing Without A Blog?

Starting affiliate marketing is easy, and anyone can start right now. If you have a passion that is in demand, that’s probably the best place to start. However, for more professional or career-oriented affiliate marketers, you could launch a research phase before you even do anything.

This research should aim to decide which industry and niche are profitable, easy to enter, and pay good affiliate commissions. Then, through the use of Google trends, keyword research, or simply falling onto already large niches such as weight loss, you are ready to get into action.

The next is to do audience research to find the competition, where your ideal audience hangouts such as Facebook groups, YouTube channels they follow, blogs they read, and more. This will help you decide your content strategy and the platforms and channels to use.

Blogging is pretty much universal, and you cannot go wrong with it as an affiliate marketer. However, there are lots of viable ways to promote your links.

The next is to find the best affiliate programs that pay well and honestly help customers and will be a good fit for the brand you want to build.

Once you have your links, you can get to work creating content and adding your links to your content to drive traffic to the company’s website to get your commissions flowing.

With a simple setup of YouTube, add links to your video descriptions, you can start making money as soon as you can get traffic to use your links. This could be within a day if you already have an audience.

Is Affiliate Marketing Only For Bloggers?

No, affiliate marketing is for everyone, unlike network marketing. A majority of bloggers use affiliate marketing as a revenue and monetization strategy. But that doesn’t mean affiliate marketing is for bloggers.

Affiliate marketing is for everyone, and with a little time commitment, you can get your affiliate business off the ground. By simply writing posts (articles) on your Linkedin profile, you can quickly create a steady revenue stream.

There are different ways to engage in affiliate marketing, and there are different levels of affiliate marketers. For example, there are career affiliate marketers who promote a full-time sort of job. You cannot say affiliate marketing is a job as it is much more similar to a business.

If you open a shop to sell groceries, your model is similar to an affiliate marketer, but you do not say you are an employee of the companies you sell their products. While being an affiliate doesn’t come with all the costs and risks of running a grocery store, you can reap more revenue from promoting product and service links than most grocery stores can.

How Can I Do Affiliate Marketing Without An Audience?

You can do affiliate marketing without an audience by engaging in online communities and forums, as well as using paid ads. However, these strategies are quite short-term centered and won’t last long. If you stop doing them, your revenue stream dries up.

Online forums, for instance, are not entirely reliable. You do not own the platform, and you may not even own the community or space. That means your links need to go through an approval and most forums and discussion groups hate links. So you may need an ingenious plan to get your links past the admins and into the feed of the community. And for that, your content or contribution can still be pulled down at any time.

Paid ads are great, as we explained above. But it is not everyone who has the skillset that is quite intricate. Not everyone has the budget to burn through until a steady stream of commission starts to come through.

The disadvantage here is that your leads stop coming through when you stop running ads, and everything dries up. Compared to a blog or website, your links can be exposed to thousands and even millions of people every month with good content and SEO practices.

You don’t have to create content every day as compared to running ads all the time to make money. It all boils down to your strategy, niche, and skillset. That is the beauty of affiliate marketing.

Recommendation: Takeaways

You can do affiliate marketing and make money without a blog/website and there are several ways to do that as shared in the post. But is that really sustainable? In my experience, it is not sustainable since you don’t have control over most of the options.

Besides, you have so many opportunities when you have your own platform like a blog/website for your affiliate marketing. With that, you can easily build an audience through email marketing. Many super affiliates have leveraged that to build a community where they are making millions of dollars every year.

Having your own blog/website is a sure way to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business of consistent income. The best part is it doesn’t cost much to own a website or have the right tools for your success. I find this platform to have the all-in-one package you need for affiliate marketing.

Whatever your reasons for doing affiliate marketing without a blog/website, having one guarantee you sustainability and consistent income. Hence, it’s worth owning a blog/website.

Over To You!

How sustainable is making money with affiliate marketing without a blog/website? Kindly let me know what you think. Do not hesitate to share your experience as well if you’re making or have made money in affiliate marketing without a blog/website. Thank you!