Affiliate Marketing Without a Website
Why affiliates don’t need a website
Save on costs
The best thing about stating out in Affiliate marketing is you can do it without a website and avoid any start up costs at all. We will discuss exactly how in this article.
When you find your feet and begin to make a few sales and build up a bit of a bank you can expand your efforts. One way to expand is to get a website to add an extra facet to your promotional efforts.
Connect with your audience
Affiliate marketing is about making a connection with your audience. No matter which audience or niche market you choose to target.
Sure it helps to have a website. It will only add to your online presence. However there are other ways to build a profile online and get people to believe in what you have to say. And now in the age of Web 2.0 offering quality content and advice is the only way to make a good living online.
Web 2.0
You may have heard the term Web 2.0 and wondered what it means.
Basically it means version 2 of the internet. The old internet was static. Basically the webmaster would create a site with content for people to look at. People might come here to buy something or just get some useful information and click away from the site onto another static site. In essence, one way communication, from the webmaster to the website visitor.
Fast forward to now and the web, like anything, has evolved. Web 2.0 offers one great advantage. That is interactivity. All the new social media sites, blogs and forums that have sprung up over the last 2 or so years have given the internet a whole new way of sharing information. It is real time, viral and a very powerful concept.
Social Media
I’m sure you have all heard of facebook or twitter. Facebook and other sites (click here for a list) are a great tool for any affiliate marketer to start to build a profile online. All yon need to do is participate, grow your friends list and you can offer you opinion and insert your affiliate links directly to people who you know will be interested in them.
There are literally hundreds of these them have popped up over the pas couple of years and all of them have their uses. The trick is to find the ones that will service you best. Create a profile be active in them on a regular basis and in a short time people will begin to know and trust you. This will give you a great advantage when you try to sell them something.
Social media is a long term strategy. Don’t expect to join a dozen of these sites on day and see instant results. It will take time to build up relationships with people. Give it time to develop. Truth is it won’t seem like work. But the more you participate the stronger your relationship and online presence becomes. If you have something interesting to say people will find you on their own.
Squidoo
Squidoo is a godsend for affiliate marketers starting out. It’s like having a website without the cost involved.
That’s right it’s free and you can publish any of your own content and even make money directly from squidoo. You will need to sign up for an account and from there the sky is the limit. Talk about and promote whatever you like. Use this in conjunction with the social networking sites linking back to each other and you have a very powerful tool for promotion of your products.
You can build as many pages as you like on the same or different products. These pages get noticed by Google and all the other search engines and they can give you great traffic and exposure.
Forums
There are thousands of forums out there. About almost any subject you can think of. A great way to stamp your presence as an authority in your chosen niche is to regularly participate in these forums and offer real answers and quality feedback.
People will become to know you as an expert and trust what you have to say. Throw in a few affiliate links in the mix and you will be surprised at how many sales you can generate this way.
Best Affiliate Recourse
These are just a few of the methods that I have discovered and that worked for me when starting out affiliate marketing. They are a great starting point for any aspiring affiliate marketer.
One of the greatest resources I have found is Sean Rasmussen’s book, Year of the Affiliate. All of these strategies and more are covered in depth in the book. He gives step by step examples of how to implement all of these strategies. Well worth a read. His years of experience as a successful internet marketer are in the pages. It will save literally hundreds of hours of research and put you on the front foot.
As you can see I have implemented all of these techniques discussed in this article. Please click the follow me on twitter icon or digg icon on this page for a live example of how social media can work. See my profiles I set up long ago when I was starting out affiliate marketing. Join or follow me and I will follow you as well.
until next time
Lets make millions together.
Nickquinlan
Affiliate Marketing Explained
Affiliate Marketing Explained
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. Weather you have your own product or not.
In basic terms affiliate marketing is becoming affiliated with another person or company and selling their product for them. After you have completed a sale for them your affiliate merchant (the company with the product) will pay you (the affiliate) a commission on each individual sale you make.
In order to explain affiliate marketing best, refer to the diagram below.
Affilliate Marketing Explained
Affiliate Marketing Explained
The merchant is the one with the product. The merchant can sell their product directly to the public and receive 100% of the profits. The merchant can also enlist the help of an affiliate and get them to market the product on their behalf.
You might ask why the merchant would want to do this and be cut out of so much of the profit. Well what if the merchant was to get 50 Affiliates to market their product for them. Their sales would be much higher right, and the Affiliates would be getting just reward for their efforts too. So it’s a win, win situation really.
And for internet beginners, affiliate marketing is the quickest and easiest method to start making money online.
Affiliates make money basically through commission on every sale they make, up to 75%.
There are several ways to go about promoting your affiliate efforts and I will spell them out on this blog over the coming weeks.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing Explained
Zero Start-up Costs
A lot of people wonder how much money it takes to get started affiliate marketing. And the answer is zero. If you have a computer and access to the internet (if you’re reading this I assume you do) you are already set up and ready to go.
No Product, No Worries
You don’t need a product of your own to sell. This is definition of Affiliate marketing. You take someone’s already selling product and tell people about it. It’s that easy.
Further down the track when you are comfortable with marketing other peoples affiliate products you can develop your own product and get affiliates to market it for you.
No Website, No Worries
Now you might be thinking “I don’t know anything about building a website.” This is one of the things I love about affiliate marketing explained. You don’t even need a website. There are many free services that will get you on your way.
It is best to start with these and build your way up. As you go you will gain knowledge experience and then you can add the next method to your campaign. I will spell all of these methods out over the next few weeks in future posts. So don’t forget to subscribe to this blog through Google reader or via email and I will be spilling the beans regularly.
Some of the topics that I will be covering in the Affiliate marketing explained series include:
Finding Affiliate products to promote
- How to get paid
- Choosing the right affiliate product to market
Why you don’t need a website
What you can do with a website
- How to set up your first website
Free traffic sources including:
Article marketing.
Free Classified Sites
Squidoo
Social Networking Sites:
- Youtube
- Myspace
- Blog Catalog
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
Plus More
All of these methods are free and can be leveraged in one way or another to make money as an affiliate marketer. I will show you how.
Each blog post will concentrate on one method and build on from the last one.
So don’t forget to subscribe and keep informed.
Until next time..
To your success
Nicholas Quinlan
