You’re reading this blog because you want to make money with affiliate marketing, without spending a dime on a website.
The truth is, you don’t need to own a website to make money with affiliate marketing. A niche, network, tool, or social media site, and you’re well off running a profitable affiliate business online.
In this blog, you’ll learn about how the exact steps needed to build and maintain a profitable affiliate marketing business. I’ll cover everything from selecting a niche to making your first commission as an affiliate.
So without any further ado, let’s get right into it :
What is Affiliate Marketing without a Website?
Affiliate Marketing is the process of making money promoting someone else’s product or service.
In this, you select someone’s product to promote, make a sale on it and get commissions on the sale you made. The commission is paid by the business or individual whose product you’ve chosen to promote.
Running a website to promote affiliate offers can be a tedious process. You’ll need to pay an upfront charge to maintain the website.
You’ll even have to create content constantly and promote it to increase your website’s authority on search engines. This may take months.
Here are 3 reasons why creating a website can be difficult for affiliate marketing.
Low Domain Authority: A brand-new website lacks authority, content, and backlinks. Ranking your affiliate website on the first page of Google will take time, maybe months or years in fact.
Lack of visitors: Since your website is new and unable to rank on Google, you’ll barely get any visitors from Google, lest conversions.
Non-acceptance by Affiliate Networks: Your brand-new website is less likely to get accepted by Affiliate Networks for promoting its products. Such networks validate the worth of your website on the basis of content and traffic. And if they find out your website lacks both, they’ll reject your request to become their affiliate.
But let’s look at how affiliate marketing without a website actually looks today.
Affiliate Marketing without a website is when you promote someone else’s product using a platform, mostly a landing page, and leverage other channels and tools to promote the product, make a sale, and grab those commissions.
Let’s begin with the most important aspect of affiliate marketing.
Choosing Your Affiliate Marketing Niche
Your affiliate income depends on the niche you choose.
You’ve got 2 choices:
Go for a niche that’s profitable
Go for a niche that you like talking about
So which one would you choose?
In fact, you can choose both of them. The real issue isn’t the niche, it’s the trust and connection you build with people when promoting your affiliate products.
Truth #1: People don’t care about what you’re promoting unless it benefits them.
Truth #2: All major Affiliate niches are saturated today. So let me take you through some “shoulder” affiliate niches to attract targeted traffic.
Let’s look at the top 5 major affiliate niches first: Health and Wellness
Lifestyle
Fitness
Finance
Technology
All the niches listed above are extremely competitive.
We need to focus on sub-niches, a.k.a Shoulder niches to get started with affiliate marketing.
Let’s look at an example :
Major Niche: Fitness
Shoulder niche: Gyms, Yoga, Pilates
In case you’re planning to narrow down on shoulder niches and enter micro-niches, here is an example that can work out:
Example: Shoulder niche — Gym
Micro niche — gym equipment, gym shoes, gym gloves, etc.
The smaller your niche, the more targeted your traffic is. And that’s a good thing.
Now that we’ve covered the niches, let’s look at platforms that’ll help you start your affiliate business from scratch.
Go for a niche that you like talking about
So which one would you choose?
In fact, you can choose both of them. The real issue isn’t the niche, it’s the trust and connection you build with people when promoting your affiliate products.
Truth #1: People don’t care about what you’re promoting unless it benefits them.
Truth #2: All major Affiliate niches are saturated today. So let me take you through some “shoulder” affiliate niches to attract targeted traffic.
Let’s look at the top 5 major affiliate niches first: Health and Wellness
Lifestyle
Fitness
Finance
Technology
All the niches listed above are extremely competitive.
We need to focus on sub-niches, a.k.a Shoulder niches to get started with affiliate marketing.
Let’s look at an example :
Major Niche: Fitness
Shoulder niche: Gyms, Yoga, Pilates
In case you’re planning to narrow down on shoulder niches and enter micro-niches, here is an example that can work out:
Example: Shoulder niche — Gym
Micro niche — gym equipment, gym shoes, gym gloves, etc.
The smaller your niche, the more targeted your traffic is. And that’s a good thing.
Now that we’ve covered the niches, let’s look at platforms that’ll help you start your affiliate business from scratch.
5 Free Platforms to Start Affiliate Marketing Effortlessly
Since we aren’t using websites to promote affiliate products, let’s look at free platforms that have pre-built authority and audience.
This will feel like everything is served to you on a platter, all you’ll need to do is create content, drive conversions and make sales.
So without further ado, let’s dive right into them :
But, here are a few things you should keep in mind when affiliate blogging on Medium. Avoid stuffing affiliate links
Write keyword-researched and catchy headlines
Cloak or shorten your affiliate links before using them in your blogs
Use a maximum of 2–3 affiliate links throughout your article
Use affiliate links when publishing your article under a Medium Publication, only if it’s approved by them.
Want to know the best fact about Medium?
Medium articles rank pretty high on Google, in fact, a lot of them rank on the first page itself.
Realize how easy Medium makes blogging for you on Google?
But if you want additional traffic, make sure you publish under a relevant Medium Publication. Read their guidelines on affiliate links as well.
Only a handful of Publications allow affiliate links in their blogs, the rest disapprove of such practice.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is the most popular funnel-builder SaaS tool on the internet.
With an intuitive interface, user-friendly dashboard, and lots of resources, Clickfunnels might be the best choice for kickstarting your affiliate business.
A Sales Funnel can be divided into several components such as Squeeze pages, automated email sequences, upsells or down sells, thank you and order checkout pages, and whatnot.
With ClickFunnels’ 14 Day free trial, you can build a funnel from scratch, integrate other software, play around with its simple drag-and-drop builder and get your funnel ready within hours.
Its Paid Plans start from $97 per month post their 14 Day free trial.
Now let’s look at the best alternative for ClickFunnel. Something more affordable.
Systeme
If you’re looking out for a free alternative to ClickFunnels, you’ll love Systeme.
Systeme is an all-in-one Business SaaS tool that helps you build, grow and monetize your business right from its platform. No external software is needed.
It lets you build sales funnels, launch online courses, and run email campaigns and marketing automation.
Systeme’s Free Plan lets you have a maximum of 2000 contacts along with unlimited blog posts.
It’s more than enough to get started with affiliate marketing.
As I repeat, you won’t need to use any other tool to work on your affiliate product promotion. Funnel Builder? — Check
Email Automations? — Check
Cart Page? — Check
Blogs? — Check
See? You literally get everything for Free.
Just in case you decide on upgrading your Free Plan to enjoy greater benefits, you’ll only need to pay $27 per month.
Now let’s look at how the 2nd largest search engine on the internet will help you promote affiliate products.
YouTube
If you’re someone who’s comfortable with creating videos and promoting affiliate products through them, then you’ll love YouTube.
I have some exciting news for you. Apparently, affiliate promotions won’t be the only way to earn on YouTube.
YouTube has its own Partner Program that lets you monetize your YouTube channel.
However, you’ll get into the YouTube Partner Program only if you fulfill the following conditions.4000 Watch Hours
1000 Subscribers
Once approved, your YouTube channel will be monetized to show advertisements in your videos.
Enough of that, let's get back to learning how to leverage YouTube for affiliate marketing.
Let’s take this step by step.
Step #1: Start a YouTube channel in your affiliate niche.
Step #2: Make a list of all the networks and products offering affiliate partnerships.
Step #3: Upload videos consistently on YouTube. Avoid promoting anything in the first month. Just provide value.
Step #4: Start talking about your affiliate products and dropping your links in your video description.
Step #5: Keep doing this for 6 months and watch those commissions drop in passively in your bank account.
Step #6: If you don’t make a single penny out of your niche in the first 6 months, you should shift to another niche.
Track, Analyse and Observe your viewer’s behavior on your videos. Structure your videos in a way that keeps them hooked till the end.
Tip: Start building an Email list alongside your YouTube channel. Drop its link in your description and persuade people to become join your list.
Emails conversion rates are 23x higher than other media channels. You can use ConvertKit or MailerLite to build an email list for free.
Now let’s talk about the tool that’ll help us build an entire affiliate business with emails and landing pages.
ConvertKit
I love how ConvertKit supports its users and help them grow their business with free workshops, webinars, courses, challenges, and ebooks.
Let’s see how you can build your affiliate business with ConvertKit.
Step #1: Create a Free account on ConvertKit.
Step #2: Decide your affiliate niche and start creating landing pages and emails to convert leads.
[Note: You can’t create “email sequences” or “automation” unless you get one of ConvertKit’s Paid plans]
Step #3: Once you are ready with a landing page and emails, start leveraging social media platforms for eyeballs.
My recommendations — Facebook, Quora, YouTube, and Twitter(threads)
Step #4: Start by providing value in your niche. Next, gain their trust and credibility and gently promote your products infrequently.
By now you must have realized that this is a long-term game.
But if you stay consistent and dominate it accordingly, no one can stop you from building a steady flow of affiliate income.
We’ve finally covered all 5 Affiliate Platforms, now let’s look at some popular Affiliate Marketing Marketplaces that host thousands of affiliate products in a variety of niches.
You might just find your ideal product right there.
Affiliate Marketing Marketplaces
Don’t you ever wish you had a single website that would save you time exploring affiliate products and niches?
Well, that’s where Affiliate marketplaces come into place.
Such websites host hundreds and thousands of affiliate offers for affiliate marketers to choose their niche and pluck their products.
Let’s look at a few popular ones.ClickBank
Digitstore24
JVZoo
Warrior Plus
MaxBounty
CJ Affiliate
FlexOffers
Before you plan on hitting these marketplaces for offers, build a strong brand on either of the social media sites.
People won’t blindly trust you with these products, you’ll have to earn it by constantly providing valuable information in your niche.
Note: It’s always advisable that you test out the affiliate product first before promoting it to your audience. It’ll make things easier for you.
Final Takeaway
Affiliate Marketing doesn’t need a website to work, it needs your determination, mindset, and consistent efforts.
To summarize this blog, I’ve covered the following topics: Select an affiliate niche.
Select a Platform to get started — Medium, YouTube, ClickFunnels, Systeme, ConvertKit.
Promote your affiliate offers on Social Media sites by building trust and credibility first.
Select offers from Affiliate Marketplaces to save time exploring elsewhere.
Drop in your affiliate niches and the platforms you use to promote them in the comments below.
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