So, you want to know how to make money with affiliate marketing without a website. This is one of the most common issues with new affiliate marketers. They don’t want to create a website or blog (initially) to save money and avoid the technicalities of website management.
Well, you can.
Having a website to make money with affiliate marketing isn’t necessary but recommended as discussed here and here. If you are testing the waters and don’t want to spend resources on website development and creating content for your website, you always have the option to go without a website.
Here are the best ways to make money with affiliate marketing without a website:
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the best way to make money with affiliate marketing without a website. Affiliate marketing is the most popular way to make money from social media used by a lot of influencers.
Here is an example:
If you have an active account with a decent number of followers, you can promote pretty much anything you like (including affiliate products). Here is an example of how fashion influencer Mario Di Vaio is promoting affiliate products via Instagram:
It isn’t just limited to Instagram. You can use any social media network you like for affiliate marketing. Here is an example of how to use YouTube:
And Facebook:
You can use social media networks and video streaming platforms to share your affiliate links with your followers. However, this will work if you have followers or your social media post goes viral. Simply creating an account and sharing affiliate links daily won’t help much. It might backfire.
Here is what you need to do to use social media for affiliate marketing:
- Select a social media network of your choice that aligns with your affiliate niche. Do your homework and make sure your target audience uses the social platform you are about to use
- Create a content calendar with clear posting rules and content ideas
- Grow your account by engaging with other accounts on the network.
2. Forums
This is the best way to make money with affiliate marketing without a website. You need to do forum marketing religiously. And if you don’t forums don’t work anymore, check out how Scott generated more than 1,861 visitors from a single forum post.
Here is an example of a forum post that is promoting an affiliate product:
Yes, not all forums allow affiliate links. You must find forums in your niche that allow affiliate links in posts or signatures. Any forum that doesn’t allow affiliate links is useless for you.
Read this article to find the exact steps to promote affiliate products on forums. The idea is to help others, solve their problems, publish quality content, and become an authority in your niche. Simply posting affiliate links here and there won’t work. You’ll get yourself banned.
Try helping others and once you establish yourself as an expert, people will then follow your links and buy products.
3. PDFs and eBooks
Have you ever seen a PDF ranking in Google search results? I’m sure you did.
You can use PDFs and eBooks to promote affiliate products and your eBook will rank in SERPs. There are a lot of eBook publishing and sharing platforms out there such as Slideshare, Issuu, Scribd, Box, MediaFire, 4Shared, and many others. You can submit a single PDF on all these platforms.
Follow these steps to make this technique work for you:
- Write an interesting yet helpful eBook or PDF on a topic that’s related to the affiliate product you are promoting
- It must be a highly valuable piece of content. It needs to be non-promotional
- Add affiliate links in the PDF smartly with proper disclosure
- Submit your file to multiple PDF sharing networks
- Optimize your eBook for search engines
- Share links to your eBook on social media so that people get to know it.
Simply submitting the PDF on Slideshare (or any other network) won’t drive traffic. You need to promote it so people read it, click affiliate links, and buy affiliate products. Else, your PDF will keep sitting on the network forever.
If you want to drive organic traffic and you want your PDF to rank in search engines, you’ll have to do the following additional tasks:
- Identify long-tail keywords for your PDF
- Use Google Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool to identify low-competition long-tail keywords in your niche
- Write an optimized eBook targeting the keyword with proper formatting and optimization
- Publish it on multiple PDF sharing websites
- Repeat.
Create and publish multiple eBooks targeting different long-tail keywords to rank in search results pages.
4. Question and Answer Websites
Quora is the leading question and answer platform that receives more than 300 million unique visitors per month. And it is a great place to make money with affiliate marketing without a website.
You can’t publish an affiliate link on Quora. It is considered spam and it will be removed. However, it doesn’t mean you can’t use Quora for affiliate marketing. You need to link to the PDFs you created or forum posts that have affiliate links via Quora.
The idea is to link indirectly. Send visitors to a page, post, file or PDF that has your affiliate links. This is a perfect way to utilize Quora for affiliate marketing without spending a penny.
The best part: Quora isn’t the only question-answer platform out there. There are several others that you can use. Most of them (if not all) don’t allow affiliate links so you’ll have to add indirect links.
Here are other leading question and answer websites you can use:
Final Words
Making money with affiliate marketing isn’t a big deal. Whether you want to do it with a website or without a website, you have the options. It is just a matter of choice. If you want to know how to make money with affiliate marketing without a website, you’ll find several ways to do so.
I just covered the best four methods that you can start without any experience or expense. Get started today.
Featured Image: Pexels
