There’s lots of ways to promote affiliate products for free. You can write content on free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. Upload videos to YouTube and TikTok and link back to affiliate products and your blog posts. You can link to your content through article marketing sites such as ezinearticles.com and through article guest posting and blog and forum commenting. All of this takes time and effort of course. But if you’re willing to put in the work, you can make affiliate sales without spending a dime!
If you’re willing to spend a little, it’s well worth getting your own website. Having your own domain name and hosting sets you apart a little online and gives you more control of your content. Some free blog platforms will limit the links you’re allowed to post. With your own website, you’re in charge! Plus, the search engines will give you more kudos with your own domain and hosting. So using free blog platforms means you can have a harder time getting traffic.
Your own website looks far better for your potential customers too. It shines of more authority than a free blog platform does. This can affect your sales considerably.
Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Email Marketing
You can also promote affiliate products through email marketing. Get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing by clicking on the banner below.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. By building an email list of subscribers, an email list can give you much more clout than a website can. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision using one of your affiliate links.
But once you get them onto your email list, this period of time is vastly extended. Often subscribers will purchase something from an email list months or even years after subscribing. With an email list you can build trust with your subscribers by giving them value in your email follow up campaigns.
When people get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you. Data shows that most customers will need several touch points before making a buying decision. Email marketing lets you do this with customers. Selling directly from a website makes it more difficult for a visitor to trust you completely, because they don’t yet know you.
Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Blogging
Blogging is one of the simplest and most straight forward ways to attract an audience for your affiliate products. Whether you use a free blog platform or have your own website (recommended), you can continue creating content and attract an audience from the search engines. This doesn’t happen immediately and often bloggers will find it can take several months or years before they attract free traffic in abundance.
Initially though, you can attract an audience through sharing your content on the social media platforms. There’s a number of free plugins you can use if you have your own WordPress website. This is another reason why having your own domain name and hosting is recommended for traffic. You can more easily optimise your own website, and add plugins to help you get shares. This can’t be done on free blog platforms. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Creating content which ranks on the search engines can take some time. For the fastest results, aim for the long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty. Writing content for shorter phrases which get more traffic may seem like a good idea. But those keyword phrases are hugely competitive and therefore you’re less likely to rank your content for them.
Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Social Media
Social media platforms are a good source of traffic for your affiliate products. You only need a strategy which you can get stuck into to start generating results. You don’t need hundreds of strategies, only one which works! See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube attract millions of visitors every single day. Tapping into this potential goldmine can be done with simply daily habits. A simple Facebook strategy is to join groups where you target audience might be hanging out. (See target audience for affiliate marketing.)
Interact with people in your selected groups and answer questions. As you do this more, people will naturally gravitate towards your profile to have a look at you. If you set up your profile to showcase your offer, those who are interested will naturally checkout your offers and services. Offer something for free, in exchange for people’s emails. That way you can collect subscribers and build an email list. Then promote your products through your list.
There’s many strategies like this one which are absolutely free to use. You just need to be a little patient and make habits out of doing the work every single day. Over time this builds up and you should see some people interacting on your website, signing up to your offer and buying your affiliate products. See also unpaid social Media marketing.
Think Outside The Box
Another simple strategy for free product promotion is to tag your affiliate link on your email signature. This may look a little spammy, so it’s worth purchasing a domain name which you can forward to your affiliate link.
So instead of a long, messy affiliate link, your link is a domain name (e.g. yourproduct.com rather than https://tinyurl.com/mnkkkk4m). When people see a messy affiliate link, they are less likely to click on it. But a clear domain name which gives more context is more likely to arouse their interest.
Once you have set your email signature to include your link once, you never need to think about it again. All outgoing emails will showcase your domain name (and/or affiliate link).
Link shortening can also be done very quickly using sites such as
- TinyURL
- ShortURL
- Cutt.ly
- Bitly
- Ow.ly
- Buff.ly
See also where to promote affiliate links and low cost advertising techniques.