It is possible to do affiliate marketing without investment, although it will likely take a lot longer. With investment you can buy traffic and invest in high ticket affiliate programs, which pay larger commissions. You can also purchase training and support if you’re prepared to invest.
However, if you’re running an affiliate business on a shoestring budget, or on no money at all, there’s a few strategies you can use. Here’s an overview of some of the strategies you can use which are either cheap or cost only your time. If you have nothing to invest, you’ll need to invest more time. If you can invest a small amount, you can give yourself an advantage. This article aims to cover the cheaper and free options of doing affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Without Investment
I started affiliate marketing without much investment. I bought a few courses which were cheap, and followed the advice I was given. If you have anything to invest, I would suggest investing in your education. It’s the one thing no one can take away from you and has the largest rewards over time. Access a free video training series here which explains the various affiliate business models you can use.
Without investing in anything, you can generate content on platforms like these:
- YouTube – upload videos to YouTube and link to affiliate products which relate to your content
- Hubpages.com – Hubpages.com is where I started out. It’s a free platform which lets you create content and link to affiliate products.
- WordPress.com – is another free blogging platform which lets you create written content and link out to affiliate offers.
- Social media platforms – you probably already use Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram or another social media platform. Get to know the methods of unpaid social media marketing, and leverage your platform of choice to promote affiliate products.
Affiliate Marketing Without Investment – Traffic
The main problem for affiliates is getting traffic to their affiliate offers. See get traffic to your website free. You’ll need to be inventive and use a strategy you can work on over a long period of time. Blogging is a simple strategy I use to generate traffic to my websites. You can use the free blog sites like Hubpages, WordPress or even create a free website with Weebly.com, or one of the many other sites which offers that service:
- Weebly.com
- WordPress.com
- Wix.com
- Site123.com
- Strikingly.com
- and many more..
But just having a website is no guarantee of traffic. You’ll need to create content to get traffic and the freebie sites aren’t those which the search engines trust the most. A worthwhile investment is to get your own website and hosting provider. That way you have more freedom to create affiliate links you choose without restrictions from the free website providers. Some of them will limit the kind of affiliate links you can use.
Free website providers won’t rank as highly as those which are purchased. Google will therefore limit your traffic and you’re likely to need to work a lot longer building content on them. For more information on building your own site and getting a domain name, see this article.
Affiliate Marketing Without Investment – Groundwork
Before even starting your website, it’s a good idea to know what subject you are going to be creating content around; or what marketing tactic you’ll be using. Without this understanding, you can spend a lot of time getting things wrong.
Most affiliates quit far too early because they don’t have a long term strategy and/or the belief and confidence in it over the long term. With a “no investment” affiliate business, you’ll need to have a good long term strategy and be able to sustain the work over a long enough period to break through.
Your marketing strategy will depend on your natural leanings and your ability to create content or connect with people online. Some people use social media marketing and others create content. If you’re more comfortable on video, you could upload videos to YouTube regularly to build a following.
For more ideas of free and cheap marketing strategies see my post 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Choosing Your Affiliate Products
Ideally, choose affiliate products which you are aligned with; those products which you yourself have purchased, or would want to purchase. If you align with a product, the chances are much greater that people you attract through your content will also find them desirable. Plus, if you get to know a product, you’ll have some ideas to create content around them.
If you have some ideas about the content you want to provide, look for affiliate products which relate to your content. You can easily find affiliate programs which relate to most topics and interests. Simply do an internet search for “{your niche} affiliate programs/products”.
So if you’re a keen gardener, you can look for”gardening affiliate programs”. Choose a program which is most suited to you, your interests and the content you are going to create.
A Review Website
A good idea for affiliate marketing without investment is a review website. Reviews can even be written on free blogging sites such as Hubpages.com. One of my very first affiliate sales came from a review I put up on Hubpages.com about a software program I have bought called Xsitepro. The software is obsolete now since WordPress came along (and the many other website builders). But at the time it worked for me and I built a few nice looking websites using it.
The key about review websites is they attract buyer traffic. There’s a huge difference between attracting a website visitor who wants to buy and one who wants something for free. A review brings in someone looking specifically at a product or products they want to buy, or are thinking of buying. If you can get your review website to get found, you can earn commissions from your visitors quite quickly. But again it comes down to your ability to get free traffic to your website.
A Niche Website
A niche website is what this site is. It’s a website built specifically to cover a very niche topic. This one is built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. Although not entirely free, it’s a very cheap way to build an affiliate business though blogging.
Most niches are pretty competitive today so it can be difficult attracting traffic, particularly when you start out. But if you stick at it long enough, you can get the attention of the search engines and build free traffic to your site. If you link well to affiliate products which are well targeted towards your audience, you can start generating sales from your blogs. See also how to know your target market.
It’s also a good idea to define a niche within a niche, also known as micro niche. With a niche such as affiliate marketing, it’s very competitive. But if you target affiliate marketing for seniors, for example, you’ll find less competition. So if your topic is gardening, you might choose a specific type of gardening to limit your potential competition. See also best micro niche for blogging.
Blogging Strategy
I use a blogging strategy which is low cost. The main cost is my time, which for many is more valuable than money – depending on how much they have of either! If you have time, but not much to invest, this can be a good strategy to implement. My blogging strategy involves finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
There’s a great free tool called the Google Keyword Planner. This tool can show you the keywords people search for online in your particular niche. Find the keywords which offer the least competition and write long, quality articles around those keywords. Use an SEO tool, I use Yoast SEO , to help you write the posts. Share posts on social media (I use a plugin called Revive Old Posts – which is free).
YouTube – Free Strategy
YouTube is a great platform to gain exposure and promote affiliate products. Anyone can join and upload their videos to build out their YouTube channel. If you’re going to use YouTube organically (without paying), you should expect to make a daily habit out of uploading videos covering your chosen affiliate topic for several months before you start gaining traction.
For any content marketing, YouTube included, you’re looking to create a back catalogue of content which can create free traffic over time to your affiliate offers. A small amount of content will only have a tiny impact, or none at all. But over time, if you are consistent, you can build a nice automatic trickle income from your affiliate products.
For more on free marketing ideas and strategies see get traffic to your website free.