Why do you need a website for affiliate marketing? While technically you can still do affiliate marketing without a website, a website is definitely a good idea. If you don’t own a website and still want to do affiliate marketing you’re definitely making your life more difficult! Why wouldn’t you use every tool at your disposal to make an affiliate business work? Whatever your strategy to sell affiliate products a website will help you to attract targeted visitors. If you’re trying another strategy such as using free blog platforms, or social media, you’re leaving money on the table.
With a website, you can build free traffic or pay for targeted website visitors who you can convert into email subscribers. This is one of the best ways to do affiliate marketing. You can also technically collect email subscribers without a website, although you’ll need a landing page software of some kind to do this effectively. This is arguably also a website though, but it’s the best way to do affiliate marketing if you’re determined not to have a website.
Still, I would say a website is worth its weight in gold once it is working for you and especially if you have created some free traffic to it!
Why Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?
A website is your digital property which shows your potential customers you mean business and are serious. Pasting your affiliate link hither and thither only shows everyone that you’re not serious! Having a real website shows some authority and that you’ve made some effort! This in turn will be much more likely to win you some customers compared to a long messy affiliate link pasted on your social media profile!
A website can be used to attract customers for free too! While free blogging platforms can do the same, they don’t carry as much authority. The search engines and customers will see a website in a better light, and this build more trust.
Trust is pretty important when you’re buying something online and a website is much more effective at doing this than other free marketing methods you can use. So a major reason you need a website for affiliate marketing is your personal authority.
Traffic
A website is a tool for acquiring traffic and without traffic you won’t succeed with selling affiliate products. While you can use other strategies to attract traffic, a website is one of the best ways to consolidate your “stamp” of authority and send potential customers.
You can use a website to attract traffic in a couple of main ways:
- Building content through blogging and attracting free traffic from the search engines
- Sending paid traffic to it
Both of these strategies can be used in conjunction with email marketing, depending on the products you are selling. With email marketing, you send customers to a freebie giveaway and collect their email details in exchange for your free gift. Email marketing is a good tactic to use particularly for digital products because it can take more explaining and trust building on order to sell them. Whereas with physical products the product is more obvious to a potential customer. But whichever product you sell, and email list can help you build trust and a relationship with potential customers over the longer term. Whereas on a website, a visitor often will only stick around for a few minutes before they are gone forever!
Summary
Why do you need a website to do affiliate marketing? While you can become an affiliate without a website, many affiliate programs require you to have a professional website and often a certain amount of traffic and/or email leads too. Even if you find a program which doesn’t require this, a website is a huge advantage.
It can be used to help potential customers with enquires and questions. It can show you are an authority in your niche. Mostly though an affiliate website is used to attract visitors and turn those visitors into customers. This can be done through organic search or paid traffic and through social media.
Without a website as an affiliate you’re giving yourself a serious disadvantage. why would you want to do that? Better to take all the tools and techniques you can use at your disposal to make your affiliate business work. Affiliate marketing is hard enough without giving yourself a disadvantage!