I want to state upfront that I am not in favor of affiliate marketing without a website.  However, some people can make a very good living this way.  I want to emphasize that most do not.

My main problem with affiliate marketing sans website is that without a website you aren’t building as asset over time.  In other words, everything you do today to make money you will have to copy tomorrow and next week and next year.  Without a website there is no asset, no reputation to build.  Also, there’s no email list building or viral marketing without a website.

Affiliate Marketing without a Website is still appealing…

The dream for most of us is to find a way to make a living online with as little effort as possible.  We dream of working no more than 3 hours a day just doing the aspects of internet marketing we enjoy and making $100k even a million.

Affiliate marketing without a website seems like an ideal way to make money without the hassle of dealing with building, hosting, and maintaining a site.  Promoting a product without an intermediary website is known as direct linking.  In other words you go about your marketing campaign for the affiliate product and the only link you ever place on any site or advertisement is your affiliate link.

Details, I want details…

PPC is the obvious source of traffic

In order to drive sales of any product – affiliate or your own – you need to drive traffic to the sales page. There are a couple ways to get traffic to the site of your choice.  The fastest way to gets large quantities of traffic to any site is PPC.

There are a couple of things to be aware of regarding PPC however.  (Most of my experience is with Google AdWords and so most of these obsservations are for AdWords not Yahoo or MSN.)

First, AdWords has a rule about there only being 1 ad in their system showing ads for a given display URL.  So if someone else is already advertising on AdWords with a direct link to the affiliate product you are promoting then your ad won’t show up.  I believe this is 1 ad per keyword so you may be able to find profitable keywords that no one is advertising on but obviously this takes significantly more work at the keyword research stage.

Second, AdWords calculates your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) based on several factors.  One of those factors is the success of previous ads that pointed to a given domain.  In many instances where people are learning PPC for the first time they realize that their first couple of campaigns flopped.  So they re-work the ad copy and now the campaign generates good traffic.  However, the CPC is still high despite a good Quality Score.  This is because Google has retained a history of previous ad success when poiting to that domain.  If a bunch of other newbies have pointed bad campaigns at the site’s domain via direct linking it could make your CPC higher than it should be.

Article Marketing is the less obvious source

Article marketing on sites such as Hubpages is another good source of traffic.  Writing affiliate marketing hubs takes some practice so plan on spending a couple of days researching how the successful people do it.  Run some searches within Hubpages to find other people with affiliate marketing pages on similar products.  Study keyword density and do a preliminary SEO analysis on it – i.e. how many incoming links does the page have? what is it’s primary keyword? secondary keywords?  In other words see what they do successfully and what they don’t do well.  Then do it better from an SEO standpoint.

Forums, Blogs, etc.

One of the oldest internet marketing methods is to post comments on blogs and forums with a link in the text or the signature (today it is pretty well limited to signatures).  This is still possible today but a lot of marketers do it.  My own experience driving links to my own sites is that forum and blog link posting require almost daily postings to these sites.  With some luck you may be the top comment on a really hot thread that creates buzz and continued discussion for months.  But even then you will likely have to keep posting every few days in order to maintain your top position.

Affiliate Marketing with a minimal site…

From an SEO standpoint every link you put on a blog, forum, or article marketing site is a potential backlink to the domain of the product you are promoting.  In essence you are building backlinks (and improving the SEO) of the product.  This will make it easier for them to sell product without you.

Also, these backlink efforts and PPC campaigns are work that may generate you income but no lasting asset that you could later sell or leverage for easier profits on future, related, affliate products.  Think about it, if you spend dozens of hours posting backlinks all the internet for a weight loss product and next month you want to promote a fitness or abnominal exercise product you have to repeat all of that work.  However, if you have your own site, even a minimal one, then all of the backlinks for the weight loss product become domain level backlinks for the SEO of any page on the site – including your fitness or ab products.

This post is already too long.  I’ll be doing a separate post for affiliate marketing with a minimal website.