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Do you really need a website when promoting an affiliate program?

By Proson Cheng

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Published: 15Mar2008
Word count: 961
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For someone new and wants to start an Internet business, It's often suggested them to try promoting others people's products or to become an affiliate marketer. The reasons are because people who seeks the opportunities to make money online are often less experienced business person or lack of capital to build their own online businesses.

Affiliate marketing provides first time online marketers the chance to sell something on the Internet without having your own products. As an affiliate, depends on the merchant terms and conditions, you can get paid by referring others who purchase the merchants' products, by signing up their newsletters or by just visiting their website.

It is often thought that becoming an affiliate marketer is quick and easy. All you have to do is signing up the merchant's affiliate programs (usually it's free), get your referral links and, promotional materials, and that's it.

Despite all of these benefits that we have discussed above, why people still remain hesitant when comes to join and get started in affiliate marketing? One of the reasons, may be they are lacking of the knowledge to build a website. Sure, they want to make money online and affiliate programs do sound good to them but they just don't know how to build a website!

Now, this comes to a question, is a website really necessary when promote other's people products or affiliate programs?

In this article we will show yous 5 strategies that others people have succeeded before which you do not require a website.

Strategy #1: Email Marketing

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually the most popular affiliate marketing strategy that doesn't require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this strategy, what you basically need to do is maintain a list of the email addresses of your prospective customers and provide them with informational articles that are relevant with the affiliate products or programs that you are promoting. One example of informational articles might be a review article and some useful information around the subject matter of the products that you are trying to promote. For instance, if the subject matter is web hosting. You may write article information on "how to choose a right web hosting package that best fit your requirement", "what are the pros and crons of certain web hosting company", or "how do you distinguish a dedicated server package and half dedicated server package and so on". The idea here is informational and less promotional since it may annoy your subscribers. So how do you promote the programs? Just add a tiny text link advertisement at the end, mentioning about the website and that's it.

Strategy #2: Offline Promotion

Use of classified ads, fliers and brochures. But the common medium among those that we discussed are using classified ads. Classified ads would generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audiences.

Strategy #3 Writing Free e-books, or reports

If you are a good writer, writing an e-book can be the best way for you to promote the affiliate products in the absence of an actual website. Just like in emails and newsletters, your readers would better appreciate your e-book is not too promotional but rather informative. Be sure, however, to make the contents of your e-books relative to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. And just like in email marketing, you can just place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of your e-book that links to the merchant's site.

Strategy #4 Writing Free Ezines

Ezines are publications or articles that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don't have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can well use ezines to promote your affiliate products or to insert links to your merchant's site. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But since you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various websites that hosts ezines, like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and others.

Strategy #5 Online discussions (Forums, Chats, Message Boards, etc.)

With or without a website, you just can't ignore online discussions, forums because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. In chats, forums, message boards and discussion boards with topics related to your products, you can easily find people who may be interested with the products you are promoting.

With all these strategies, it may appear that one really doesn't need to have a website to start marketing his affiliate products and promoting his affiliate programs. Well, starting in an affiliate program without a website may be easy, but getting successful in affiliate marketing without a website is another thing. While one can actually gain enormous success in affiliate marketing even without a website, it is a rare instance that "newbies" like you can reach the same levels of success.

Having a website is not really a pre-requisite in entering into an affiliate program, unless otherwise the program owner would require you to have one. But while this is so, I would still recommend that you have for yourself a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates a lot of advantages in affiliate marketing. For one, it provides you a place where you can creatively promote not only one of your affiliate products but all of your affiliate products. With a website, you can also advertise your affiliate products to a wider market.

Again, having a website is not a requirement in affiliate marketing. But with the advantages that a website can provide, I'd rather have one for myself and make affiliate marketing a lot easier for me.

Proson Cheng, specialize in generating traffic and sign up using social media websites such as Digg , Myspace and facebook. You can read more about him on his latest project Affiliate secrets weapons

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