How to Make Money Without a Website with Affiliate Marketing

Having your own successful website and blog can do wonders for your online business.

However, before pouring all of your time, energy and resources into one, Digistore24 recommends first trying out alternative methods of making money online as an affiliate without a website.

This article contains all the tips and tricks on how to successfully embark on this journey and start building a passive income source like a pro without a website.

How to Make Money Online Without a Website with Affiliate Marketing Without

Outlining and building a website can be both time-consuming and expensive, but fortunately, you don’t need a website to make money online with affiliate marketing! Yes, a website can help your affiliate marketing business and your brand, but ultimately, it doesn’t mean you can’t have success without one. There are countless alternatives besides creating an affiliate website, regardless if you’re just looking to make a quick buck, or plan to do this long-term and have affiliate marketing replace your full-time income.

As an affiliate, especially early on, one of your main goals should be figuring out clever ways to send quality traffic to the offer(s) you’re promoting. Thankfully, this can be done through various ways, including email marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising, and more. But before we jump into the ultimate guide on how to make money online without a website as an affiliate, let’s break down the basics of affiliate marketing.

We also did an article on how to learn affiliate marketing for free, so you can also check that one out when you have a moment.

What is Affiliate Marketing? The Basics to Get You Started

If you’re wondering how you can become a successful affiliate marketer, you first need to understand how things work. We won’t be going into fully explaining all the details, however, we’ll outline a couple of basic tips to put you on the right track.

Essentially, affiliate marketing encompasses any form of marketing where an affiliate (marketer) earns commissions and generates passive income by promoting someone else’s existing product through online channels, like YouTube, forums, email, Facebook, ads, and more, and then referring them sales.

But first, make sure you browse a couple of affiliate marketing networks, and join one! (Digistore24 *hint, hint*). Once you're a member, you can start promoting affiliate products even without having your own domain set up.

Before diving into some actionable tips, let’s go through a couple of affiliate marketing basics just in case you need a refresher.

What is an Affiliate Offer?

In order to make serious money online, you first need something to market, ie an affiliate product or offer. An affiliate product or offer can be a physical product, like a supplement, or a digital offer like an online webinar or eBook. Before anything else, make sure you find & select the right affiliate niche to pick a product or offer from to promote. Usually, try picking something you are already familiar with, so you won’t have to spend too much time doing research on a topic. Choosing the best affiliate marketing product to promote in the beginning can mean a lot for your affiliate marketing business - and ultimately whether you’ll have success or not.

Picking a Traffic Source

Picking the best traffic sources for affiliate marketing is equally as important as picking the right niche and offer. For example, if you choose to promote a fitness and health vertical, you need to position your ads to target people who are interested in this niche. You can either place ads on specific websites, create content on social media, or get your hands on a mailing list. Ultimately, a great chunk of your success will boil down to how well you can connect your offer with the right audience, and what marketing channel you use.

So, now that we went over some of the basics, let’s explore one more element you could play around with before we jump into the top 6 ways to do affiliate marketing without a website.

How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing with a Landing Page

The next best thing to a website is a landing page. If you go on the Digistore24 Marketplace, you’ll realize all available offers all have their own affiliate sales pages, as well as likely other landing pages with different hooks or for different traffic sources. If by chance you stumble upon an offer you’d like to promote that only has a sales page that doesn’t fit with your traffic source’s compliance or your audience, you can create a landing page by yourself to act as a squeeze page. But let’s slow down a bit…

What is an Affiliate Marketing Landing Page?

A landing page is like a one-page website. For affiliate marketing, it basically serves as an intermediary between your ad or promo and the sales page. A strong lander with informative content increases credibility and can drastically improve the customer experience and your conversions. Plus, if you’re running ads on your social media accounts, having a landing page is pretty much a must, especially on Facebook, due to their strict compliance requirements. According to Facebook, some sales pages are not compliant for their platform. 

Creating a landing page isn’t that difficult. You don’t need to be tech-savvy or spend hours on researching how to do it. If you want to have a stable passive income source and earn money online with your own landing page, make sure to check out Digibiz24. It’s a highly intuitive tool that lets you easily create and build landing pages to attract customers.

Top 5 Ways to Make Money Online Without a Website with Affiliate Marketing

Now that we have established the basics of affiliate marketing and explored what a landing page is, it’s time to dive into several proven affiliate marketing strategies that will land you some extra money and don’t require you to have a domain. The following techniques can definitely put some money in your pocket, but you still need to put in the necessary time and effort to learn how each of these work in order to actually be successful sustainably.

Let’s start the top 5 list with social media.

1. Leverage Every Social Media Platform

Look, most of us already spend too much time on social media, but few of us know how to use social media for affiliate marketing - so why not try to harness its power and learn how to make some money while we’re at it? Making money as an affiliate marketer on social media is by no means easy. There’s a lot of hard work involved and a tremendous amount of research. However, most people are already familiar with all the popular social media platforms, so embarking on this affiliate marketing journey might not feel like you’re starting from scratch if you start with Facebook or Instagram.

Let’s explore some of the most popular social platforms that can be a great fit to promote affiliate offers.

How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

We’ll just assume you already have a Facebook page or account, but if you don’t, it’s pretty easy to create one. Facebook might not be an extremely popular social media platform these days, but there’s a lot of potential there for affiliate marketing. Boasting over 2.9 billion users, you can pretty much tap into any audience in the world when you learn the ins and outs of the platform.

But if you’re just starting out, we recommend starting small and building your way up. Initially, you don’t even need to pour any of your money into ads on the platform; you can simply try growing organically. Facebook is tough on compliance nowadays, so make sure to review their terms and conditions to avoid your statuses or posts getting flagged.

If you already have a personal account, it’s highly unlikely your current “Friends” list will provide the engagement you’re looking for. What we recommend doing is picking a niche, like personal development, for example, and start adding people to your “Friends” that you think will be interested in what you are promoting. You can also join specific Facebook groups to promote offers, although try to provide value to avoid the risk of getting kicked out for just spamming affiliate links. The best strategy here is to join a group where people share a common problem (ex, losing weight), then providing them with weight loss tips, ultimately linking to a weight loss affiliate product. The best thing about Facebook, as you can probably tell, is that you can utilize many free affiliate marketing techniques.

If you want to jump into paid advertisement, you can take your affiliate promos to the next level with Facebook Ads, but make sure you get a hang of their Business Suite Manager first. Plus, don’t forget to check out Digistore24’s Facebook CAPI tool for further assistance.

Here are some of the best types of affiliate marketing offers that you could promote on Facebook.

How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

Instagram is a very visual platform, so one of your main focuses here should be creating content that is pleasing to the eye and stands out. If you want to be successful on this platform, your posts should be high-quality, your stories engaging and fun, and the overall tone of your content should be informative. When people see that you are trying to help them with your content, they will be more inclined to buy from you. 

When starting out with affiliate marketing on Instagram, try not to focus on sales, but rather on being of value to your audience. If you do a good job, sales will most definitely follow. Remember to make use of Instagram’s Story Link feature to guide your traffic to your lander, and don’t forget to set up a Linktree account to post both educational & affiliate offer links in your bio. In addition, remember to always focus on building connections and partnerships. Lastly, make sure you post frequently & consistently!

How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest

Pinterest might seem a bit underrated when it comes to affiliate marketing, but it’s definitely not, and it’s worth checking out to make some extra money. The platform has tremendous potential for sending traffic to the offer you’re promoting, and conversions are usually pretty high through this marketing medium.

All you need to do is create different category Boards and populate them with Pins. Just make sure the photos you upload are yours, or they don’t infringe any copyright if you get them from somewhere else.

Pinterest essentially works as a search engine, so when people search for a specific topic, one of your Pins might pop up. Just make sure you hyperlink your Pins, so when the user clicks on them, they are taken to the affiliate offer.

2. Harness the Power of Ads

Growing organically on social media takes more time and energy, but working with ads allows you to see results much quicker. So, let’s check out how you can increase your earnings by leveraging ads.

Solo Ads

Making money online with solo ads as is extremely profitable. It is a go-to choice for many affiliates without a website. In case you don’t know how these work, we’ll explain briefly to put you on the right track.

Essentially, solo ads are featured in emails or newsletters in which your ad is the only promotional piece. Once users click it, they are taken to the offer's sales page.

So how do you get featured in these emails? Well, let’s say you’re promoting offers on love & relationships, try to make connections with professionals within this sphere, and negotiate a dedicated spot in their email list. Many email list managers in direct response marketing offer CPM drops, aka dedicated paid email drops to their list. 

Once your ad is up and running, all you have to do is keep an eye on the traffic coming from your solo ad, and look for ways to optimize it.

PPC Marketing

Increasing your earnings as an affiliate marketer using PPC is quite lucrative. Even if pay-per-click advertising promises faster results, you have to be good at making & optimizing ads. We already discussed Facebook Ads briefly, but haven’t touched on Google Ads yet. Google Ads aren't very different from Facebook, but it does have key differentiators.

You can earn significant money with paid ads as an affiliate and have your passive income soar, regardless of the platforms you’re running the ads on. However, your ad strategy has to be on point. Knowing some of the basics will help you get started, but for more in-depth knowledge, you have to do some extra research. 

With PPC, you only pay when a user clicks your ad. To get started, all you have to do is create the ad copy, set a budget, and make sure you’re targeting the right audience. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? 

It’s actually pretty straightforward, but when you factor in your competitors, the niche you are targeting, and the price of certain keywords, just to name a few, it can get a bit challenging to generate positive ROI.

Native Ads

If you’re not familiar with native ads, one of the main things you need to know is that this type of advertising matches the content of the platform upon which it appears on - so it doesn’t come off as an ad to end users. They can be found on search engines, different websites, social media, and more. 

When it comes to native advertising for affiliate marketing, don’t forget to make visuals your greatest asset, nail the content, and target the right audience with the right offers. Even though native ads sometimes lead to a blog post or even your own website, they can still be used to link to a pre-lander, or even directly to a sales page if it’s compliant to the platform or medium being used.

3. Hop on Forums

This is one of the more direct approaches. Finding online communities nowadays is pretty easy. Most of the time all you have to do is jump on Reddit and search for a specific subreddit where you can talk about your interests, or ask questions. And let’s not forget the most important aspect: you can also earn some extra money on forums.

Affiliate marketers can easily join many online forums and start providing value to the community. Answer questions, provide insight and slowly start promoting your affiliate link when you gain a little bit of credibility. 

Pro tip: Regardless of the forum you join, always read the community guidelines to determine whether or not promotional activity is allowed.

4. Get Creative on YouTube

There are two ways you can go about increasing revenue as an affiliate on YouTube: paid advertising on YouTube and content creation.

Organic advertising on YouTube basically means you become a content creator. First decide what type of YouTube channel you’re going to be, and what offers you plan to advertise - and then build on that. For instance, you can create unboxing and review videos of different products. You can also choose to keep it digital and establish a channel for business and investment topics, for example. The possibilities are truly endless.

Pro tip: Create relevant content, and always mention the products you’re trying to sell in your videos, and link them in the video description. Earning money on YouTube with affiliate marketing is not that hard... However, you need to put in the necessary work to become successful.

As far as paid advertising on YouTube goes, you can create any type of ad you’d like, and see what works best with your niche. You can play around with in-video ads, bumper ads, or overlay ads, just to name a few, depending on your budget and skills.

5. Build a Community Through Email Marketing

We mentioned email marketing briefly when we spoke about solo ads (this is another great way to do affiliate marketing without a website). Besides solo ads, one of the main ways you can use email marketing is by building your own email lists and sending personalized offers, newsletters, or content pieces to your traffic. The best thing about affiliate email marketing is you own that data, and so, you can promote as many affiliate products to your list as you want. And on top of that, you can link directly to any sales page you’d like.

You can easily earn additional income as an affiliate without your own site by leveraging email. All you need is a list of subscribers - which you can build out & grow by yourself.

One of the ways you can do this is by leveraging the emails of your existing customers. You can also create surveys or quiz funnels and ask for the email address at the end. You can share these survey sites on forums or social media. Also, consider offering free courses or a free ebook via ads where the customer has to provide an email in order to receive the goods.

Once you have a decent amount of email addresses, you can start sending out content and affiliate marketing promotions to your subscribers.

Pro tip: Make sure your emails are written well, look professional and don’t contain spammy words so you don’t end up in the Promotions tab or Spam folder.

How to Make Your First Sale

If you need a little bit of extra help to make your first sale, make sure to tune into this Affiliate Marketing Academy episode, and let Olivia, Digistore24 Social Media Manager, guide you through the entire process.

Final Thoughts

Making money online as an affiliate without a website isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s actually very doable. By leveraging a multitude of outlets, you can successfully promote products for a long period of time before even considering building your own website or blog. Sometimes, a slick affiliate landing page is enough, and most of the time, you won’t even need that.

If you’re looking to earn money online fast, you can start with paid advertising campaigns, or if you want to make a mark in this industry and don’t mind taking it slow, you can focus on building a community on social media and/or with email. However, a good approach is sometimes combining a little bit of everything, but taking it one step at a time. 

You can have some ads running while also building your social media following; once you gather details about your traffic, you can create your own email list, and if you have the time, you can even hop on forums to provide value, as well as create YouTube videos.

Want to become a Digistore24 affiliate? Simply go here to register for free.