Do I Need A Website to Sell Affiliate Products Online?
Posted by admin | 
June 28th, 2007
Yes and No.
Both methods work, they just work differently for different people.
If you have a website, can design your own, or are comfortable with the idea of paying someone to develop a website for you, AND, if you know how to generate traffic to your website, then you will probably enjoy having your own website to promote from.
If you feel that creating a website is too expensive, time consuming or not worth the bother, you can find ways to advertise the product you are promoting and let the merchant’s website do the selling.
So let’s look at both methods in more detail, and explore a few of the pros and cons of each.
Let’s start with promoting products WITHOUT a website, because that is the quickest way to start promoting affiliate products.
This can often be the fastest way to start making money with affiliate programs, but it requires a bit of skill, persistance, patience, and money.
Generally, someone who makes money by promoting affiliate products without having their own website is paying for advertising. They use a pay per click service, such as Google AdWords, and they create ads which promote a specific affiliate product.
They place their affiliate link in the ad and anytime someone clicks, the affiliate is credited for sending the visitor. The person who clicked the ad ends up on the merchant’s website. If they choose to buy the product, the affiliate who paid for the ad will be credited with the sale, and they’ll earn commissions as usual.
Affiliates who use these direct promotional methods to earn money from affiliate products spend their time researching keywords to place their ads under, and writing or refining their advertisements. Some affiliates spend a lot of money on this method, and many make a lot of money with this method as well. Usually in the beginning though, you spend much more money than you make.
Most affiliates who use these methods also tend to have multiple campaigns going at once. And some of those might make great money while others fail miserably. With time, attention, patience, experience and adequate funds, this often turns out to be a very lucrative way to make money with affiliate programs. And it doesn’t take much time or effort once you’ve gotten a bit of experience under your belt.
Promoting Affiliate Products With a Website
Some people (myself included) prefer to create websites of their own, and use those as the primary vehicle for driving traffic to the preferred affiliate partners.
This method can be just as lucrative as the other, but it can take just as much time, effort, learning, patience and money. In fact, I’d say it usually more, and the process is longer because bottom line is, it takes time to get potential customers to your site, and even more time for them to find something of interest, click your link, and subsequently, make a purchase.
When building a website for Affiliate Marketing purposes, you must first build the website. This alone takes time, money and effort. Then you must add content to that website. Often you have to add content on a regular, frequent basis while it’s becoming established. A static website with no new content quickly becomes stale, and visitors quickly lose interest in what you have to say or the products you are promoting.
Once your website is created and you have a plan in place for adding quality content, you must also ensure your website is both visitor and search engine friendly. One of the main reasons affiliates decide to create their own websites in fact, is because they hope to eventually get lots of free traffic from organic search engine results. So SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) optimizing the website is another important step to success with this method. If you don’t know how to do this you can take the time to research the process online, or you can hire someone to do this. But do this you must, because without traffic your website is already dead in the water!
So once you have your website design, content, and optimization done, or at least started, you still have to generate traffic to the site. And once the traffic has arrived, you still have to convert that traffic into affiliate product sales. And yes, this can be a lot of work.
Over time however, if you’ve done a good job with your website and traffic generation, you should be able to do less work while seeing an increase in affiliate income. Some people can see things improving within a month or two, while others are still struggling to make their affiliate website work six months to a year later.
And that’s why I say it can cost about the same as using direct advertising methods. When you build a website and do all the work yourself, it feels like it’s all free. You don’t have to actually fork over cash other than the initial domain name payment or website hosting, and those are cheap these days. You do however, have to spend hours, days, weeks and months - doing a lot of really hard work - to start seeing results.
If you think of that time spent in terms of hourly pay, you might find you’ve been working for something like $1 an hour. You’re investing time into the chance that you’ll receive a big payoff in the future. And you might, if you invest enough time and effort.
If you use direct advertising methods you’re investing more cash than you are time. And you can start seeing returns much sooner as well. Of course you can become bankrupt much sooner too, and this is why different people choose to approach affiliate marketing in different ways.
If you have a good solid source of extra funds, you might choose to become an expert in direct advertising methods so that you can see the returns faster. If on the other hand, you’re short on funds but you have plenty of extra time on your hands, it might be better for you to create an excellent high traffic website instead. Both ways work.
Conclusion is: Like any business, affiliate marketing with or without a website involves refining your strategy plus making a considerable investment of time, work, money, and the right tools. And, like any offline business, growth can be slow.
However, if you enjoy working with your computer and are able to see beyond the obstacles, plus, you have the drive and incentive to work hard, chances are, given time and experience you will succeed.
