Basically you can answer this question with "no", as a publisher you don't necessarily need your own website to generate revenue with affiliate marketing. It has always been clear until now that it is better to advertise affiliate products via a website, because as a publisher you have many more marketing possibilities in your hands than if you place your affiliate link without a website in the various advertising channels. But the fact remains that affiliate marketing without a website can work very well.
Generating affiliate commissions without your own website
Ultimately, the only way to generate affiliate revenue, simply put, is for as many people as possible to click on the affiliate link and then buy something or perform some action, whether it's filling out an insurance form, subscribing to a newsletter, or performing a defined action for which the merchant will pay a commission. There are several ways to distribute your affiliate link on the Internet. The important thing is to achieve a large reach for the link in order to get a corresponding number of clicks and actions from the user.
Social media channels
The various social media channels are particularly suitable for spreading your affiliate link.
Facebook and Google
The decisive factor for success here is also that as a profile owner you have a large number of friends on Facebook and Google in order to get the best possible distribution of the link. However, it would be fair to make it clear to Facebook and Google users that the link is an affiliate link and that you should not spam people with your links. This has a rather negative effect, it is forbidden to post affiliate links on Facebook and Google.
Twitter
The same goes for the microblogging service Twitter as for Facebook and Google in terms of reach. You will only be successful with your affiliate links here if you have a high number of followers, ideally several thousand. On Twitter, too, you need to mark the link as an advertisement and not exaggerate the tweeting of affiliate links, so don't post such tweets several times a day.
Youtube
If you want to use the well-known video channel for your affiliate marketing, you should set up a separate channel for each advertised product and post videos about the product, preferably customer testimonials. Although it sounds a bit complicated, customer reviews of products can be bought for little money these days, but it is certainly not the most serious way to advertise products. Finally, you should place the affiliate link under the published video, so that users can find a way to buy the product immediately. To make your YouTube channel popular, you also need a high number of page views and backlinks, so you certainly need to invest a lot of time in marketing measures to get affiliate income with the channel. If you already have a successful video channel with a few subscribers, you can proceed to create a small promotional video for an advertised product from time to time and put it on the channel. In the video, they can do a review of the product or show what the product has done for them. It is important that you fully support the affiliate product and that it also earns good commissions. Digital information products are best suited for this, where commissions of 30-50% for a mediated sale are often paid.
Forums
Forums are also a good way to reach the right target group and place an affiliate link. However, you should carefully read the forum rules before doing so, to see if it is allowed. If it is, don't go overboard with the distribution of affiliate links, otherwise you risk being expelled from the forum.
Banner advertising on foreign websites
One paid advertising option is to place your affiliate banners on other blogs or websites. You should check if it is worth it financially, not that you are paying more money for the banner ad than you are generating revenue from the affiliate link. Placing advertising via Google AdWords would theoretically work too, but some people claim that this is prohibited by Google. In addition, many affiliate program providers prohibit the distribution of these links, so you should refrain from this advertising opportunity.
What do affiliate program providers allow?
Finally, the question arises as to whether the various affiliate networks allow publishers to sign up without having to specify their own website? Most networks such as Affilinet, Zanox, etc. require an own web presence when registering a publisher, also on Amazon and finanzen.de. You must register at least one website for the partner program, otherwise you will not be activated for the different partner programs. As you can see, the choice of partner programs is therefore considerably limited, leaving only Clickbank and Digistore24. Before you plan to advertise for partner programs without your own website, you should pay attention to whether this is possible from the program or the affiliate network.
Conclusion
It is not possible to get affiliate income without your own website, but with your own website or blog you have many more possibilities: you can present the advertised program in blog posts that are interesting and informative for the user, you can do email marketing if you have a newsletter on your site, you can also attract users through your search engine rankings and you are not dependent on social networks or forums and their guidelines, which can change from time to time. Certainly you have to invest a lot more time and energy in your own website to get affiliate income, but affiliate links posted in the various social media networks need to have a wide reach to be successful and for that they are at least as expensive as a website. It is much more interesting to create a website and advertise thematically appropriate affiliate programs on it.
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