Do Affiliate Marketers Need Websites?

Do you want to make money with an Internet business but don't have enough experience or capital to start your own online business? You don't have to worry, since a lot of online marketing options exist for you to start with. One of these options is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing provides first time online marketers like you the chance to market something online without having your own product to sell. All you have to do is to sign up with an affiliate marketing program, which is usually owned by an online merchant or retailer, and start picking the products you want to promote. As an affiliate, you are paid by the merchant for your services on a commission basis, whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant's site and the visitor actually buys something. Becoming an affiliate is often quick and easy, and for most affiliate programs, signing up is also free. But despite these and all the benefits being promised by affiliate programs, many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One of the reasons why a lot of people remain hesitant is the lack of a website to start marketing affiliate products with. This now leads to the question of whether a website is required or necessary in affiliate marketing or not. Many people say that one can do affiliate marketing even without a website. You can really start promoting and marketing your affiliate products even without a website; and there are a lot of ways this can be done. Among these strategies are email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, message boards and others. Email marketing is actually one of the most popular affiliate marketing strategies that doesn't require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this affiliate marketing strategy, what you basically do is maintain a list of the email adresses of your prospective customers and provide them with articles that are related to the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. Articles that you provide your contacts with need not always be promotional, since many individuals find such types of email annoying. Rather, it can be better if you provide them with something informative and just add small text ads that link to your affiliate site. There are many ways you can promote your affiliate products offline. Among the more common mediums used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audience. If you have a knack for writing, developing an e-book can be the best way for you to promote your affiliate products without an actual website. Just like emails and newsletters, your readers would better appreciate your e-book if it 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 link to your affiliate site. Ezine articles are publications that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don't have a website, but want to be an affiliate, you can use ezines to promote your affiliate products. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But if you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various ezines, like those found at goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and others. With or without a website, you just can't ignore online discussions 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. It is considered bad form to make forum posts just to advertise your affiliate site, but you can use carefully placed references to your site without invoking the ire of the forum moderator. 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. While one can actually gain enormous success in affiliate marketing even without a website, having a website can help you reach better 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, having a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time, can help you with your affilate businesse(s). Having a website creates some 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, you may find that you would rather have one and make your affiliate marketing a lot easier.