Do Affiliate Marketers Really Need a Website?

by David Cooper

Your main goal as an affiliate marketer is to increase your stream of income without having to become a product owner yourself. Do you still need a website of your own if you’re just pushing other people’s products?

The answer is – yes and no. It’s not a necessity, but having your own website can be a boon to your online affiliate sales. Technically, you can be an affiliate for someone else’s product and promote your link through article marketing, blogs, forum posts, and other non-site specific methods.

But each time someone follows your link directly to the product owner’s pitch page, you’re allowing them to opt out of a lifetime of future sales through you. You’ll be working longer and harder for each sale because for every new sale, you have to cast your net all over again.

If you have a domain of your own, you can set up a simple opt-in form where people can subscribe to your list and cater to their needs week after week, without having to return to the ‘net each time to find new prospects.

Instead, you build a list of people interested in your niche topics, and then find other products to promote to them. It’s much easier to visit ClickBank for a new product to promote than it is to drum up new customers to buy a single product.

In order to build a list, you need a simple domain (or even a blog will do), with an autoresponder tool you can use to capture the contact information and store the names for you. This is known as a squeeze page, where your primary goal is to get the contact information in hand.

You have to know how to convince your target audience to opt in to your list. Grabbing their attention and keeping it brief is key. Don’t require them to read through a 25-page sales letter only to find out at the end that all they had to do was enter their name and email address in a box to get their hands on some sort of freebie.

Some affiliate marketers even have larger websites that house lots of reviews of the various products they promote. Sometimes they’ll pit two like-products against one another, giving an evaluation of each one’s strengths and weaknesses, but each review includes their affiliate link for possible commission earnings.

Is a website a necessity? No. But if you want to increase your affiliate sales and work less, then you at least need to develop a simple opt-in form on a domain that you can brand within your niche.