By Fred Farah
You want to start an online business, but don't have what it takes to
start with your own products. You have the option of starting with affiliate
marketing, selling other peoples' products for a commission.
Affiliate marketing provides online entrepreneurs the chance to market
products even without having your own product to sell. All you have to do is to
sign up with a vendor who has an affiliate marketing program, and choose the
products you want to promote. As an affiliate, you are paid by the merchant for
your services on a commission basis, whenever you've directed a visitor to the
merchant's site and the visitor actually buys something.
Becoming an affiliate is usually quick and easy, and for most affiliate
programs, signing up is free. In fact, if it's not free, then just don't join.
There are more than enough no cost choices you can make.
But despite all the benefits of affiliate programs, many people are
still hesitant about getting into affiliate marketing. One of the reasons is
the lack of a website to start marketing their affiliate products with. This
begs the question of whether a website is really necessary.
Actually, you can start promoting affiliate products without a website.
There are stategies that permit you to do this. But don't make any mistake
about the fact that it's a great advantage to have a web site. You can consider
starting without one, but plan to eventually create a web site.
There's only one strategy that you can do without ever needing a web
site. Your income may be limited, but if it suits you, then go for it. The
answer is in PPC, Pay-per-Click advertising. I know people making almost as
much money using Google AdWords PPC ads, as my web site makes.
Other strategies you can use without a web site, include email
marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, and engaging in online
discussion forums.
Email Marketing
Email marketing, using email lists, is actually the second most
popular marketing strategy that works without a website. What you basically do
is maintain a list of your prospective customers and email them information
articles that are relevant to the affiliate products you're promoting.
Just how could you achieve this with no web site?
With an autoresponder! But an autoresponder service costs from $20 to
$30 per month. This is actually more than the cost of hosting a web site, many
of which include a limited autoresponder at no extra cost.
Offline Promotion
Among the common ways to promote your affiliate products offline are
classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads would generally work best
compared to the other two, because classified newspaper ads have a wider reach.
But as you can imagine, these offline methods are all expensive compared
to the modest cost of owning your own web site.
Distributing Free e-books or Reports
Write an e-book or have one written for you by a ghostwriter. This is a
good way for you to promote your affiliate products, as long as your affiliate
links are in the ebook for the selected topic. You could distribute the ebook
via your autoresponder service. The viral effect of a well written and useful
ebook, is quite astonishing.
Just be sure to make the content of your e-books relative to the actual
affiliate products you are promoting. And just as in email marketing, you can
just place text ad links throughout your e-book.
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| Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Ezines are online newsletters that inform your subscribers about the
specific topics. If you don't have a website and yet want to be an affiliate,
you can use your ezine to promote your affiliate products.
If you have a website, your ezine article would be archived, and becomes
content for your site. Another advantage to having a website.
Online Discussion Forums
With or without a website, you just can't ignore discussion forums
because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. Most
forums won't allow sales promotions, but you will find some that do.
With all these strategies, it may appear that you really don't need a
website to start marketing your affiliate products. Well, starting in an affiliate
program without a website may be do-able, but being successful is another
thing. While you can achieve some success without a website, it is rare.
Greater success requires a web site, if not now, then maybe in the near future.
Again, having a website is not mandatory, but with the advantages
presented, I'm glad I do have one, because it really makes affiliate marketing
a lot easier for me. You should too!
Good luck with your affiliate venture.
Fred Farah
copyright 2005
Article Source: EzineArticles expert: Fred Farah
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