Affiliate Marketing – Do You Need a Website?

Yes it is possible to sell other people’s products online without a website. You can just use pay per click advertising using your ugly affiliate link but it is not recommended. Also the top article directories do not allow you to use affiliate links to redirect people from your article to a product sales page.

It is recommended that you purchase a domain name and redirect it to an affiliate link so that it no longer looks like one of those ugly affiliate links. This will also satisfy the terms and conditions of some article directories who insist you use a top level domain name to redirect affiliate links. You can also have business cards printed using this domain and hand them out in the offline world.

It may be a good place to start affiliate marketing by using a redirected domain name but it is becoming harder to sell products online these days without first building up a relationship with people interested in buying your recommended products. It is also becoming more and more expensive to use pay per click advertising.

Sooner or later you are going to need your own website to help first build up a relationship with people who buy products on your recommendations. It is also easier to sell to repeat customers so you need somewhere they can find you and see what are your latest recommendations. So you need to build yourself a professional looking website, preferably a blog, where you can add regular content so that your new customers can get to know you and your old customers can read your latest news.

Your website or blog should be full of original, relevant and useful information. Most people go online to look for information not to buy something so do not like to be sold to. They may also filter out your ads so much so that they longer see them. People love articles that are helpful and offer solutions to their problems. Avoid bad fluffy content as this will not help build your credibility.

Good quality content is still king and may help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. Just by posting useful articles will help you be seen as a dependable endorser of any products you promote. Establish a good name and you will build yourself a responsive following and customer base which will in turn will pay you well.

Your website content, layout and graphics should be designed so as to motivate people to visit your site, revisit and ultimately click through to the sales pages of the products you promote.

Websites come in all shapes and sizes so you need to work out which one will work best for you. Some people use simple squeeze pages while others use sites with many pages. Squeeze pages are great to give away stuff but to sell stuff you need something more substantial in order to help build that credibility that is becoming more and more important for people to feel comfortable enough to buy from you.