Can You Do Affiliate Marketing Without A Website? | Pros & Cons

Today, I want to address one of the most popular questions that I get asked by my students, “can you do affiliate marketing without a website?” The short answer is yes, you can. But there are pretty extensive nuances that I want to share in this article.

It’s super important to understand all the pros and cons of doing affiliate marketing without a website.

Basically, you have two options: to do affiliate marketing with a website and to do affiliate marketing without a website but still, you’ll need to make a sales funnel if don’t want to get banned.

And let’s look into each one of these options.

Affiliate Marketing Without a Website

And first, let’s look into the option of affiliate marketing without a website.

And let me cover the advantages first.

Advantages

The main advantage of doing affiliate marketing without a website is basically that you don’t need to spend any money.

You can promote affiliate products using social media, like Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, or write in the comments as well and inserting your affiliate links.

So, the only advantage is that you don’t need to set up a website that and you can make a sale pretty quickly, maybe if you go the commenting route, not to the social media way because social media demands even more time to make your first money than if you were to build your website.

To sum it up, the advantage is that you don’t need any expenses.

The disadvantage of doing affiliate marketing without a website.

Disadvantages

If you want to build an affiliate marketing business you need to own your asset.

The main disadvantage of doing without any website is that it’s not a sustainable model of business.

You cannot even call it a business because you don’t have your own platform.

Even if you create a social media account like YouTube, Instagram or Facebook and you don’t have a website, you don’t build your email subscriber’s base.

The truth is that you’re putting your entire business at risk, at mercy of the social media platforms.

There are many disadvantages of social media esppecially for affiliate marketing.

I personally know a lot of people that lost everything that they built in social media overnight, simply because at some point that platform decided to ban their account.

I know many cases with YouTube, with Instagram, with Facebook, with Pinterest that these platforms overnight decided that your account is against their policy, that they don’t want your account on their platform and they just ban your account with no warning.

All your sales, all your money that were coming in through that social media account disappear and that’s it.

You had a business yesterday, and you don’t have your business today anymore.

Would you like that it happened to you this way?

And that you didn’t have any chance to get to your subscribers that you had them yesterday and to communicate that you created your new account or invite them to join your other account or visit your website.

You just cannot do that simply because your account disappeared, and you don’t have any other form of communication with your followers, with your buyers, with your subscribers.

This is the main disadvantage.

If you want to do affiliate marketing, you need to get approved by affiliate programs and networks like Amazon Associates, ShareASale, Commission Junction. And if you want to get approved by these affiliate programs and networks, you need a website.

You have to consider it from the company’s perspective. If they’re going to approve you they want people who are legit, and businesses that are legit, that are going to represent their brand in the right way.

They don’t want spammers and people who are not invested in a real business to be promoting their brand because it makes them look bad.

The only popular affiliate network that doesn’t require a website is Clickbank. So, you can promote Clickbank products without a website which is cool.

And the last point of the disadvantage of doing affiliate marketing without a website is that often than by commenting or by building social media following, it takes even more time than making money with a website.

You really need to put in a lot of effort.

And if we’re talking about commenting, you’re putting a lot of effort into nowhere, because the comments that you write below the news, for example, people read these comments and you have a chance that somebody will click your affiliate link and go buy the product that you promote, only within maybe a couple of days because after that and you get buried in the archives because news is coming out every single day and on blogs is the same thing.

Affiliate Marketing With a Website

But now let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages of doing affiliate marketing with a website.

Why it’s better and why it’s worse.

Let’s start with the advantages of doing affiliate marketing, using a website.

Advantages

You have pretty much two options for doing affiliate marketing using a website.

The first one is you can create a landing page. A landing page to collect emails.

And what you do, you drive traffic to your landing page and you collect emails.

You collect emails of your loyal subscribers and potential customers into your autoresponder database and you can communicate with them.

You send them value, you send them valuable information; some tips, you share your experience, whatever you are trying to sell depending on your niche.

Or you just recommend them the products that you consider the best on the market. You have a chance to communicate with them is the first thing.

The second most important thing is that as soon as you collect their email address, their contact belongs to you. Nobody can delete your account. Nobody can take their email, the database of your loyal subscribers from you.

Now, the second option of doing affiliate marketing business with a website is obviously running a blog or a niche website.

This type of website is my personal favorite because you build content, you publish content that attracts the audience, that attracts people.

It ranks in Google; it generates free traffic substantial long-term traffic, you don’t need to add a lot more content every single day, just like you do in social media.

For example, on Facebook, you need to publish some fresh content every single day to be active to generate traffic, but when you publish content to your website and rank it in Google, your website can generate traffic every single day, constantly without publishing fresh content.

You can just publish 50, 100, or 100 articles and forget about it.

The only reason why you want to publish more content is to increase the amount of traffic that you get.

Your website in this case is 100% your own digital asset that nobody can touch because the content belongs to you,

You are the only owner, 100% owner that can do with your website, whatever you want. You can sell your website as well, you can promote any products on your website, you can run affiliate marketing, you can create and promote your own products.

Also, to have content and generating pretty much free traffic from Google, you can also collect emails and increase your subscriber base to earn even more money.

And in addition to that, you can create social media accounts and increase following in social media as well. But unlike the first scenario where you were doing affiliate marketing without a website, and you got banned or just removed from social media platform, in this case, your social media followers have no way to find you.

And in case if your website disappears, they know where to find you. They will come to your website and on your website, you will let them know that you have a new account for example, in social media, or if you were collecting their email addresses, then you can just send out an email address to your loyal subscribers.

If you consider all the possible risks that can happen, creating your affiliate marketing website is the best, the safest option that you can go for.

Disadvantages

The only pretty disadvantage is that you need to spend a little bit of money on hosting and domain name.

But websites are honestly pretty cheap these days because you can buy hosting for less than $3 per month with hosting providers like Bluehost. $2.95 per month to be exact.

And if use my link you’ll get a free domain name.

Get started with Bluehost and get a free doamin name here.

And if you don’t have even like $3 per month to spend on your website, think of how much money you will be making in a year from today, when you first build your website and publish your content.

Even if you will be making $100 per month, only $100 per month, it’s nothing in one year of time of running a website, then you will have to deduct these $3 per month to maintain the website and that’s it, all the content you can write yourself.

Or if you have more money to spend you can invest in some AI copywriting tools like Conversion AI and generate high-quality content for your website hands-off.

Then all you have to do is to promote your website and rank in Google without any expenses, nothing like that.

Conclusion

So yes, you can do affiliate marketing without a website.

But from my personal experience and my personal recommendation is to do affiliate marketing with a website. It is a way safer option, and you will be able to make way more money than just running affiliate marketing on third-party platforms.

I hope it was helpful, If you have any questions, drop a comment below, I will be happy to answer all your questions.

If you want to know the best strategies to do affiliate marketing, make sure to check out my complete free affiliate marketing training.