Own Website Necessary For Successful Affiliate Marketing?

It's a question that comes up again and again

Do you need your own website to be successful at affiliate marketing?

Probably not could be an honest answer, but having your own website makes the job a lot easier

If you think about it. What are your options for advertising your affiliate links if you do not have your own site

There are a few options

• Use Pay per Click ads with your affiliate links as the destination link. This is what used to be called the google cash method i.e you put up an adwords ad with the affiliate site's URL as your display URL and your unique affiliate link as the destination URL. Used to work but now with high bid costs and a very competitive market, there are very few niches that you can actually make serious money doing this. At best most people report breaking even. not really what a business is about. Also there is the problem of tracking your clicks. I mean which keyword actually generated the click that went on to buy?? it's anyone's guess

• Use other people's websites e.g Squidoo or Hubpages. The benefits of this is that you don't have to pay for hosting. The problems though are that you are GIVING AWAY your valuable content and the sites are not totally under your control.

• Use USFreeads. Admittedly an effective method. Tips at USFreeads And Niche Marketing. Again the limitation is that you actually need a premium account to make USFreeads work for you and your niche marketing campaigns. The free account is just not worthwhile

• Other Free Classified sites. I think anyone with any experience in the free classifieds sites knows that the majority of the traffic is people looking to place their own free ads. I tested free classifieds for about a year and yes I got some clicks but nothing that added up to serious conversions

• Buy an email list and spam them: A definite no-no. Besides, bought email list recipients tend to be very trigger happy when it comes to hitting the SPAM button

Advantaged of having your own website or Blog:

• Totally under your control. The content is yours. you can tweak it, add to it, alter it , improve it's search engine properties, take it down, you have total freedom with regards to what goes on those pages

• You can focus on driving traffic to this website on which you can promote more than one product or even have different methods of monetization

• You can build a reputation and have your personality reflected on your site. If you think about it, a lot of people out there make purchases from one person and not the other because they liked the way the sales person approached them.

• You can build an email list from an opt in form on your website and then work on building a relationship with the people on your list. Again sales are easier and people are more open to recommendations from people they feel they know

So let's get back to the original question

Do you need your own website to be really successful in affiliate marketing

I suppose the answer is probably YES

Till next time