Building an affiliate website seems to be the one thing that most beginner affiliate marketers try to avoid.
It can seem very intimidating and time-consuming and most beginners believe that it requires a huge budget to be able to run a website.
But in reality, starting an affiliate website may be one of the best choices that you can make for your affiliate marketing business.
It may require more work but having an affiliate website can send a great message to all of your future viewers and even your competitors and show them you mean business.
Still not convinced?
In this article, I will give you 5 reasons why you will want to build an affiliate website instead of choosing other alternatives.
Do You Need A Website To Be An Affiliate Marketer?
In short, no, you do not NEED a website if you want to become an affiliate marketer. New research than you’ve probably seen that there are countless ways that you can also do affiliate marketing.
They mostly have to do with building social media platforms or landing pages.
Not to mention building an e-mail list.
But all of these things will require one specific thing that most beginners do not have: traffic
Unless you already have some kind of platform of your own, it’s going to be very difficult for you to start getting sales on social media platforms without traffic.
Social media platforms nowadays are also a lot harder to build an audience on, with platforms like Instagram constantly changing their algorithms.
So although you do not need a website to do affiliate marketing, We’ll see in the next section why building a website may be more beneficial.
Why having a website is the best choice for affiliate marketers.
Let’s get into five reasons why building an affiliate website will be the best solution for you as an affiliate marketer.
All things that I have noticed from first-hand experience from being an affiliate marketer for years and also things that other industry leaders have mentioned to me.
I honestly believe that I got some very good information from them and these are things that I wish I would have heard before I started my affiliate marketing business.
1. Legitimacy and Professionalism
If you’re looking for a way to be seen as credible and professional, then having a website is the number one way to do that.
As popular as social media platforms may be, There’s so much nonsense that goes on now on social media that some customers and viewers still find it hard to find you credible.
This is not your fault at all.
It’s due to the numerous amount of scammers and fake influencers that are on these social platforms that promote things that are essentially not even adequate.
When it comes to Google, however, it’s highly unlikely that you will find scam websites or scam offers coming up at top of search results.
Google has been very good throughout the years at blocking sites that are not secure and that are scammy.
So there is more trust built with Google’s search engine than there is with most social media platforms.
When people see that you have a website that is ranking on Google, they will be more likely to trust what they read and then take the next step to make a purchase.
From a business perspective, most sponsors and affiliates will likely see you as more professional if you have your own website as well.
Especially when it comes to getting sponsored, it’s a lot easier if you have a credible website instead of a social media platform.
Brands know that articles will rank and will end up in search if they’re done correctly. Which will mean more exposure for them in the future.
It’s also less likely that bloggers and website owners will get into any scandals like influencers on social media get into so their money will probably be safer with you.
2. Easier Organic Traffic For Your Affiliate Website
Google has 90.46% of all worldwide search traffic going through its search engine.
According to skai.io, that equates to around 4.6 billion searches every day. This shows that the possibility of organic search traffic reaching your website is a lot higher than on any other platform.
If you can even get 1% of that search traffic onto your platform, then you’ll probably be set for life.
But just for some perspective, Instagram gets around 500 million daily users and TikTok gets an average of 1.8 billion daily users.
This shows you that Google still outshines all of the major social media platforms.
Even the YouTube giant, which is now owned by Google, gets only around 122 million visitors per day.
None of these numbers can even compare to 5.6 billion searches on Google search engines.
Another major advantage is that you’re almost guaranteed traffic on Google if you do your SEO correctly.
For other social media platforms, there really is no guarantee and it’ll all depend on the algorithm.
You can be on YouTube for a year and get very minimal traffic. Whereas you can have a website on Google and in one year you can start to see thousands of visitors per day.
If SEO seems intimidating, don’t worry. You can read all about how to start SEO as a beginner in this article.
3. Full Ownership of Your Platform
Nothing feels better than having a platform that you know you own.
One of the major downsides of having an affiliate marketing business on social media is that you never really own the platform.
Instagram is known for shutting down accounts for no reason and YouTube can take away your Partnership due to their policy at any time.
None of these platforms aren’t truly yours.
But with their website you pay for the hosting, you own your domain, and you have full control of what happens to it.
If you’re not running a scam website, that clearly goes against the search engine’s terms and conditions, then the likelihood of there ever being a problem with your website is highly unlikely.
Having your own website is one of the safest and most secure ways to start any kind of business.
I have seen time and time again that certain accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers can simply vanish.
They either get hacked or they get shut down due to some policy.
With a website, unless you have some downtime with your server, you will almost always be up and running and able to be found by viewers.
Where to Find Cheap and High-quality Hosting
If you’re worried about the pricing for hosting, then I’ve got a few solutions for you.
I recommend that you start on places like Bluehost or Hostinger if you want cheaper shared hosting that is actually high quality.
Both of these platforms are high quality and they’ll give you everything you need, including a free SSL certificate to get started.
These will cost you around $3 per month for hosting (but you will have to pay for at least the first year, to begin with).
If you have a WordPress website and you are willing to try something a little more advanced, then you can start with Cloudways.
I personally went from hosting my website from Bluehost to now Cloudways because of the great quality and scalability.
Also, Cloudways is a cloud hosting provider, meaning it’s a lot faster and a lot more secure.
So if you have the budget, you can start with Cloudways for around $10. What I really love about Cloudways, is that you can pay on a month-to-month basis, meaning you pay only for the month that you used.
Almost like a subscription!
You can even get a 3-day free trial here if you want to test it out.
if you want to test it out.
4. Easily Scalable Without Extra Investments
If you’re looking to scale and grow your business, then having an affiliate site is also going to be one of the best solutions.
If you have something like a landing page, it’s going to be very hard for you to be able to scale that landing page without scaling your traffic.
You’ll need to find more people to get to your landing page in order to be able to make more sales.
If you have a social media platform. You’re going to need to grow an audience first and gain their trust.
With constant algorithm updates and changes, growing a social media platform can take a little bit more time.
And even before you see some sales, you may need to have a couple of thousand followers on your platforms.
With your website, however, all you’ll need to do is write high-quality content that helps people and you will most likely see that your articles will do better and better with time.
SEO really is one of the very few ways that you’re able to almost guarantee more growth over time.
Whereas with social media platforms, you’re going to need to constantly be uploading new content to feed the algorithm in order to keep your audience engaged.
So in order to scale your business on social media, you’ll need to scale your audience as well.
With the website, if you want to scale your business, you can just simply leave more time for your articles to hit the algorithm. Or you can choose to write more articles and build them for organic traffic.
5. Closest Thing to Passive Income
Last but not least, having an affiliate website is the closest thing to having a passive income that you’re most likely going to get.
As I mentioned earlier, the longer your websites are online, the more organic traffic you’re likely to get.
That is, of course, if you have done your SEO correctly.
With a website, you can upload and schedule your posts and leave them there for 6 to 8 months without really doing anything.
And when you come back, you’re most likely fine that they’re doing better than when you left them.
That is because SEO on search engines, in general, needs about 6 to 8 months to start picking up your articles when you’re first starting.
Once you’ve got a good baseline of articles and the engines start to trust you, you’ll see that it takes less and less time for your articles to rank for keywords.
So you will find that some of your articles will even rank within the first few weeks or few months.
I can tell you from personal experience that I have built websites before doing SEO and relying fully on organic search traffic. I uploaded several articles to these sites and then completely walked away from them for months.
And I always come back to see that they’re getting thousands of views per day.
Once your article starts to rank, you can simply go in every now and then just to tweak some things and make sure that your articles are updated.
Unlike social media platforms, your website will not “die” just because you don’t post articles.
Are There Any Cons To Having An Affiliate Website?
There are many pros to having an affiliate website. However, there is also one major con.
And that is TIME.
Owning a website means you’re going to be writing articles and doing research for these affiliate products.
This will require a lot of your time, especially if you’re a beginner and don’t have a budget to outsource this part of the process.
Quite frankly, I don’t recommend that beginners start outsourcing their articles.
The process of learning how to write your own articles will help you get a better understanding of the industry and how things work. It would also help you get a better understanding of your affiliate product and how you can promote it to your viewers.
But writing articles take time.
Matter of fact, when you’re a beginner, it can take you from three to four hours just to write one blog post.
It’s only when you start to get more advanced and you have your own system that you learn to maybe write articles in 30 minutes to an hour.
There’s also the aspect of SEO and search engines that take time to rank your articles.
You can expect that with your affiliate site, it can take anywhere from six months to 8 months to start seeing any kind of traffic whatsoever.
Before this time, you’ll maybe see one or two views coming in at most and that can be very discouraging.
It’s one of the reasons why most affiliates actually do not like to build websites and even get discouraged after starting one.
But once the traffic starts to come in, you will see that the growth can really be exponential and quick.
Do Affiliate Marketing Programs Require Websites?
No, most affiliate marketing programs do not require that the affiliate themselves have a website.
You’ll find several affiliate programs like ClickBank, SkimLinks, and ShareAsale that do not require that you even have any platform whatsoever.
However, there are platforms out there that do require that you have some form of a website, e-mail marketing, business, or social media platform.
These kinds of affiliate programs tend to be very high-ticket and required some form of credibility before you’re able to get accepted into their program.
There may not be a lot of them, but they do exist, so it’s good to know just in case.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing is still one of my favorite passive income streams, and I always recommend it to anyone who is looking to start making money online.
The reason is that it’s usually easy to find an affiliate platform that will work with someone who is a brand-new beginner.
Almost every product that you use today probably has an affiliate program as well.
This means that you can start by simply writing articles about products that you actually love and use.
And that is going to be one of the main things that you are going to need to focus on. Make sure that you write articles about products that you actually know about or you actually use.
Don’t just take some random product that you found online and then start to write reviews about it, because you’ll just sound like any other affiliate marketer.
You want to make your voice stand out, and there’s nothing better than putting in your personal input about how the product is used and how it worked for you.
If you personally haven’t used a product, try to find people who have and gather their input.
You can find people on social media and on YouTube who talk about the product. They use the product. Try to contact them and get their opinion or watch their reviews and get an idea on how the product was for them.
With affiliate marketing nowadays, what really wins is remaining authentic and true to yourself.
And if you get this right, you’ll see that you’ll have a very successful affiliate marketing business
