I was asked, “Do you need a blog to do affiliate marketing?” the answer really is “Not really”. That’s why in this article I’m going to show you how to do affiliate marketing without a blog.
Yes, a blog is one of the easiest ways to promote affiliate products on a regular basis. The only problem is, that it requires you to write all the time to be able to promote affiliate products. It needs to be updated with high-quality content for it to rank online.
But what if you hate to write and you don’t even have the time to shell out content on a regular basis. Chill, this article is made just for you.
I will show you 4 different ways to promote affiliate products without writing on a regular basis. But before that I want you to know that you will still have to write irrespective of the platform you choose to go with. The only thing that will change is the frequency of writing.
Let’s get started.
Ways to promote affiliate products without a blog
1. Email marketing
I’m starting with email marketing because this is the best alternative to blogging. If you don’t like writing content on a regular basis, you can just set up an email sequence that will sell the products for you and it will be sent out every time someone subscribes to your email list.
It will be done only once and can continue working for as long as you want it to run. Email sequences are great to sell affiliate products on a regular basis but you have to tweak them to get the highest open rate and better conversions. We will talk about that later on in this article. For now, let me clear a common misconception that most people have about email marketing.
Is email marketing dead?
Unlike what you might have heard or what you might have been told. Email marketing is not dead and is not likely to die anytime soon. Coming from someone who is actually promoting products with email marketing, I know what I’m talking about. Most people claiming that email marketing is dead are not using the best email marketing practices
Is email marketing better than blogging?
Of course not, email marketing is not better than blogging and vice versa. But, I would prefer to have a large list over a blog. My reason is, that whenever you send out a campaign (email) you will definitely reach all your subscribers. Unlike a blog where 99% of your first-time visitors might never return again.
But even at that, I still love to have a blog, because, once you’ve got the ball rolling for your blog, it can serve as a very nice source of passive traffic (and income) which can be used to build your email list.
So if email marketing is not better than blogging, what are the benefits?
Benefits of using email marketing
- Easy access to your subscribers
- You can easily retarget your email subscribers with ads
- More money in your pocket if you have the know-how
How to use emails to promote affiliate products
I won’t write an in-depth explanation of the ways to promote affiliate products with email marketing. Rather, I’ll just give a straightforward explanation.
When you have a product that you want to promote with email marketing. It’s as simple as sending an email to a friend about the goods you are selling. Just that, in this case, you don’t know the people personally.
Even at that, we would assume we know these people closely and talk to them like they were our friends. When you write an email promoting your product, tell them the benefits of the product and why you know that it will be good for them.
The first and most important thing is to know who is actually on your email list since you don’t want to be promoting red meat to vegetarians
That’s why it’s very important to build targeted email lists. So make sure you know what the people on your list are like and what they are interested in.
A very good example is, promoting a YouTube keyword tool to YouTubers. If you’ve built an email list of people who have their own YouTube channels, nothing stops you from promoting to them, good tools that can be used to optimize their videos to get more views.
The second thing is to send good emails and never sound like a spammer.
Who is a spammer and how can you sound like one?
Spammers are people who send unsolicited messages promoting their products without adding any benefit to your life.
Do you remember those set of people (who you know nothing about) on social media who will send you messages telling you about the latest investment they ventured into that is making people a millionaire, yeah that’s a very good description of a spammer?
What is the best email marketing platform for affiliate marketing?
The best platform to promote affiliate products with email marketing is systeme. It is cheap and very easy to use. Systeme makes promoting affiliate products very easy. Plus, you can use systeme for free until you have more than 1000 email subscribers on your email list.
Here’s the complete systeme.io review
Disadvantages of using email marketing to promote products
The only disadvantage I can think of is when you aren’t using your email list the right way. That’s the fact that people can choose to ignore your emails when they know that you are a spammer.
When people don’t open your emails and this can hurt your domain sending the score and make your email land only in the spam box. And you know when your email falls into the spam box, only a few people will be able to read it not to talk less of buy what you were trying to sell.
2. Direct ads
Direct ads (advertisement) of affiliate products. This type of promotion requires you to have a budget upfront and you should also have the technical know-how for running ads.
You have to be willing to test different campaigns to be able to find the best ad that will bring in the most money. During the process of testing different ad campaigns, you will lose money upfront, but this is part of the process of finding the best ad campaign for the product you are trying to promote.
Are ads better than blogging?
No, but using paid ads to promote affiliate products can help you get fast results and even build an email list really fast. I said it’s not better than blogging because, unlike paid ads, with blogging, you only pay for hosting your site online and you don’t have to pay for any other thing.
The benefit of using ads to promote products
Fast results
I touched on this point a little bit earlier but I want to really clarify what I meant. When running paid ads, when your ad campaigns are approved you can immediately start seeing results.
Just think about it, you could get more than one thousand people to your website in a day with paid ads if you have the budget.
If you were making 2 sales a day with blogging, if you switch to using paid ads, you could be making more than 100 sales if you do it right and if you have the budget.
In fact, if you use a powerful strategy Russell Brunson explained in his book traffic secrets, you will be able to run ads for almost free.
In the book, he explained that to be able to achieve that, you have to set up the system in such a way that, whenever you run ads. You should add upsells and follow-up funnels so that the people buying your products will pay for the ads and also help you earn a profit that you can use to run more ads.
More data to work with
Paid ads give you more data to work with. With more data, you can easily tweak your landing page to increase conversions.
When you change the colour of your header, the images on the page and the words and the buttons, you can easily know what is working and increase your chances of making a sale.
Ways to promote products with ads
Here is the part you’ve probably been waiting for. There is no single way to promote products with ads, especially affiliate products. But here’s what I want you to know.
There’s a framework that you can work with. If you follow this framework, the platform you are using to run ads won’t matter anymore because, it’s the same principle, whether you are running ads on Facebook, Google or any other social media platform.
So, I’m going to share the principle with you after which I will tell you some of the disadvantages of running paid ads.
This single principle will help you run profitable Facebook ads
Keep this principle in mind whenever you are about to create a new ad campaign. Before I share that principle with you, I want to remind you to read the traffic secrets book by Russell Brunson, very important. It’s a free book, you will only the shipping cost.
Yes, the principle:
Always make sure you are building your email list whenever you are running an ad campaign. Why is this important? Well because you are actually paying to get access to the audience on that platform. So when you use that opportunity to build your email list, you now own a part of the audience and that traffic now belongs to you.
There would be no need to pay again to reach those people. But when you don’t build your email list. If you run ads and make 10 sales today, you’ll need to spend that same amount of money for ads to get another 10 sales again.
If you build an email list first when running ads, sure, not everyone will buy, but you can later target them with email follow-up funnels and even retargeting ads (very cheaply)
Disadvantages of using ads to promote affiliate products
1. You need a budget to get started
Yes, you need a budget if you would like to get started with ads. You have to pay to reach the people you are trying to advertise to.
Though some platforms (like Facebook) allow you to run ads first and pay later. You still have to pay whether the ad was profitable or not. This brings me to point 2
2. You can lose your money easily unlike some other types of investments
Some online businesses like blogging have a very long lifespan. If your blog is not profitable by the first month, you still have 11 months to really determine whether you lost your money or not.
But with ads, the case is completely different, from the very first day and week, you can lose a lot of money if you are not careful. That’s why it is recommended to always start your ad campaigns with little capital to know what’s working and what’s losing money.
4.There’s a learning curve to running ads
There are a lot of things you have to learn if you want to be able to run a profitable ad campaign. You have to become familiar with different ad terms. Also, you need to learn how to calculate your ROI to know whether you are actually making any money. learning these things is vital to be successful with your campaign and avoid losing money.
3. Social media
Social media can really be fun at times. You get news and you can chat with your friends every single day irrespective of your location. For us affiliate marketers, social media can also be used to promote products.
The only problem is that there are so many said-affiliate marketers who are only spamming others with their affiliate link.
This is not our goal. Our goal is to become a trustworthy marketer that everyone loves to be friends with. We are going to help people by sharing good tips and advice. And at the same time, we are going to be trying to promote products to them.
Is social media better than blogging?
No! But it is much more fun than blogging. With social media, you can keep up with what your friends are posting and the latest updates.
Social media can be used to promote your blog and even your affiliate products. But I try to use social media only for driving traffic to my blog. This to me is one of the best ways to use social media.
The best thing to use social for is building an email list. Yes, building an email list is wonderful because it makes that traffic your own.
The benefit of using social media to promote affiliate products
The benefit of social media is that you can reach a lot of people. Especially on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has lots of groups that you can join. Groups in different niches, so you will definitely find a group in your niche.
If you join these groups and add value, you’ll get a lot of people checking out your website and joining your email list or reading your blog posts.
Twitter on the other hand more of the palace of current posts. The more current you are the better. Twitter allows you to post links which is a really cool feature and can be used to drive traffic to your website or email list.
How to use social media
The best way to use social media is as a good marketer, not a spammer. I told you what spammers do earlier. On social media, you want to be viewed as the expert, not the guy who’s constantly begging people to join his email list or click his link.
The social media platforms you are currently on belong to someone else. They create the rules and can change them as they please.
Therefore, your main goal should be to drive people back to your own platforms like your blog and email list. So that you can grow your own business and not waste all your time on another person.
Remember, your social media account can get banned at any given time.
Disadvantages of using social
Social media can be used to get traffic to your affiliate offers but it is also very time-consuming. You can easily fall into a loop of videos
4. YouTube
YouTube is a very cool platform for video content, it is known as the second largest search engine. Creating an account on YouTube is free. To post videos on YouTube is also free. If you hate writing then YouTube is a where you should focus on.
Though you can make money on YouTube using the YouTube partner program. The main idea should be to use YouTube to build your own platform (email list). After which, you promote products through email marketing.
Why is YouTube good for affiliate marketing?
YouTube is very good for affiliate marketing because your videos can get views on autopilot and help you make sales regularly.
With YouTube, you can build an audience and promote products to them very easily. You can use Tubebuddy (a very good YouTube keyword tool) to help your videos get more views to be able to make more sales.
Read this ultimate guide for the full tutorial on YouTube affiliate marketing
How to use YouTube for affiliate marketing?
There are two basic things you should do if you intend to use YouTube for affiliate marketing. They are:
Create quality videos
Yes, your videos should be quality videos. The audio in your videos should be clear and easy to hear. This will make people watch your videos longer and you will build get more retention rate on your videos and more watch time (which is a good feature to help your channel get more views)
Use good video SEO on your videos
Though I mentioned this earlier, you need to optimize your videos to make them rank on YouTube. Just the same way blog posts are optimised to rank on Google, YouTube videos need to be optimized as well. Tubebuddy is a very good tool that can be used to optimize your videos
Disadvantages of using YouTube for affiliate marketing
The only thing about YouTube is that it takes time to edit your YouTube videos and it could take a while to start getting views on auto-pilot.
If you’ve got the right tools, you can do it as well without much stress.
Q and A
Do you need to write reviews to make money with affiliate marketing?
Yes and no. let me explain. You can write reviews if you choose to and make money with affiliate marketing. If you don’t like writing, you can use other methods to promote affiliate products.
Ways like email marketing, social media, YouTube and paid ads can be used to promote affiliate products.
Can you make money with affiliate marketing if you don’t have a blog?
Yes, if you don’t have a blog, you can use free blogging platforms to make money. You can use medium, blogger or even WordPress (.com not .org). It’s free to sign up and start writing articles.
If you don’t like writing, then you don’t need a blog, rather you should create a free YouTube channel and start creating videos.
Choose a particular niche and start creating quality videos. You can even use your mobile phone to start creating videos.
Is affiliate marketing still profitable in 2022?
This is what most people are sceptical about, the simple answer is YES. Affiliate marketing is still very profitable.
Although affiliate marketing is a simple business model, it’s not easy. It requires you to learn different skills to be able to promote products properly. Skills like marketing, building a sales funnel, driving traffic online using free and paid methods, and other people skill if you want to outsource some services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can make money with affiliate marketing whether you love writing or not, even without having a blog.
In this post, you discovered 4 ways to promote affiliate products without writing on a regular basis. Get started today and start promoting products to start making money online.