Five ways to do affiliate marketing without a website
Most people think they need a website to make money with affiliate marketing, but the truth is that an advertiser’s products or service can be promoted in a variety of channels in 2020.
The traditional advice for new affiliate marketers has been to set up a website and generate conversions from the traffic that the website receives from search engines. However affiliate marketing can be rewarding through a lot of other promotional formats or platforms.
With close to 15% of affiliate marketing conversions at Adtraction being derived from other sources than websites there is undoubtedly potential for affiliate marketing in other channels. So what are other channels that work well with affiliate marketing in 2020?
Youtube
Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day and it is an increasingly popular channel for affiliate marketing purposes.
In the last two years Adtraction has seen 66% growth in the number of sales from affiliates using YouTube as their promotional platform. This shows that YouTube is an increasingly popular channel for retailers and consumers to take advantage of.
There are plenty of options for YouTubers to monetise their content, and as stated in one of our previous posts ”Affiliate marketing for YouTube”, it certainly pays.
Affiliate marketing can provide YouTubers with a number of benefits:
- YouTubers with less than 1k subscribers can monetise their channels
- Bigger channels can ‘double up’ with view-based and CPA-based revenue
- It gives brands a chance to support content creation
With almost 2.5 billion monthly active users, Facebook serves as the world’s largest social media platform and the channel shouldn’t be ignored.
Using Facebook for affiliate marketing can provide several benefits. Amongst others, the sheer size of the platform enables marketers to target appropriate audiences with relevant products. Also, affiliate marketing can be conducted regardless of profile or group size.
Instagram serves as yet another social media platform that has opened up the doors for brands and influencers to work creatively together. Utilising the power of word of mouth marketing increases the likelihood of consumers to buy the promoted products – perfect for affiliate marketing.
In recent years, Instagram is the social media platform that has seen the largest increase in conversions at Adtraction. The channel has grown to become nearly 8 times bigger than Facebook and more than 4 times bigger than Youtube for affiliates.
Email marketing
Email marketing is still vital to any online marketing strategy and can be powerful when done right.
With active email accounts being expected to hit 4 billion by 2020 and 99% of consumers checking their email on a daily basis, it might not be a surprise that affiliate marketing efforts can be used also in the email marketing channel. This is further emphasised in the year-on-year growth of more than 40% that the channel has had at Adtraction from 2018 to 2019.
Affiliate marketing can provide the following benefits for email marketers:
- The CPA-based payment model gives affiliates freedom to A/B test and optimise their campaigns while monetising their activities
- A high number of affiliate programs available which enables email marketers to find the right product or service to promote and perfectly customise their emails
Mobile app
Apps have become an integral part of people's daily micro-moments and they can be a powerful way to reach out to a particular audience. The emergence of apps in affiliate marketing is quite recent but that doesn’t limit the success the channel has had. By 2019 mobile apps were on par with email marketing in terms of the number of conversions tracked by the network.
With apps being used for longer time periods and twice as often as traditional browsers, app users are more inclined to pay attention to brand news which makes them a good match for affiliate marketing.
Variety in affiliate marketing channels
The above channel types are well known alternatives to the traditional content website for affiliates, but that doesn’t mean that affiliates are limited to only websites or the above. The term affiliate includes any kind of website, channel or profile owner with an audience. As long as a person owns or administers an online site, channel or profile where tracking links can be shared, he or she can be an affiliate.
If you have questions about affiliate marketing or would like to know more about affiliate marketing at Adtraction, please reach out to hello@adtraction.com.
