Free Website For Affiliate Marketing [9 Effective Techniques]

So building a Free Website For Affiliate Marketing purposes is your method of choice for making money online. Great, but how do you go about it if you are a complete beginner at this? You’ve looked up all the ways you can do it but most cost money from the initial stages. Money that you possibly don’t have, or don’t want to spend right now.

I know I am making a big assumption here, but you are reading an article about building a free website for affiliate marketing after all. There is no shame in that, you are not the only one, hundreds if not thousands of people are looking for the same thing. You will hear many saying “you need to spend money to make money”.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. The best things in life are free. Money is just a tool to scale and ramp us your results. So let’s get to it and start looking at the various things you will need to make this happen for yourself!  

Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing – What will you need?

So as with everything, you will need a few things to be able to get the ball rolling and start earning. Over the coming few sections we will be looking at what is affiliate marketing. We’ll also discuss the experience, resources, and tools you will need to begin making money online.  

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is basically where a company or service provider pays you for getting them, clients. When I say client, I mean ones who purchase one or more of their products and/or services. This is usually in the form of a commission and can be anything ranging from 1% to 100%.

YES! Some people will pay you up to 100% of the purchase made by the client you refer to them. Don’t worry, no one gives money for free, it’s not a “too good to be true” kind of scenario. You see some products have a very low entry price point. Like if a company’s entry-level product is worth $10 or less…

giving someone a fraction or percentage of that would make it unpractical for someone to spend the time, effort, and at times money marketing it. But that’s not reason enough for someone to practically give away money.

Such companies 100% of the time have other more expensive products and upgrades. Ones that they are certainly a big percentage of the people who bought the first product will buy. This in turn makes it worth their while. Some companies are sneaky and would make you drool over 100% of a $50 or $100 product and give you nothing of the upgrades.

These are products that could range anywhere from $500 all the way to upwards of $50,000. In that case, they’ve invested $100 in a guaranteed customer and earned multiples of that cost in return. Now put it in contrast to the thousands they would spend on marketing to showcase their product to mostly uninterested people. Is it beginning to make much more sense now?

What Are Affiliate Links?

Usually, affiliates will get a link called an affiliate link which is unique to each affiliate. After that, anyone who buys through that link earns the affiliate a commission. Going back to commissions for a second…

Some companies prefer a more win-win approach. They give out a worthwhile percentage on their front-end product. Then a smaller, yet equally worthwhile, commission on their back-end products. These are the products you should focus on in my opinion. Why? That same client that you spent all that time and effort getting will continue to make you money as long as they keep buying.  

You basically spend the effort once and keep reaping the rewards, as opposed to making money off the front end then repeating the process. I don’t know about you but I prefer to work smart and earn more, over pointless, hard, work only to earn less. Usually, the lower end of commissions is on e-commerce products.

This is because the product costs more to produce and the profit margin on each unit is fixed. The margin is also, usually not that big. The higher end of commissions is usually on digital products. A product is made once and as soon as the creation cost is covered every sale after that is 99% of the time pure profit.   This allows them the ability to afford to offer larger commissions.

These digital products include but are not limited to digital learning products. For example, video courses and ebooks, software, website subscriptions, etc.  

Alternatives To Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing

Because I know many of the people who begin considering affiliate marketing are hammered with an overwhelming amount of articles and posts suggesting you need a website to make it in affiliate marketing…  

I thought I’d share with you some other free alternatives first. You can effectively use these to earn money through affiliate marketing first.  

The internet is full of options, restricting yourself to a website alone is not necessarily the best way to make bank. So here are a bunch of other ways you can use your free website for affiliate marketing or even instead of it if you feel so inclined. In the end, succeeding online is not based on a one size fits all strategy. That means, what works for you may not work for me and vice versa. This is why knowing your options is extremely important. It’ll help you choose the method that works best for you!

Email Marketing

No list of affiliate marketing tools can ever be complete without email marketing. At least as an ‘honorable mention’. I suppose you’ve heard the term “the money is in the list” before. Moreover, and even though I am not a big fan of email marketing myself, it does work. Some people made millions depending only on email to market their affiliate links.  

You probably heard of services like Keap (Formerly InfusionSoft), SendLane, GetResponse, MailChimp, ConstantContact, Aweber, and the like. Most of these offer free trials. If I am being honest, though, the free trial period is usually not long enough to build a list. You could get lucky and make a sale during that period to pay for their entry-level subscription fee. However, that’s not very likely!  

So what else? I wouldn’t put email marketing in a free marketing article if the only way to do it was to pay monthly for service right? Just to be clear, you cannot use your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. to do this. Sorry! You will need a domain that costs close to nothing and is paid yearly. Wait, you don’t want to spend even that right?

You want to test the waters first, yeah? I’ve always got your back, my friend!  

Nothing is impossible! Go to either “dot.tk” or “hostinger.com” or type the words “free domain” in your favorite search engine. This will present you with many free domain registration services.  

Note: sometimes the first few results are paid/sponsored results on some search engines. These will usually charge you for the domain name.

The catch with free domains…

The thing is free domains will not have the popular extensions (known as Top Level Domains or TLD) like .com and .net, etc.  

They would be *your domain*.tk for example. Also, since they are free it may take you a while to find a domain name you are happy with. Competition is usually high on anything free. So you got a domain, how do you start sending emails then?  

You need to set up an email address and email forwarding. This will send the emails you receive to your free personal email of choice (i.e. google, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). I suggest doing that since buying an email hosting service defeats the whole free idea. I will not be covering the steps to doing this here as every email registrar is different. However, you can either contact their support or look it up on your preferred search engine.

It’s pretty straightforward, don’t worry.  

Now that you’ve got all this setup, you need to find a “free mass mailing application”. You can look up using that term on your favorite search engine and hundreds will come up. I know of three but I can’t recommend any since I’ve not used free mass mailers if I am being honest. I have tried many of the paid ones though and used them frequently before deciding email marketing wasn’t for me.  

OK, so the 3 I know of are ‘Big Mass Mailer’, ‘E-Campaign’, and ‘MailList Controller Free’. But I think you will need to try out a few and see which one has the user interface you like most.

Getting emails is going to be the tricky part, though.

You cannot send emails to people who didn’t request and/or permit you to do so. To get emails for free you will need to get creative, to be honest. What you could do, is join groups on Facebook that cater to a community of people interested in the niche (topic) that you are targeting. That’s one way of getting emails, another that I can think of is on Quora and Yahoo answers.  

The key here is interaction. Interact with the people, build trust, answer their questions and then, only then ask if they would like to join your mailing list. If they accept then ask for their email and you’re good to go.  

If you’d like to get a more in-depth look at email marketing you could check out my article about it here.  

Now that you know how to email market for free let’s look at the other options.

Writing Books Online

So here’s a neat trick I Learned quite a few years back…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you must have heard of eBooks. I know you might be thinking “but I am not a writer”. Don’t worry it’s not rocket science. Of course, there are remarkable writers in the world and I am not trying to belittle what they do here. To write a free ebook, though you don’t need to be an exceptional writer. You know the ones worthy of being best-sellers kind of exceptional. As long as you can construct meaningful sentences that should be enough to write an eBook.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the juicy part of it all. How does the average Joe and/or Jane do it? But more importantly, how would a free ebook help you make money online for free? More importantly, how does that help you sell affiliate products? At running the risk of oversimplifying here…

The general premise is you create an ebook that speaks about things related to the niche you are targeting. In that book, you would embed your affiliate links inside the text. To do that effectively you can’t embed the links in any random text within the book. You would need to strategically place the links in the book.

For example if you are writing a book about DYI mountain bike repair you could link to your affiliate offer like so:

“The tool I prefer to use for this procedure is the XYZ tool because it’s very effective at doing such-and-such. If you would like to find out more details about the XYZ tool and get it for a fantastic price you can do so by clicking here”.

You would need to replace the words “procedure”, “XYZ”, etc. with your topic. Where the words are underlined you would embed your link. Taking this approach will let your readers know they will be taken to a page where they can get more info and pricing of the tool. This way you ensure that the people clicking the link are interested and didn’t click it accidentally.  

Using such a strategy also increases the chances of the people clicking the link buying. To be able to structure the book properly you can find plenty of specialty articles about that online. Unfortunately, it’s such a detailed matter that would far exceed the scope of this article.

So your book is ready it’s now time to create an attractive cover to get people to download your ebook. You can do that for free too, just go to canva.com and create a book cover using some of the design templates there.

Now let’s get your ebook out to the public

Since we have an ebook ready, complete with an attractive cover it’s time to put it somewhere. The whole exercise is useless if people can find your ebook. I suggest getting it on one or more of the following platforms so people can find and download it.   These platforms are:

• Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
• Bookrix
• Smashwords
• Apple’s eBook Store.

There are others too. However, these are the most popular platforms online for publishing and selling ebooks. I think this is something you should try your hand at. Who knows maybe you’ll discover what a great writer you are and start selling ebooks for more income online.

Using Video To Market Affiliate Products

Before you start thinking about how uncomfortable you would feel begin on-camera… right there in front of millions let me tell you don’t even have to be on camera! This is, in fact, probably the most enjoyable one from the alternatives to building a free website for affiliate marketing.

OK! so how do you make a video without being on camera yourself? Well, there is an option other than personally being on camera:  

The first option is by recording your screen and just speaking about the product.

For starters, if you are using a mac you can use QuickTime to screen record and then iMovie to edit the video and do a voice-over. On windows, 100s if not 1000s of free tools are available to perform the same functions.  

If you are on Windows 10 you can even just use the built-in game bar to record your screen. If you are using an iPhone, it comes built-in with a screen record function that you can use. Also, on Androids there are plenty of apps. I personally like the apps Camerafi live and AZ Screen Recorder. They both have all you would need in the free versions.

The nitty gritty of it all

The premise is simple, you either create a presentation or show yourself. You will demonstrate using the website, software, app, game, etc. that you are promoting. You could talk about your experience as you show people the product, game, etc. to increase the chances of people buying. Think about how most people buy and what holds them back especially for digital products and games…  

In the majority of cases, it’s that they don’t know what to expect inside. This makes them unsure if it’s worth their time and/or financial investment. If you give them a thorough demo and they find your video helpful they have a high likeliness of buying through your link.

The second option is using creative commons videos.

These are free-to-use videos that you can use on your video channel free of charge.  

I will not be discussing it in detail here since this article is already approaching 3000 words and we’ve barely scratched the surface. however, I discuss it in another article that you can check out here if that’s something you are interested in. Here’s a tip to help you increase sales when selling via videos…

Invest in a small “bonus giveaway” either by a draw or to everyone who buys through your link and sends you their purchase receipt. This encourages people to buy through your link instead of others who made videos promoting the same product.

So where could you post these videos?

Well anywhere that supports video really but I would recommend YouTube if you intend to use just one platform. But why?

Well for many reasons the most obvious begin that YouTube is the biggest video platform on the web as of the time this article was written. Also, YouTube is owned by Google and Google’s search engines give YouTube videos a higher priority in their results. You’ll notice when you search on google a bunch of videos will come at the top of the results, all from YouTube. So your video on YouTube may even get a higher chance of ranking on Google than your website.  

The third reason is why settle for only your affiliate commissions? With time YouTube can pay you a share of their ad revenues from ads played on your videos! Makes sense right?

Writing On Ezines To Sell Your Affiliate Products

Ezines are electronic magazines. All you have to do is create short articles and submit them to all the websites that hold ezines. You need to make sure you pick ezines talking about the topic of interest related to your product.  

Of course, your article will include links to your affiliate product. Furthermore, they will be written in a way that recommends purchasing that product.   Here are some websites that you can submit ezine articles to:

• ezinearticles.com
• amazines.com
• sooperarticles.com
• artipot.com
• Quora.com

That’s just to name a few and a simple search on any of the search engines will give you many other options as well. You could also type the name of your niche beside the word ezine to get more specific results for your niche. For example, if you are into the health & fitness niche you just type “health & fitness ezine” in the search box and you are good to go!

Online Conversations

Another one that I don’t personally like to be honest, but it works for many marketers. It is the equivalent of cold calling for the online world. Remember when we were talking about getting email addresses for free?  

We talked about hanging out on forums, chats, message boards, yahoo answers, etc., and striking up conversations with people. We’ll be doing the same thing. This time around, however, you will discuss the topic of interest, ask questions, and build a relationship of trust with the person and instead of asking for their email…  

You tell them you have something that may help them and ask if they’d like you to tell them more about it. If they say yes, you proceed to describe your product and how it can help them achieve whatever they are trying to achieve. You then just follow up by asking if they would like a link to their website to check it out themselves.  

If the answer is yes, then send your affiliate link and be sure to be available to answer any further questions they may have before buying. Moreover, remember to be nice and never, ever, do you just spam people with your link, no matter what. If you do you will just get reported, blocked, and probably kicked out of the platform. Plus the chances of you making a sale by just sending out unsolicited links are 0.  

Alright so now that we’ve covered all the alternatives which we can cover within the scope of this article…

let’s take a swing at websites, shall we?

Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing

So after looking at all the alternatives you are still dead set on making a website to sell your affiliate products. I don’t blame you, it’s my favorite way too, otherwise, this website wouldn’t exist. There are many routes that you can take in your journey towards building a free website for affiliate marketing. First, let’s look at the different websites for each type of affiliate product…

Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing – eCommerce

If you will be selling specialty products as an affiliate to one of the big online names like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc…  

You will need an online store rather than just a typical website. Of course, you could create a blog, there’s nothing that says you can’t and it would work just as well. However, in this section we’ll focus on the store-like option, the blog version we’ll be discussing in the next. The store option will look exactly like what you see on online shopping platforms. I am talking about sites like Amazon, eBay, GNC, etc.  

That means the page will look like a grid of photos and item names with a search option, categories, etc… When someone clicks on the photo it can either link directly to the details page on the site you are affiliated with. I consider this to be the easiest option in terms of time and effort spent.  

The other option is to make your website “layered”.This means once they click on the photo on your home page they would go to a details page on your website. On this page, you will just copy all the photos and details from your affiliate site. Once the viewer is ready to buy they click the “buy” button. The customer would then be sent directly to a checkout page on the site you are affiliated with.

This option, in my opinion, is just pointless. Unless the affiliate requires you to send people directly to the checkout page don’t bother. It’s an unnecessary duplication of the work already done by the affiliate. ‘Reinventing the wheel” per se.

OK so how do you go about doing it for free?

There are multiple websites online that offer you the option of hosting your online store with them for free. A quick search would reveal many options.

However, here are a few I’ve personally checked out before writing this article. It means that, as of the date of writing, they are still functional and free options. I’ve put them in no specific order of preference so feel free to check them all out and pick the one which works for you best:

• Site123.com
• Freewebstore.com
• Weebly.com
• Squareup.com
• Bigcartel.com
• wix.com

Now, remember you are not selling anything on your site. Therefore, you don’t need to pay for any eCommerce functionality upgrades these platforms are selling. For example, you don’t need a payment gateway since all the payments will be processed by the company. Once a sale is made they will pay you the commission to PayPal or your bank or whatever their system of payment is.  

All your website needs to do is look like an eCommerce website on the front end, as I explained earlier in this section. I have used Weebly and Wix before. They are fun and easy to use and the support on the free versions is not bad plus they have FAQs. Moreover, YouTube is filled with tutorials that can help you do pretty much anything you need on these platforms.  

It’s worth noting; at the time of writing this article, I am not making any affiliate commissions from any of the above websites. I’m including them here, solely with the intent of helping you out and saving you time looking around!

Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing – Blog Style

This is my favorite approach of all the approaches I mentioned here! There are many types of blogs, you have a variety to choose from, let’s take them one by one. However, first, there is a critical point that can make or break a blog that I need to point your attention to. This also applies to every other alternative already pointed out here.  

You need to offer something of value to the visitors of your blog. Think in terms of what will the people gain by visiting your blog for the first time and frequenting it thereafter?  

In these cases what you need to do is, offer them something of value and in this line of business, the value comes in the form of useful information. Blogging on such a niche can come in the form of teaching them something. You could also show them things and discuss them in detail so that they can make an informed decision whether to buy it or not.

Another good one is giving your opinion about a topic which matches theirs. Politics is a good example of such a topic, so are sports, rights & environmental movements, and so on, I think you get the idea!

Information & Education Blogs

These are the kinds of blogs where you either have information that people need about a particular subject matter. Alternatively, you could be so interested in it, that you have the drive to do the necessary research to be able to write about it.  

The mission of the blog is to teach people about the topic of choice (niche). While also offering them products that could simplify their efforts and help them while trying to apply what they Learned. A fantastic example of this is sites that teach you DYI things like how to fix your car at home.  

Your focus here should be on either saving the reader money, solving a problem they have, or helping them get rid of a pain point in their life. Such an approach helps you create an instant bond with most of your readers because you are helping them have a better life!  

Ensure your readers leave every article you write with a new piece of information. Like something they didn’t know so that they can feel the time spent on your blog was worth every second!

Unboxing & Product Review Blogs

You must have seen these before, where someone buys the new iPhone for example, and films/photographs opening the box. They then proceed to talk about the box’s contents. After which, they discuss the phone itself and its functions. Finally wrapping up with the device’s specifications like battery life and the like.  

This allows people to go through the experience of buying the phone and testing it. All before even going and purchasing it themselves. It allows them to see if it is as advertised and has what they need in a phone. Other bloggers specialize in getting review accounts for digital products, mobile apps, etc.  

They then take screenshots of the various sections of the product/app. They then go on to discuss it in detail and give a full review of the functionality. They usually also explain what it can be used for and whether they had a pleasant user experience with it. Sometimes, they’ll also mention the things missing from the product/app and any bugs or glitches that they have encountered.  

Again helping people know what to expect before buying and if it is the right purchase decision for them. These blogs will then (usually at the end of the article) tell people; if they want to buy the device/product/software/app… they could get it from the same place where the blogger got it from via “this” link. The link is their affiliate link in the majority of cases and they make a commission off every sale made through the link.

Opinion Blogs

This is where you focus on a particular topic where opinions vary. These include; politics, any sports team you support, feminism, nature preservation, or religion to name a few. Touchy topics I know but remember, on each side, some people feel strongly about that topic. In general, people like to read articles from like-minded individuals supporting their opinion. It also gives them ideas to fair better in debates about the topic.  

If you choose this form of blogging most likely you feel strongly about that topic. Products you can sell here are abundant as well but mostly in the form of merchandise and apparel. You can easily sell them pins, t-shirts, caps, mugs, car stickers, helmets, jerseys, hoodies, etc.  

Believe me, there is no shortage of these on the internet! In this case, you would just speak your mind. Then suggest; they show their support to the cause, team, political party/movement, and so on by buying such products. I think it’s time now to get to how is it that you can start building a free website for affiliate marketing as a blogger.

Start Building A Free Website For Affiliate Marketing As A Blogger

There are many places where you can start your free blog. You don’t even need a domain. We’ve already covered guest blogging on ezines; since you are still reading, I think it’s safe to assume that you want to start a blog. Two of the websites which I mentioned earlier can help you do this, completely free:

• Weebly.com
• Wix.com

I’ve used these many years ago. The best thing about such sites is that they are free and you only have to upgrade when you need extra functionality. The builders on such sites are easy to use. However, as far as I remember from when I used to use them, they don’t offer extensive training on how to use their platforms. They also don’t cover the more important topic of how to make money using them.  

But as always, I have something up my sleeve for you guys. A platform built specifically for bloggers. It offers free SEO support (search engine optimization) and will host your blog for you with no domain at all for free. That means you get all you need to start building a free website for affiliate marketing immediately. It doesn’t stop there though…  

You get free training videos of hours upon hours of how to make money from blogging and affiliate marketing. But let’s face the cold hard truth in the face here for a second…  

We all need the support of a community filled with like-minded individuals who are ready to help us and answer our questions. Don’t we?

These guys offer a community of over 1,000,000 members from all corners of the globe. They are all friendly, from all walks of life, and ready to offer you help whenever you need it. This is the platform I use for one of my blogs.

Here’s a little more about them…

They have been around for over 15 years and know what they are doing! Their platform offers you all the help you need from writing content that ranks on search engines, to free domain and hosting. They even have a free website builder that has your website up and running with just a few clicks. You’ll also get free SSL certification for your website so search engines know it’s a secure website and rank it.  

I don’t want to oversell it though, but frankly, I don’t think I have done it justice even after all I’ve said here. Anyhow, it’s free, not a free trial, it is just free. They offer you the option to upgrade to premium which you don’t have to take. All you need to start making money from a free website for affiliate marketing is provided by these guys at no cost whatsoever!  

You can even promote their product as an affiliate and earn commissions with the free package. I think it’s a no-brainer, obviously, otherwise, I wouldn’t be a member there. If you do choose to join our community of bloggers you will find me on it and get personally in touch with me whenever you want 🙂  

I’ll drop you my affiliate link here. Go check them out!  

Please note that if at some point you choose to upgrade to premium, I’ll be earning an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you.

So if you’d like to check it out and sign up for the free version you can do so by clicking here!

Note: The page has all the information you need. I recommend clicking all the links at the top to see if the platform is right for you. Please do this before signing up for the free version, don’t just take my word for it!