Affiliate Marketing without a Website (7 Steps)

So you want to try affiliate marketing but you don’t have a website?

You have come to the right place because I am going to show you exactly how you can generate online income by doing affiliate marketing without a website at all.

But first, what is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the method of marketing another business and receiving payment or commissions for generating sales, leads or even calls.

With affiliate marketing, you can be the middle-man (or woman) in between traffic and sales. Most online companies have an affiliate program that you can sign up for free and promote their products.

One of the most known affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates program, which is Amazon’s own affiliate program. With Amazon’s affiliate program, you can get paid anywhere between 2% and 8% of the sale price of any product that someone buys after they click your affiliate link.

With the Amazon Affiliate program and a good traffic source, you can generate a high paying side hustle.

YouTube is the worlds 3rd most visited website so it gets an insane amount of traffic. You can harness this traffic to your affiliate links and make money without even having a website.

Here is how:

Step 1: Create a YouTube Channel

The first thing you will need to do is to build a YouTube channel to host your videos.

Yes, you will need to create videos in order to make money on Youtube. But don’t worry, you don’t even have to be in them!

Your channel should be in an Amazon niche that has higher payout commissions. Here are some great examples of high paying niche:

• Headphones
• Luxury Beauty
• Business
• Home Improvement
• Pet  Products
• Pantry
• Tools

If you create your channel around these niches, then you will make a lot more money because they pay a 4-8% commission of the total price.

Now would be a good time to choose your video format. You can do normal open box reviews which work quite well. Or if you don’t want to be in the video, you can do a voiceover video (or get someone to do the voiceovers). Whichever you decide, the video should be valuable and review the products in depth.

Once your channel is ready, its time to research products that you are going to review.

Step 2: Research Products to Review

Picking the right products to feature on your YouTube channel is very important when it comes to making money from your channel.

If you create product reviews of products no one is searching for, you are going to get far fewer views. That’s why we need to do some research before reviewing any products.

There are some free tools like KeywordTool.io and Google Keyword Planner, but I prefer to use Ahrefs for all of my keyword research.

Look for products that have a low keyword difficulty (easier to rank for) and a high search volume. You want to try and find keywords that have a volume over 1,000 and a Keyword Difficulty Under 20-30.

This will make it easier to rank the video for this keyword in Google.

It also helps if the product already has some YouTube reviews in Google when you search for ‘Product Name + Review’.

Step 3: Buy the Product to Review

In order to give the most honest and true review of a product, you need to have it.

This will build trust with your viewers and subscribers so they watch more of your videos and keep making you money.

When you have the product, you can show it at all angles, show it working in action and give people an idea of what to expect when they buy the product.

This can be a little bit of an investment upfront but once the affiliate income starts coming in from the video, it will pay you a large ROI.

Step 4: Generate a Valuable YouTube video

You don’t have to have $1,000 worth of video equipment to make a valuable video on YouTube.

The latest cell phones can create really high-quality videos that only need a little bit of editing.

Make sure your videos describe the product, what’s good about it, what’s bad about it and even an example of its use.

You can use free tools to edit your videos if you don’t have access to Adobe Premiere. Here is some free video editing software you can use to edit your video and make it more professional:

1. Blender
2. Shotcut
3. DaVinci
4. Lightworks
5. Openshot

Or if you are feeling fancy, you can use one of these professional video editing software:

1. Adobe Premiere
2. CyberLink PowerDirector 365
3. Corel VideoStudio Ultimate
4. Apple iMovie
5. Final Cut Pro X

Your videos should be to the point and don’t really need to be any longer than 15-20 minutes. I have found that the shorter videos will provide you more success as the total watch time of a video is important for ranking it well.

Step 5: Generate Affiliate Links

Now, you need to generate affiliate links for the product you are reviewing. You will add this link in the description of your video so people can easily click it, but we will get into that later.

First, you will need to generate an affiliate link in Amazon Associates Central.

We go in-depth on how to generate affiliate links in our beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing with Amazon. Simply generate a tracking id for your YouTube channel so you can track the sales that come from your channel.

Find the product on Amazon and then copy the URL of the product. In the Amazon associates area, go to Product Linking->Link to Any Page.

Choose the ‘Link to Any Page’ tab and then paste the URL of the product and click Get HTML. Copy the URL only and then we are going to use a URL shortener to create a pretty link that we can track.

Go to any URL shortener like bit.ly  or Short URL and paste the affiliate link you generated to generate a short link.

We want to use this so we can track how many clicks our link gets for each video and product.

Then you can see which links are getting click the most and compare it to Amazon’s click amount.

Step 6: Add Affiliate Links in Video Description

This step is pretty simple.

Just copy your bit.ly URL to your product and paste it in your YouTube video description. I would suggest pasting it towards the top so it’s visible before the read more link.

This will increase the CTR and give you more clicks to your affiliate products.

Step 7: Repeat

Now simply repeat this process over and over again.

The cool thing about YouTube affiliate marketing is the more videos you create, the more money you will ultimately make.

Once your channel reaches 1000 followers and 4,000 watch hours, you can enable monetization with Google Adsense and also make money just from people watching your video.

This will create 2 different ways to get paid for your videos!