If you’re wondering how to sell digital products without a website, look no further! While a website is a useful tool to sell something online, you don’t need one. You can easily sell digital products without a website of your own. In fact, many affiliates use other platforms to sell their digital products:
- YouTube – a great resource to use to attract traffic and sell digital products
- Free blog platforms – such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com allow anyone to create content and link to products and services online with their affiliate links.
- Funnel building software – lets you easily create a single (landing) page to sell things from by collecting subscribers email addresses
One of the best ways to sell digital products is through attracting traffic organically. This is done by creating a lot of content – either written or video content. YouTube is one of the best places for video content and with enough content in a given topic, you can attract visitors for free to your YouTube channel.
The downside of this strategy is that it will take some serious effort in building content in the first place. YouTube is competitive, but less so than Google. It’s the second largest search engine after Google online so you can find plenty of potential customers on YouTube. It’s also less competitive than Google search which has many thousands of blog websites to compete against.
Still if you’re not into creating video, you can become a blogger on any of the free blog platforms available online. My first affiliate sale came from a free blog site known as HubPages.com. Anyone can create a free account using Hubpages.com and start creating written content. As you attract more visitors over time, you can link to various affiliate products to earn commissions.
How To Sell Digital Products Without A Website
Another simple strategy is to create landing pages and drive traffic to it using paid marketing. This is a good strategy if you’re not into the idea of spending months (or years) creating written or video content. Paid marketing is also much faster and more scalable than the organic methods listed above. With paid marketing, your best opportunity is to send traffic to a landing page where you can instantly collect their email address.
Why collect emails? Paid marketing is much more effective if you can collect a visitor’s email. Without it, you must rely on sending traffic directly to affiliate products. This isn’t such a good idea for a couple of reasons:
- Paid advertising platforms often object to you sending direct to the affiliate product, so they may disallow it
- Sending traffic to a product means you don’t get to build a relationship with your subscriber. Most of that traffic will simply leave the product sales page, never to return.
So if you’re going to pay for traffic, make it worth your while and collect subscriber’s email addresses. This means you’ll need an autoresponder but you can use a free autoresponders for affiliate marketing if you’re on a budget.
An autoresponder means you can create pre-written email messages and sell affiliate products to subscribers over a long time period. Often, I have sold products to subscribers on my email list even months or years after they have signed up. This just isn’t possible if you send traffic directly to an affiliate sales page.
When To Use A Website
If you want to sell affiliate products without a website, you’ll need to use either free blogging platforms or video platforms and create a lot of content, or, build a landing page and send paid traffic to it. The reason many affiliate marketers use a website is because it’s much more cost effective than using paid marketing, and you can more easily obtain free traffic to it from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc.).
With free blog platforms, it’s more difficult to get a ranking with the SERPS (search engine results pages). Search engines don’t rank free blog platforms as well as they do actual websites. So it might be worth considering building a website, or using some kind of website building software to build one for you. There’s a variety of website builders who will create websites for you totally free:
- Wix.com
- Weebly.com
- WordPress.com
- Websitebuilder.com
- Godaddy.com
But again, a free website has a lesser authority with the search engines. If you’re going for free traffic and you’re serious, it’s definitely worth learning about building a niche website. This can be done to help you get free traffic from the get go. In general terms, the cheaper (and free) marketing methods are going to take longer. The more expensive marketing methods (using paid marketing) and a high ticket affiliate program, are going to cost more.
Selling An Affiliate Product
To sell an affiliate product you need to join an affiliate program and find a suitable product which you want to sell. Once you have done so, you should have an affiliate link. This link can be placed in many places online:
- On a blog you own
- On your YouTube videos
- In your articles on a free blogging platform
- On your social media profiles
- In your email signature
You can get very creative about where you place your affiliate links online. But to make sales, you will need to learn how to attract the right kind of visitors who will then click your affiliate link with the intention of buying something. This requires a bit of skill and newbie affiliate marketers often become disillusioned after trying and failing to make sales online with their affiliate links.
The best way to promote affiliate links will depend on your marketing options, budget and product/s. To attract the right people, you should spend some time getting to know who you are aiming your marketing towards. Not everyone online is interested in your products, but some people will be. The trick with making affiliate sales is to get to know your target audience and learn who your perfect “customer avatar” is.
Once you understand who online is more likely to buy from you, you can create a marketing message which will attract that specific section of the online marketplace.
See also how to sell digital products online.
