Develop an Internet business without a website

Everyone assumes that to run an Internet based business you have to have your own website – but that’s not necessarily true.  It is perfectly possible to earn money from the Internet without a website, and I’ll tell you just how to do that in this article…If you have ever run your own website, you may have developed some skills that will help, such as keyword research and pay per click advertising.  I have discussed these in other articles, so I won’t go over them again here — suffice to say that marketing through pay per click can really pay when you become an affiliate for another company’s products.

You can use direct linking to create adverts and send clicks through to the parent site for a commission payment on conversions.  Even without your own website, MSN and Yahoo! search marketing (but not Google Adwords) will both allow direct linking to sites other than your own.

This system is not always ideal and you won’t necessarily maximise your affiliate income — to do that you should direct traffic through your own website and collect contact details to build your list before you send them on to buy the products.  However, as an easy way to build an extra income stream, it has a lot of advantages.

For a start, it saves a lot of time and effort, not to mention the cost of creating and maintaining your own website.  You can simply set up your pay per click adverts and let them get on with it — you just pay when someone clicks on your ad.  This means you can get on with other moneymaking activities and setting up more income streams.

Affiliate marketing without a website can encourage more people to click through to buy products because there are fewer obstacles — like opt in forms — and fewer clicks-throughs required before they get to see and buy the products.

There is however one major drawback because direct linking is restricted by the pay per click programmes.  There are only a certain amount of affiliate adverts that are allowed to point to the same URL shown in the advert.  That means that if there are a lot of affiliates posting pay per click ads for the same products, your ad might not get very far, unless it is extremely good. So what you have to do to get your ads noticed above all the other affiliates? Well, there is plenty you can do — here are some ideas…

Keyword research

One of the main things you can do to create top-notch pay per click adverts is to do lots of keyword research — but there is a sneaky way to get ahead of your competition.  Instead of competing for the top keywords targeted at a broad market, find those neglected, cheap keywords that can still bring lots of traffic.

If you have experience of keyword research, it will help enormously — perhaps you could work with a mentor for a while, until you really get the hang of it? Also look out for keyword research tools such as the free Google AdWords keyword tools that can help.

Try to search for problems to solve for your targeted market and gear your keywords to this in terms of offering further information or being able to purchase the solution in the form of a product — it has been shown that people buy more readily when they are offered something that solves a problem.

Polish your ad

It’s important to do everything you can to make sure your ad stands out from the rest — so polish it up and keep titivating it until you get it working hard to attract click-throughs.

Work with the concept of identifying and solving problems for your target market and make sure your keywords address this effectively.  Don’t forget to highlight the benefits that the product will bring for your prospective customers.

Use a powerful headline — make sure it grabs attention and forces people to read on.  Often, a question is a good way to do this and makes people curious as to what the answer could be — it could push them into clicking into the ad.

Make sure you include a strong call to action.  Don’t be wishy-washy about it — just ask outright for people to click onto the website through the advert.

Ads with pictures

Yes, I know, pay per click adverts don’t allow you to include a picture with your advert — but adverts on Facebook do!  Social network advertising is the latest in pay per click adverts and Facebook lets you to use an image in your advert.  This is brilliant - images can convey a thousand words and are a very powerful way to attract attention.

You can get the better of your affiliate competition by advertising on Facebook – the great thing is that at the moment there are relatively few marketers advertising here when compared to general pay per click adverts on the search engines.  Get in now with your advert before your competition beats you to it!

Don’t forget to keep testing and tweaking your adverts, or the click-through rate will start to dwindle.