Do You Need A Website To Start An Internet Business?

Amazingly you don’t actually need your own website to run a business on the Internet. While having a website is certainly one way of going about it, there are ways and means of generating an income without one. One way is through pay per click advertising and there are lots of articles giving you the basics of how to get into pay per click — here we can build on that to show you how to use this method to market affiliate products directly. So how does it work?

Direct linking

By using direct linking, you can design adverts and get visitors to click directly through to your parent company’s website without coming through a website of your own. As long as you include your affiliate link in your advert, you will be able to claim your commission on conversions.

The advantages of this method of generating an affiliate income are that it is easy and hassle-free and you don’t need to worry about maintaining your own website. However, the downside is that you won’t be able to build a list of your own subscribers as many affiliates do by directing traffic through their own website and collecting contact details from an opt in subscription box. If this doesn’t trouble you, then it is a quick and easy way to build an Internet business. You may have other projects on the go which means that you don’t have time to maintain your own website and this could be ideal as a side-line.

In many ways, this method of affiliate marketing can actually increase your sales conversions because when visitors have to click through to 2 separate sites before they can buy a product, you risk losing them along the way.

However there is one problem with direct linking because pay per click programs will restrict the number of affiliate adverts that can point to the same URL. So if your affiliate products have a lot of other affiliates also using direct linking, you may not be able to do this.

Unique affiliate products

One way to overcome this is to find affiliate products that are not being promoted by hordes of other affiliates. While you might believe that you have to put up with affiliate competition for the best products, there is nothing to stop you hunting down your own unique products to sell on commission.

There are zillions of small businesses with websites selling products on the Internet today and the vast majority of them do not have an affiliate program — that doesn’t mean that their products are not good enough. It simply means that the business owners have either not thought about setting up an affiliate program, they don’t know how to go about it, they are fairly new to Internet marketing, or they simply don’t want to go down that route. There are so many fabulous products available with no affiliate programs that it would be a very easy job to track down something unique that you could sell on behalf of another company.

All you need to do when you find something you would like to sell and believe there is a large market for, is to contact the business owners and ask if they would be willing to let you sell their products on their behalf. Most business owners would be delighted to be approached in this way and you can reassure them that there is no need to set up complicated affiliate programs. Just offer to be their exclusive affiliate — at least for the time being.

Once they have agreed to this, all you have to do is create a code or some method of identifying sales generated by your advertising and you can claim your commission. This way of finding products to sell is a little bit more involved but the enormous advantage you will gain by being a sole affiliate for a particular product is obvious. No affiliate saturation – in fact no affiliate competition at all…

Then all you have to do is set up your pay per click adverts. You may even have the advantage of knowing which keywords are working best for the product already, which saves time and effort on keyword research.

Other ways to sell without a website

Even if you don’t want to get into affiliate marketing, you can run your own Internet business without a website. All you need to do is use other platforms, such as eBay, Amazon and Craigslist, as well as the many minor auction sites available.

There are literally unlimited opportunities to sell via these sites and they are easy to set up and run with no obligation to have your own website. These days, anyone can run their own Internet business…