Site Building with Free Tools for No Cost Affiliate Marketing
Other than banner advertising and pay per click advertising with some small players in the industry, most networks no longer allow your ads to use your affiliate link as the destination link. Thus, even if you are doing PPC marketing, you will need a site or a page to act as your landing page.
As for no cost affiliate marketing which the whole model revolves around search engine optimization and acquiring search engine traffic, having a site is a must.
I do understand that most people are doubtful and curious, even after the keyword research and market viability research that they have gone through, that they might fail badly and lose a lot of money. Yes, hosting and domain names can be very expensive for some who are just starting out in learning affiliate marketing.
In this article, I will provide some of the free site builders and page builders that will allow you to build your own virtual real estate without the need to pay. Also, I will be putting up a few valuable tips on what to have and what to avoid when building your site for no cost affiliate marketing.
Free Tools for No Cost Site Building
To save up your time and effort, please avoid using free web hosts for your affiliate marketing venture. There is no point going through the fuss of setting up a database, the FTP and having tonnes of ads splashed all over your sites, only to find out that you are banned from the host because of 20 unique visits a day.
Let me list out 5 site building platforms that you can use to market the products and services that you are promoting as an affiliate.
- Blogger (RECOMMENDED)
- Squidoo
- Synthasite
- Blinkweb
All the above sites have an easy to understand control panel and you should be able to get your first affiliate marketing promotion page up in no time.
Site Building with Free Tools Must Remember Tips
Although the above tools allow you to try and experiment as much as you want, you have to imprint this in your head: YOU NEED A .COM AND A HOST! Thus, make your money and leave these tools out for building primary affiliate sites later on.
The following tips will be able to shrink down the number of experiments you need and provide you with a higher chance for success.
Restrict On-Site Navigation
Forget about things like stickiness and bounce rate. Those are not your major concerns when it comes to building affiliate sites using free tools. All you want your visitors to do is to click on your banners and affiliate links and hopefully, they will convert.
There is no point sending them all over your free hosted site without telling them you are trying to sell something. You are not staying with Blogger or Squidoo forever. Once you have made enough money for a host and a domain name, these tools are going to be supplementary.
Readable Content
Just like selling something using your mouth, your writing needs to be clear and precise. No, not your writing skills, but the way you present your writing. Most of the default templates will have appropriate spacing and readable fonts.
Do not turn your affiliate site into a color palette. Refrain from using too many colors on your site as they hinder proper reading.
Proper Usage of Banners
Most affiliate networks like Pepperjam Network and CPA networks like Market Leverage offers some great creatives (banners) for your usage when promoting their offers. These banners can be nice looking and they are best if they come with short benefits description and a call to action.
However, you must not overuse them (one will be enough) and please avoid those spammy red black white blinking designs. Banners that explain themselves usually have high click through rates and you should place them high up in your blog post.
Call to Action Buttons
Instead of writing click here, learn more, download here, buy now, you can always add some vibrancies to your affiliate promotion copies by using glossy call to action buttons. Click the image below for preview of examples of what I mean.
Looks astonishingly nice, don’t they? Don’t be sad, you don’t have to buy them because Aff Boom is giving away all the 170 private label rights graphics above FREE OF CHARGE just because you read this post! 
**The PSD files are inside as well so you can edit them if you have some knowledge with Photoshop.**
Only Relevant Contents
My experience tells me that people tend to be more skeptical when visiting a generic Blogger blog or a Squidoo page. They would want to look at your profile (Squidoo) or your other blog posts (Blogger).
Thus, please make sure that apart from promotional copies, other relevant contents are available to build the trust needed for you to promote something easier.
No Mashup
As I move along, I will be talking about one type of affiliate site which is cost efficient for affiliate marketers. These sites are called niche mashup sites or offer sites. I will not go deep into the details but with free site building tools, you must not build such sites.
Apart from losing the trust building process that I have mentioned earlier, affiliate links will become too hard for you to track. Focus on one niche, list down all the affiliate links you have so that you can change whenever there is an offer expiry.
Affiliate Marketing Success with Free Site Building Tools
There are a lot of people using the free site builders above to build their affiliate sites. Some even have their whole affiliate marketing model based on the above tools. However, we aim to move on once we make enough money to get a host and a domain name.
Sites and blogs hosted for free makes you look cheap. People will trust marketers that uses a .com domain more. You will also have better control over things like affiliate links, content ownership and web design if you have a proper web host.
All the Best in No Cost Affiliate Marketing
Next week, we will be moving into different sites to build for affiliate marketing. Once you have the money, what type of sites you should build? How you should be building them and how will they fare? All these will be revealed in next week’s issue of No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest.
P.S: Got your goodies above? Well, I always give away goodies from time to time within my post. In order not to miss them, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed today.
P.P.S: If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to use the Contact page to get in touch with me.
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[...] Aff Boom - Wayne is a new reader to the blog but his most recent post about no cost affiliate tools really got my attention. I am new to affiliate marketing and so I think this can be helpful to [...]
I would also suggest wordpress for anyone who wants to update their website/blog often. It is extremely easy to use!