How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers: 8 Surprising Ways for Stay at Home Moms To Make Money

Do you need followers for affiliate marketing? Or, do you need social media for affiliate marketing? Can you make your first sale with affiliate marketing even without followers? 

You’ve probably heard of stay-at-home moms like Michelle, who earn $50,000/month with affiliate marketing (this free ebook will teach you her strategies). And now you want to give affiliate marketing a shot. But there’s only one problem and that is you don’t have any followers yet. So the big question you’re asking yourself is, can you do affiliate marketing without followers? You might be surprised by the answer. Because you don’t need to have many followers or any followers to make money online. The truth is that social media only makes up a small percentage of successful affiliate marketing activities.

And most affiliate marketers don’t use social media at all. In fact, some admit they are really bad with social and prefer to stay away from it. So how can you still start with affiliate marketing even if you don’t have social media followers? In this post, I’ll show you 8 surprising ways how you can make money with affiliate links even when you don’t have followers yet.

If you want to work on your money mindset, then I can highly recommend Exploring Your Money Mindset – A Breakthrough Money Mindset Program by mom of two, Cappi Pidwell, which can help you grow your wealth while you sleep (and that is super affordable).

Related Posts

• 21 Questions About Blogging MakingSenseOfCents
• Affiliate Marketing for Beginner Mom Bloggers: The Best Step by Step Guide
• Best New Mom Blogs Keyword Research Tool
• How I made my first $82.79 from my blog (June 2022 – First Blog Income Report)

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you can do it as a beginner, even as a busy mama. Compared to what you may think, starting a blog is not the only way to promote your affiliate links. In this post, I am going to show you more ways how you can share your affiliate links to get the word out and make sales even if nobody knows you.

Here are 8 surprising ways how to do affiliate marketing without followers:

• YouTube channel
• Email list
• Social media platforms
• Own blog
• Social media marketing
• Landing page
• Forum marketing
• Free ebook

A great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need followers to make your first sale. However, you can greatly improve your marketing efforts by doing this next thing.

The first step, that is crucial to get right is to pick the right affiliate offer for your niche that you are crazy about. In other words, you want to pick an offer that the audience you’re trying to sell to, would be most likely interested in and, at the same time, that you’re most excited to sell.

Why is that important?

The right people will buy the product you love whether or not you have followers. That’s why you can do affiliate marketing even without followers.

That’s the basics of affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the act of promoting the products of others you love to potential customers at the right time, and place. Because you can do affiliate marketing without start-up costs it has become a popular business model.

But the main reason why affiliate marketing is popular is that you can start off without followers and then build up your following over time.

But there are more benefits to affiliate marketing, as I’ll show you next.

Benefits of affiliate marketing

• Passive income – Over time you can build up your income streams through affiliate marketing to be passive, which means you can continuously earn money from the work you’ve done before with little effort to maintain it. That also means, there’s no limit as to how much money you can make with affiliate marketing. Michelle makes $50,000/month with affiliate marketing and in her course Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing she shares how she does it. So if you want to learn more, then definitely check out her course. (I started making money right after taking her course – Read my full review HERE)
• No start-up costs – The good news is that the costs to get started with your affiliate marketing business are low compared to starting an online business. Most affiliate networks are free to join and once you’re accepted into an affiliate program you can browse thousands of brands to partner with, all for free. In general, there is no extra cost once you join affiliate programs. This means you don’t need to invest money upfront to become an affiliate marketer. You just need to join free affiliate programs. I’ll share the best affiliate networks I use in this post here.
• Promote something you love – Being an affiliate marketer means you’ll get to talk about something you genuinely care about. The good thing about that is that your audience can tell if you really like something. When you appear authentic, people appreciate it. That’s why the best way to build trust as an affiliate marketer without any followers is to be authentic.
• Low risk – Promoting affiliate links is free. Therefore you will not lose money if people do not click on your affiliate links. Your affiliate links will only make you money when people click on them, but you will not lose anything if they don’t.

So, how do you get started with affiliate marketing if you don’t have any followers?

Follow these steps here.

How to get started with affiliate marketing without followers:

1. Choose a niche
2. Apply to affiliate programs or get accepted into affiliate networks
3. Create your affiliate account
4. Log in to your affiliate account
5. Pick the right products you want to promote from a huge network of brands, people’s products, or company’s products
6. Choose the right affiliate offer for your audience
7. Promote your affiliate links with the ways I am about to show you next.

All of the above steps are important. However, promoting your affiliate links right when you don’t have any followers, in the beginning, is probably the most important one. That’s why in the next section, I show you how you can get started promoting your affiliate links, even if you’re just starting out.

8 surprising ways to successfully promote your affiliate links without followers

The great thing is that the process of getting started with affiliate marketing without followers is almost identical to the process with followers. The only key difference really is how you promote your affiliate links and which channels you use.

Let’s take a look.

YouTube channel

YouTube is the perfect place to get your affiliate links in front of a lot of people even when you’re just starting out. Check out this video below of how mom Angela Braniff uses the description box of her videos to promote all of her affiliates links strategically.

The easiest way to do affiliate marketing with YouTube videos is with

• product reviews
• how-to videos, or
• tutorials

To help to choose the right product idea for your video you got to think about user intent. User intent is the intention your user has when they search for content. For example, a user looking for a product review has, most likely, the intention to buy, which makes this type of content work great for conversions.

However, producing YouTube videos does not need to take up much time or technical know-how, for example how to edit videos. You can create videos with your mobile phone, or video on your screen if you’re doing a tutorial. You can even ask a friend to film you while you talk to the camera. The more authentic your videos are, the more your users can relate. Successful YouTube videos aren’t overly produced, just think of how successful unboxing videos are.

Make sure to include your affiliate links in the description of your videos. And ask people to share, like, and comment on your videos. Over time this will build up a following on your channel and drive even more people to it.

Email list

Email marketing is still the best way to reach an audience. If you already happen to have an email list then that’s awesome! But chances are that you don’t have a mailing list yet – and that’s ok. Because… in order to promote your affiliate links it doesn’t have to be your mailing list. You can partner with someone who already has a huge email list and get them to promote your affiliate links with their audience.

This is exactly how accidentally I launched AnyMommyCanMakeMoney. One of my mom friends Megan promoted a blog post of mine featuring her to her list, which led to a massive spike in traffic (and also a sale).

The right incentive can help you gain new subscribers to your email list. In exchange for email addresses, you can send special offers, cheatsheets, reports, free ebooks, training videos or masterclasses depending on your niche.

Affiliate programs regularly offer coupon codes exclusively to affiliate website members. You can then share amazing deals with your email list to increase affiliate sales.

Social media platforms

Did you know that you don’t need to have a website or a blog to do affiliate marketing? Technically, you can promote your favorite affiliate products directly across social media sites to potential customers in your social media posts.

I like to promote my affiliate links on my Facebook page as part of my blog posts. However, you don’t even need to create content for it as you can promote your affiliate links directly.

You should use your social media accounts with mindfulness, and you should avoid breaking the cardinal rule when you’re using them, which is: People don’t come to social media to buy things. People are looking for entertainment, inspiration, or a good laugh. So, your content must also entertain, inspire, or make people laugh for them to pay attention. The last thing you want is to come across as salesy and lose potential new followers in this way.

Own blog

Starting your own blog is a great idea if you’re an enthusiastic content creator. Check out my free tutorial to help set up your blog from start to finish.

The best thing about doing affiliate marketing with your blog is that if your blog is self-hosted, you have full control over which type of products you promote. That means you can promote products of companies, people’s products, as well as your own like printables.

Amazon associates program

A popular way for new mom bloggers, including myself, to make sales without followers is to become an affiliate for the Amazon associates program.

You might be wondering can I become an Amazon affiliate without a website? And the answer is no. Here’s why.

Amazon is aware of the fact that people don’t like to be sold too directly. That’s why Amazon associate rules don’t allow you to promote affiliate links directly without providing valuable context to go with it.

Therefore, if you want to promote your Amazon affiliate links you need three things:

• A self-hosted blog
• Create high-quality content and
• Optimize your content for SEO (search engine optimization) so that people can find you. Check out this FREE masterclass on how to get started with SEO which has taught me everything I needed to know and more!

Also, make sure to add a disclaimer on your blog that you’re part of the Amazon associates program.

Next, you can promote your Amazon affiliate links in your high-quality blog posts.

Here are two of my own posts containing affiliate links, that are doing well.

• How To Potty Train A One Year Old Girl: What You Need To Know
• How To Build Wealth in Your 40s (Even if You Haven’t Started Yet)

Own website

You can promote your affiliate links to a brand-new audience by creating your own niche website.

However, instead of creating fresh content, as you would do on your blog, you can focus on your most popular pieces of content and turn your website into a static sales funnel. There are so many affiliate marketers out there doing it and ClickFunnels seems to work great once you’ve identified your most popular posts.

Next, you want all of your most popular blog posts to lead to your sales funnel or opt-in.

Mia Fox from Become The CEO Of Your Dream Life is a great example.

Almost all of her blog posts lead to her highly converting funnel. See it out for yourself here.

Once people are in your funnel you can target them with email marketing campaigns and offer more free value before leading up to the sale.

However, for this channel to work you need to drive traffic to your website, either organically or paid. If you’re just starting out, you should focus on organic traffic and only switch to paid traffic once you know your affiliate offer, sales page copy, and brand resonates with your audience. Otherwise, if you pay for traffic too early you might run the risk of losing money.

Social media marketing

If you like social media like Facebook and Instagram but don’t have followers, then keep reading. Because, even if you don’t have any followers yet, you can still use social media to promote your affiliate links. How? In the same way you can use someone else’s email list to promote your affiliate links to their audience, you can work with social media influencers to promote your affiliate links. To get the biggest return on your investment, make sure to work with an influencer whose audience matches yours.

Landing page

Landing pages are a great place for promoting your affiliate links in a short and sweet manner. The best part is you don’t need a website or blog to do that.

A landing page can be a simple one-pager that promotes your affiliate offer, a freebie like a free chapter, a list, a printable, a podcast, a blog post, or a free tutorial that partially solves your reader’s problem and contains your affiliate links. You do need a strategy for driving traffic to your landing page, however.

Forum marketing

Going where your target audience is, is another way to do affiliate marketing without followers.

For example, there are plenty of free online communities and forums out there where your target audience is asking questions. Take a look at these examples.

Parenting niche – If you are targeting moms then you could hang out in parenting forums and help answer questions parents have that relate to your affiliate offer.

Travel niche – If you’re in the travel niche then you could join Facebook groups like DNWB by Sharon Gourlay which is full of travel bloggers.

Food niche – If you’re in the food niche then you should spend time on platforms where foodies exchange and look for recipes, like Pinterest.

AnastasiaBlogger uses Quora to show her expertise.

The best way to succeed on online forums is to be aware of the rules and follow them. In most forums, posting affiliate links directly is not permitted because the purpose of the forum is to help others. So, be as helpful as you can. People will check out your profile anyways if you provide useful information and are curious to click on your links if you’re being helpful.

Free eBook

Promote your affiliate links about a topic you are passionate about with a free eBook.

The most important aspect of your freebie is that it provides value to your audience. Offer context to your affiliate links by telling a story or giving real-life examples.

Opt into my list to see my free eBook.

The best part is that you can use affiliate marketing programs like ClickBank to promote your product if you don’t have any followers yet.

Promote your free eBook with ClickBank

ClickBank is a marketplace for vendors to list and sell their products. To get your product approved the first thing you must create is a simple sales page to pitch your product to new customers. For that, you need to have your own hosting as ClickBank doesn’t provide hosting. There is a listing fee that applies once your vendor application gets approved. You can read the full steps here.

I hope you enjoyed my ideas on how to do affiliate marketing without followers. I hope they were helpful. Whatever channel you choose to promote your affiliate links, you need the traffic to succeed.

Here are two ways how you can start driving traffic to your affiliate links.

Search engines

Search engines like Google are vital to bringing in traffic to your affiliate links. Especially in the beginning, when you’re starting out with affiliate marketing it’s a good idea to focus on organic traffic over paid traffic. Organic traffic is free and can continue to bring much traffic from internet users to your site for years to come.

And for search engines to trust your site is crucial for your affiliate marketing strategy without followers.

And for search engines to trust your site is crucial for your affiliate marketing strategy without followers.

The one thing that helps you build trust with search engines is great content. In other words, the better you answer people’s questions on Google in your content, the more time they spend on your content and the more search engines consider your site trustworthy.

Because the more search engines trust your site, the more they will surface your content in the search results. And that means the more traffic search engines are going to send to you. That means if you’re wanting to promote affiliate links in your content without followers, spend time creating high-quality content.

organic traffic is great for driving traffic to your blog.

One of them is to optimize your content, like blog posts, for SEO (search engine optimization) so that more people can find it.

To increase your chances of people clicking on your affiliate links, especially if you don’t have followers yet, you need to do keyword research.

Keyword research

Keyword research is when you research the keywords your target audience is most interested in to determine which products are the most helpful products to sell to them. Without doing keyword research you might pick the wrong product to become an affiliate for and end up struggling to make money. No matter if you’re doing affiliate marketing without followers or with followers, you need to do keyword research.

Keyword research will help you find keywords your audience actively searches for.

However, when you’re starting out doing affiliate marketing without followers you need a different keyword research strategy. Because when you don’t have any followers yet and your blog is small you are better off not going after popular keywords because they might have high competition.

Instead, you want to go after low-competition keywords that are still relevant to your target audience but that have less competition. The number #1 keyword research tool that’s great for beginner content creators is called RankIQ. It’s the one I am using for AnyMommyCanMakeMoney. Not many bloggers know about it, but it gives you the exact keyword you should focus on. With RankIQ you will no longer be guessing which keywords to go after, as RankIQ will tell you. It will not only help you save time but help you make money.

The next step is to create high-quality content around your keywords and promote your affiliate links.

I hope this has answered your most important questions about doing affiliate marketing without followers.

But you might have a couple more questions.

So, here are some other FAQs you might have about how to do affiliate marketing without followers.

Do you need followers for affiliate marketing?

No, you don’t need followers for affiliate marketing. But what you do need is traffic. However, more traffic doesn’t automatically mean higher conversions. You can have very little traffic and still have a high conversion rate if you’re targeting the right audience with the right affiliate links.

I made my first sales from a tiny blog without a lot of traffic as you can read from my first income report here.

How do I promote affiliate links without followers?

You can promote your affiliate links on your YouTube channel, across your social media profiles or in forums that relate to your niche. You can start a Facebook page, a Facebook group or post in Facebook groups that are related to your niche, and make use of relevant threads to promote your affiliate links. You can also drive traffic to a landing page and get visitors to opt into a sales funnel with an incentive like a freebie. Once visitors opt-in to your email list you can target them with email marketing campaigns. Be aware that Amazon associates don’t allow you to use their links directly in email campaigns without content to provide context.

Do I need social media for affiliate marketing?

No, you don’t need social media or social media following for affiliate marketing. You can start a blog, a website, a niche website, or a landing page a highly converting sales funnel.

Can I start affiliate marketing without a website?

Yes, you can start affiliate marketing without a website. You can use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, or search engines like Google to directly share your affiliate links. However, you do want to check the rules as each platform has its own guidelines on which affiliate programs can and can not be promoted without a website. For example, Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon associates, doesn’t allow for its affiliate links to be directly shared on Pinterest or via email marketing.

Do I need a domain for affiliate marketing?

You don’t need a domain to start with affiliate marketing. You can start promoting your affiliate links via social media or work with influencers to get your affiliate links out there. However, if you do wish to use your blog to promote your affiliate links, make sure it’s a self-hosted blog. Because only when your blog is self-hosted can you monetize your content and for that, you would need a domain, which is the name of your blog. With Bluehost, you get a FREE domain name and in this post, I’ll show you how.

Key takeaways

I hope that my post has shown you that with hard work, you can do affiliate marketing without followers or even an online presence.

The good thing is that you don’t even need to have fancy marketing skills. With a little research, you can find out where your audience hangs out and earn their trust with high-quality content by being genuinely helpful. Remember, it’s much easier to promote relevant products to your audience when you have a specific niche. So if you want to learn more then you can check out my post Affiliate Marketing for Beginner Mom Bloggers: The Best Step by Step Guide.

But there are more things you can do to ensure you’re becoming a successful affiliate marketer without followers. The main things are how to drive traffic to your social network because without traffic it will be hard to get high conversions.

However, instead of focusing on calculating how much traffic you need to get a good conversion rate, I would much rather focus on building an audience that is engaged. Because, you can make enough affiliate sales from a small audience that is engaged compared to a large, unengaged audience.

With a little bit of research and hard work, it is possible to make money with affiliate marketing. Don’t let any fears stop you from giving affiliate marketing a go. If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing I recommend checking out Michelle’s course. This course helped me make my first sales and you can read in my review here how exactly.

And don’t forget to check out Exploring Your Money Mindset – A Breakthrough Money Mindset Program by mom of two, Cappi Pidwell, which can help you grow your wealth while you sleep (and that is super affordable).

But I am curious to hear from you: Are you planning to do affiliate marketing without followers and which way your preferred way is to promote your affiliate links? Please leave me a comment below.