Do You Really Need A Website?

I see many "expert" internet marketers telling people that it's not necessary to have a website in order to make money on the internet. While that's true to some extent, not having your own website can severely limit your options.

It's difficult to sell your own product without a website - With no website, you'd have no place to put your salesletter. And without a salesletter, how can you sell your product? You could sell thru email to your list, but then again, without a website to capture names and email addresses, you wouldn't even have a list, would you?

It's hard to sell affiliate products without a website nowadays - One of the big ideas the gurus preach to new marketers is that you don't need a website because you can just advertise affiliate products using Google's AdWords Pay-Per-Click ads. That was indeed possible in the past and many people did it, but it's not something that works anymore. You see, Google has made some policy changes that prohibit multiple advertisers from using the same destination URL in AdWords ads. What this means is that if someone else already is advertising the particular affiliate product you want to promote, you're out of luck.

The bottom line is that if you want to make money selling on the internet, you really do need a website.

A website opens up so many possibilities for you - Obviously, with your own website, you can host and display salesletters for your own products. If your products are downloadable, the website also provides you with a place to store those products and make them available to customers for downloading.

If you want to promote affiliate products, your own website allows you to use AdWords without having to worry about someone else already promoting that same affiliate URL. You simply use a page of your own website as the destination URL for the AdWords ad. The page on your website can be either a "pre-sell" letter or just a simple redirect to your affiliate link URL.

In most cases, you'll want to have a pre-sell page, rather than a simple redirect to your affiliate link. The reason is that with a pre-sell page, you'll get a chance to explain the product in terms that will be meaningful to your prospects before passing them on to the affiliate URL. That way, when they arrive at the actual product salesletter, they already have made a tentative decision that they're interested in the product.

A pre-sell page also gives you an opportunity to offer a bonus to anyone that buys thru your affiliate link. For example, if the product you're promoting is a complicated piece of software, you might want to make up a short instructional video that you can give to purchasers. This is usually perceived as a good value, since it will help them to be productive with the product much quicker. Many affiliate marketers have seen increased sales using this technique.