With online affiliate marketing, you are even given an affiliate website. However, this raises the question of whether you can do affiliate marketing successfully without a website of your own.

In my opinion it is better to create your own affiliate marketing website for traffic generation purposes. Having your own website will also enable you to present your products in your own words, which will make pre-selling them much more effective.

However, if you want to do affiliate marketing without building and maintaining a website, there are several viable options that are open to you. Here are a few of them.

You can still do email marketing without an affiliate website of your own. You can promote your affiliate links directly in the e-mail messages and send your leads directly to your affiliate sales page if you choose to do so.

You can purchase leads in various ways and import them directly into an auto-responder that contains prewritten messages about the product you are selling. Then all you have to do is promote your auto-responder email address.

You can promote it in different ways, including on discussion forums, via article marketing, or by starting a blog of your own and posting it there.

Another thing you can do is create e-books and give them away. Focus on a specific theme and write useful information about it that people would want to read. You don't have to be a great writer, and nor do you have to write a 200 page book. Twenty to thirty pages would be enough. Within the content of the e-book you can include links to your affiliate products and make sales that way.

Some article directories and discussion forums do not allow you to place a link to an affiliate sales page in your signature file. On the other hand they do allow you to link to a website or a blog. So if you do not want to run a website, all you need to do is start a free blog with Blogger.com. Your blog does not even need to be loaded with content or regularly updated. All that is necessary is a sign-up form and possibly a pre-sell article about the affiliate product you are selling. Then you can participate in discussion forums send traffic to your pre-sell blog article via the link in your signature file.

You can do the same thing with article marketing. This is a great way to do affiliate marketing without a website. You would write articles that interest people and place a resource box at the foot of the article that directs people either to your affiliate link or to the pre-sell page on your blog.

In summary, while I must emphasize that having a website of your own is the best way to do affiliate marketing, if that is not something that appeals to you then it is not an absolute necessity. Instead, you can promote your affiliate link directly and make sales in the various ways that I have listed in this article.