My personal preference with affiliate marketing is that you have a website of your own.

But if that’s not an option yet – maybe because your budget is too small, maybe you think it’s too much hassle to create a website, whatever the reason – here are some ways that you can make money without a website.

Social Media

That means places like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, even LinkedIn.

You can set up a profile on each of them and build up your persona.

It’s best to add quality content rather than gimmicky or me-too content. That will help with longevity for your profile and make it appear to the world that you’re actually a human rather than a machine that’s been programmed to pretend to be a human.

That last sentence tells you the problem you’re facing.

Far too many geeky programmers have figured out that it’s relatively easy to get a social media profile working nicely. So they automate every part of the process – from signing up to posting content and getting followers.

The social media networks don’t like that because it’s hard to have a real conversation with a computer program and, in turn, that reflects badly on the social network itself. So they do their best to weed out non-humans and sometimes that weeding out catches real people as well.

Also there can be sudden rule changes as happened early in 2015 when Pinterest banned affiliate marketing.

So if you do use this route, be careful and aim to move up to having your own website sooner rather than later.

Free websites

These have been around since the internet started.

Sites like Blogger, Weebly, Wix and many others allow you to have your own page or blog on their site that you can use in much the same way as a regular website.

As with the social networks, the same caveats apply: the rules can and do change with the wind. What was acceptable last week may not be acceptable next week.

So, again, it’s great for a short term strategy to build up the cash to have your own site.

While you’re doing that, free website platforms can help give you the skills you’ll need to create your own site so you can treat them a bit like a playground and grow your affiliate marketing income as you learn.

Document sharing sites

I’ve mentioned these separately because they’re not really social networks and you don’t really get your own website.

Instead, you upload a document that you’ve created (in Word, PowerPoint, etc) and they publish it.

Sites like Scribd and SlideShare all work in that fashion.

You’ll need to check each individual site’s policy with regard to links – several of them don’t make the links clickable until quite a few pages into the document – but they can be another way to build up your affiliate marketing income.

If you’d like more help…

Check out this guide to 7 Cheap and Easy Ways to Promote Affiliate Products.

And watch this free video about affiliate marketing secrets.