Despite what internet marketing “gurus” tell you, you do not need to have a website to be successful in internet marketing.

You do need some basic tools, but a website is not one of them.

Sure, a website is helpful, especially as a content management tool, and even more so if you sell your own products. But if you are an affiliate marketer, you don’t need your own site.

For affiliate marketing, there is really only one tool you need (other than internet access and email): an autoresponder. You need a good autoresponder that will let you broadcast messages to the list that you will build. Most free autoresponder programs will not let you do this, so you need to invest about $20 per month in a good autoresponder. This will be the best investment you ever make in your business. And, since autoresponder programs are affiliate programs themselves, you can promote your autoresponder program and eventually have it pay for itself.

If you get a headache thinking about HTML, and “coding” your website gives you cramps, here is a simple marketing system that will promote your affiliate program without your own website:

1. The marketing system is to establish yourself as an expert on the products you are promoting. You do this by creating content: first, by posting in forums and submitting articles to article directories, second, by running your own ezine or newsletter, and third, by personally contacting ezine owners and offering your article for publication in their ezine.

2. You promote your affiliate product or program in the resource box at the end of your article. Write a brief description of who you are, what you do, and how readers can learn more. For more detail, see my resource box at the end of the article.

3. The secret to promoting your affiliate product is to promote it via your autoresponder. Since you have written a content article about what you are promoting, you have probably whetted the appetite for more information. So ask for the sale! If you wrote an article on dog grooming, write something like,

4. In your autoresponder, write a couple more tips, and then a sentence that refers your readers to your affiliate program.

5. Not only have you promoted your product for a very low cost (only the cost of your autoresponder), but you have collected names that you can market to again and again. These names also become your list for your newsletter.

6. Write a new article every week, and continue sending it to your list and article directories, and continue posting in forums. In no time you will have a nice list, and nice profits coming in, all without your own website!

The invention of the printing press didn’t start the advertising game. It just made it quicker and easier to find and inform business clients. And technology rolled on. Moving steadily from telegraph, telephone, fax machine, direct mail marketing, right up to today’s internet. And all along the way entrepreneurs’ took advantage of the changes to engage in their business endeavors. And nothing has changed. Taking the ever popular blogging phenomenon and changing it from a home spun communications medium to a business promotion wonderland. Enter the blog the poor man’s website.

Blogs started out being a place where the common person had somewhere to express themselves. A place to open up their diary’s and let the whole world know their hereto before private thoughts or an opportunity to express their political views. Truly this was a quagmire of unprofitable information though interesting as heck. The blog wasn’t made popular because of financial gain initially. Regardless of why blogs became so popular they did achieve a phenomenal growth. And with that explosion of popularity the greedy blew in with it. A Blog as a retail marketing medium was a certain destiny.

One of the advantages of blogs for business is that it’s easy to get access and use of one for free. Free in a sense. Usually the free ones require one to advertise the company providing the free blog. Because blogs are user friendly, and designed to be easy to customize, it’s a real cost effective tool for the internet marketer. Even if you choose to pay for your own the cost is usually a under $10 a month. Most important is the fact that hundreds of thousands of blogs are in use. Statistics show there are currently close to 14 million blogs posted on the internet with an estimated 80,000 additional blogs  signing up daily. Couple those facts with the reality that there are over 50 million internet users and that 30% of them are reading a blog. It becomes a no brainer why for the online marketer it’s a mind boggling, ready made, opportunity to be exploited for profit.

One of the common formats that are used on blogs is the mini forum. This has great advantages for the serious online marketer. It provides real input as to how the public thinks and feels about the product or services being promoted. It always helps to know exactly what you need to change to keep things moving upward. A popular technique used with blogs is to treat them as a stepping stone to another website. For example let’s say you might have a website selling sports tennis shoes. So now you create a blog called, ” Freddie the Sneaker Tweaker”. A site where folks come to get Freddie’s latest complaint or praise about different sneaker brands being sold on the internet. However most conveniently there happens to be a URL for the sports tennis shoe website clearly seen on the blogs review page which , “bingo”, directs more traffic it. Doing this of course feeds more traffic to the real money maker.

If you’re new to the internet don’t expect like so many unfortunately do that your simply having a website will guarantee that here comes the money. Even blogs being used for business reasons require good SEO practices. It would be advantageous for the newbie to join a SEO blogging community along with having their blog indexed by the larger search engines. They also should take a serious peek at their competition. The best business blogs are those owned by people who only started out sharing something they had passion over and that passion caught on to all those others with a common interest. This is a win-win situation. Good blogs are those which truly provide the public with meaningful information.

For those folks that were the charter members of blogging what’s happened to the blog is discouraging. Yet change is a natural part of life. And sense behind all those two dimensional blogs is a human director it was only a matter of time before the business blog appeared and with its success it grew and grew. Yet, there is a bright side. Because of the blogging explosion thousands of good people overnight found themselves suddenly wanted and financially bettered. May the blog live long and prosper.