Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy which involves an affiliate who promotes a merchant's products to online customers.
Largely this method requires an affiliate to have a website to do his promotion.
But affiliate marketing can be done without using a website as well.
Marketing through your own website is usually tough.
The competition is intense and to make your website appeal to the right audience is very difficult.
But a majority of the affiliate sales online are done through websites that affiliates have setup.
As an affiliate marketer you job is to bring traffic to your website and make that traffic convert.
The customers visiting your site would then buy products featured on it.
Most of the people online use search engines to look for their product.
To rank high in the search engines becomes a crucial factor.
Since a large of number of customers use only the websites found in the first few pages.
Reaching that spot is hard and you will have to use a variety of techniques to get to the top position and retain that position.
There are many ways where you can become an equally successful affiliate marketer even without using websites.
You can use many forums that are found online related to the product you are marketing.
By becoming an active member of such a forum, your posts will be viewed by a large number of potential customers.
Blog commenting is another strategy.
Find blog posts related to your product.
Comment on these posts and also advertise you own affiliate product links.
Write articles and post them in many article directories.
A large number of classified websites are found online.
Post ads of your products on these sites.
When using techniques without websites, you need not worry about getting traffic and topping the search engine ranking.
So that is an advantage but if you have your own site, then you can build a sustainable long term business.