Are you new to Affiliate Marketing?  Are you getting started exploring ways to make residual income online and want to kick the tires before committing to any investment?  

I have great news for you, it is possible.  Yes, it is entirely possible for you to start your affiliate marketing journey for free.  And, it’s easy.  In this article I will review (3) popular “always free” website offers.

Before I get started, I want to make sure we are all starting at the same level of understanding about what a “website” is.  The easiest way to understand a website is to liken it to your home.  Your home isn’t just your house or apartment, it has property, and it has an address.  Websites are like that too.  

If your website is like your home, the place where you invite people to meet you, then hosting plan is like the property the house is built on and the URL (or Domain) is like the street address.

Website = Your Home on the Internet
Hosting Plan = Your Property on the Internet (that’s where you build your home)
URL/Domain = Your Address on the Internet (where people go to find your home)

Now imagine that you house was free.  Imagine someone said, “I’m going to let you live here for free!”  If you’re

like me, you’d wonder… What’s the catch?  The truth is that free websites may not cost money, but there are other ways that the hosting provider makes money from your website by placing advertisements on your site.  They are also constantly trying to upsell and upgrade your free account.  They are like a restrictive HOA. For instance, in some cases you can create an ecommerce website selling digital products, but they won’t allow you to collect the payments online without upgrading.  Or, more importantly for you, my budding online entrepreneur, some free hosting plans do not allow affiliate HTML links.

So, what is a free website? It is more accurate to say, “Free Hosting & Domain” and not Free Website, because building your website can be free, but you’d have to buy the property and your unique domain.  With the free website plans, you are assigned a piece of their existing property and you can pick a domain on that property.  Continuing with the real estate analogy, it’s like renting an apartment.  When you rent an apartment, your address is the physical street address, and the apartment number sets your space apart from everyone else. When you have a free website, your domain name will include the original hosting company plus what you choose.

Finally, before you start to build your home on the internet, you need to have an idea of the style.  In other words, are you building your own apartment, a ranch style home, or a grocery store?  You can not build a multisite (apartment building) on any free account however you can create a static style site or a site with a lot of offers and movement (ecommerce / blogging).

My recommendation for Affiliate Marketing is a Blogging Style / eCommerce hybrid.  Start with blogging, it’s easy low pressure and perfect for affiliate links.  Once you become comfortable with how to create your posts you can look for opportunities to sell digital products using ecommerce tools.

Top Three Free Websites for Affiliate Marketing

WIX – Free Plan

The Wix free plan setup frequently suggests and defaults to “paid” versions at every step. To keep your hosting and website free, you pay attention to your selections.  Especially when selecting your plan and domain.  Once the site was created it was easy to create a blog post and insert the Affiliate Link.  However the Free Domain through wix is very convoluted and uses your login name as part of the domain. (website address).  For instance, I setup my free test account with login name: wendaone65 and here is the result: https://wendaone65.wixsite.com/affiliatemarketing.  Imagine putting that on your business cards.

Another huge downside to Wix is the lack of organic community. Because Wix is first a website and then a blogging platform, it is not designed with community in mind.  You’ll learn more about that later.  But imagine if you lived in an apartment building… the difference between having club house where everyone can mingle and not having that club house.  True not everyone will go to the club house, but some people will.  With Wix, there is no “club house” you need to drive all of your traffic to your site.

Pros	Cons
·         Good Site Speed	·         Long Convoluted URL / Domain
·         Free Hosted secure site	·         Templates are not interchangeable
·         Allows HMTL Affiliate Links in Posts	·         Site is not transferrable
·         Variety of Website Themes	·         Wix Branding and Ads on Free plans ·         No organic community / traffic

Weebly – Free Plan

 

The first thing I noticed with the Weebly free plan is the lovely short URL.  When you select your Domain, you selection is placed in front of “weebly.com” (my test: https://affiliatemarketingonabudget.weebly.com/).  I found the initial setup easy to follow except for the actual domain selection. However, once that is complete the rest was easy.  The biggest CON for Weebly is that the websites are not really designed for the blogger. The blogging tools are limited and the photo editing is nearly nonexistent.  However it has an easy to understand “drag and drop” method for updating posts and pages and is fast and responsive. 

Pros	Cons
·         Good Site Speed	·         Limited Blogging Tools
·         Free Hosted secure site	·         Poor Photo Editing Tools
·         Allows HMTL Affiliate Links in Posts	·         Tech support is not free
·         Nice Short URL / Domain	·         Weebly Branding on all pages
·         Site is transferable	·         No organic community / traffic

 

Google Blogger  - Free Plan

 

 Google Blogger gets two chubby thumbs up from me.  But first, the downside.  The themes and templates for the Google Blogger platform are very outdated and the WYSIWYG editor is at times frustrating. (WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get) That means that everything was a little bit harder.  There was no drag and drop editing and mostly “done for you” website.  In my opinion, the bonus for your learning curve and time investment is a more community-oriented blog experience that integrates with Google Adsense a popular way to monetize your site.

Pros	Cons
·         Good Site Speed	·         Poor WYSIWYG editor
·         Free Hosted secure site	·         Themes are outdated
·         Allows HMTL Affiliate Links in Posts	·         Little to No Technical Support
·         Nice Short URL / Domain
·         Site is transferable
·         Organic/Community Traffic
·         Easy Google Product Integration
·         Branding: Powered by Blogger in footer
·         A Gazillion Blogging Tools

 

In conclusion while I found Weebly the easiest of the free sites to use, it was clear to me that the blogging tools would quickly become a problem as the goal of an affiliate marketing website is to constantly be adding valuable content designed to drive traffic to your products or services you’ve written about in your blog post.  This is where Google Blogger really shines with easy blogging integrations like Youtube, Google Adsense, and more.  This ads value to your site and various ways to monetize your content.

Wait What? What about Wordpress?

Unfortunately, the free hosting and domain plan on wordpress.com does not allow affiliate marketing links in posts and pages.  The software strips the HTML of vital information so that when the post is published it does not display property. And there are no work arounds in the Free version.

I want to take a moment here to make sure I am clear because there are two WordPress companies.  There is Wordpress.com which is in the business of providing website hosting… and there is Wordpress.org.

Wordpress.org is a free website package available through any paid self-hosted plan.  In other words, if you went to www.easybuildawebsite.com and purchased Hosting, Domain, SSL security you would have purchased your property and secure address on the internet on which you will build your home on the internet for free with the Wordpress.org’s software. 

If you can budget about $100 a year for your website, then I would 100% suggest Self Hosting a wordpress site. (stay tuned for my next article Pros and Cons of Free vs Paid Wordpress Website)