That’s a question I hear a lot.  There is a lot of conflicting information around.  Can you use your replicated affiliate website or do you need your own domain and website?

The short answer is you can use a replicated site, but it’s not the best way.  If you absolutely, positively cannot afford your own domain and hosting (which you could get for about 20 bucks or so), than you could get by with just using your replicated affiliate site. Just get your own domain and website as soon as you possibly can.

There are two main reasons why using your replicated affiliate website isn’t   the best way to go:

1) If you are marketing your affiliate program with article marketing you will have a problem when  you submit an article to many of the popular article directories because  they won’t allow you to use an affiliate URL in your resource box.

2) With hundreds, possibly thousands, of the same replicated websites online you won’t rank on Google.  The search engines hate duplicate copy.  Whereas if you had your own website with unique content you might be able, with a little effort and depending on the competitiveness of your niche, to get a high ranking.

If you are using article marketing to drive traffic to your affiliate website you can go to Squidoo.com and get a free ‘lens’.  This is basically just a blog.  Then you could link your article to your lens and in your lens put links to your affiliate site.

It’s a little more difficult but it is a way around not having your own website.  You could also get a WordPress blog and do the same thing.

So yes, if you have to you can make money affiliate marketing without a website, but it is a little more time consuming.  As soon as you can afford it you should go to GoDaddy.com and get your own  domain name.  It’ll cost you around $10.  Don’t sign up for the hosting, I think there is a better option for hosting.

Then go to HostGator.com and sign up for a hosting account.  For as little as $10/month you can have unlimited domains.  This is great because eventually you will want to have several different products and several different websites.

Then you just have to transfer your domain to HostGator, which is easy to do and customer support at HostGator will walk you through it.

Don’t let this deter you.  The best thing you can do if you want to start making money online is…start.  Don’t wait until everything is ‘perfect’ because it never will be and you will never improve your financial situation.

Just get started today.  Do the best you can.  You will learn and get better as you go along, and as you grow so will your online income!