Although it can be a fairly competitive market, credit card affiliate programs offer an amazing opportunity to earn high monthly commissions. Major financial institutions are constantly looking for new leads for credit card applications and almost any other kind of loan.
One of the best things about credit card and many other financial affiliate offers is the fact that a sale is usually not needed to earn commissions. These commissions are generally paid on a Cost per Action (CPA) basis, so a commission is earned when someone completes the required steps set by the advertiser.
For many credit card or loan offers, the site visitor will only have to submit an application to earn commissions for the affiliate. This means financial institutions pay per lead instead of per sale like most other online affiliate programs. Other offers may only pay for accepted applications, but those offers typically have very high commissions.
The key to finding success in the high competition financial market is to stick to a specific niche instead of just targeting general credit card or loan applications. Build a website that will only target a particular type of offer and be sure to add plenty of unique content to the website if you want free, targeted search engine traffic.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is another popular way to generate traffic for these offers, although it can be a risky business with high overhead costs for the advertising. The cost per click for advertising in these tough competition search engine markets can sometimes be overwhelming.
Other affiliate marketers are already competing for most of the relevant keyword phrases in this niche, so another marketer added to the competition will usually only make the situation worse. Extreme competition will often require landing pages that convert a high percentage of its visitors into commissions, and a lack of conversions can quickly drain any advertising budget.
Nationwide Card Services (NCS)
Unless you are already familiar with credit card affiliate programs, you have probably never heard of Nationwide Card Services, but they are one of the leading affiliate programs for major financial institutions. Some of their clients include Discover Card, Citi Bank, American Express, Capital One and even Chase.
NCS is a unique affiliate network because it is dedicated to helping its affiliates succeed, while other networks offer a minimal amount of assistance. They assign a marketing adviser to each affiliate. This adviser will actually make recommendations to help the affiliate gain more sales from their website.
The actual commissions that are earned from each referred action can vary based on the company and the type of offer, so it is important to do additional research to find the best offers. This research must be done from within an affiliate account at NCS to see the offers that are currently available.
Credit Card Broker
An interesting credit card affiliate program is Credit Card Broker. They are also partnered with major financial institutions and credit card companies like Visa, MasterCard, Chase and Discover Card.
The unique feature about Credit Card Broker is that affiliates are actually selling credit cards, loans and even credit card merchant accounts for commissions.
Although this is certainly different from the standard CPA commission structure, the main goal is to complete a sale and not just get applications submitted. Affiliates that are confident in their abilities to complete sales through high-quality websites and advertising may be able to make more money with this program.
CreditCards.com
CreditCards.com is a major source of online credit card searches, and they offer their own affiliate program with some unique twists that can’t be found with other credit card affiliate programs. The most noteworthy of their unique features is the ability to promote credit card offers using co-branding solutions. These solutions include credit card calculators, editorial reviews and even APR rate averages.
For affiliate marketers that want to promote a variety of credit card offers with a lot of focus on high-quality, useful information, CreditCards.com is an excellent program to use that provides all of this information to its affiliates.
Commission Junction
Although Commission Junction, CJ.com, just runs the affiliate programs for other companies, they do have a large number of advertisers that are either credit card companies, financial institutions or other companies with related offers like debt consolidation. This means that a single affiliate program can be used to promote offers from a wide variety of advertisers.
It is a good idea to do some additional research on any company advertising through Commission Junction, just to make sure they are not running their own independent affiliate program that will likely offer better commissions.
As an example, CreditCards.com also uses CJ for an affiliate program, but you will find better earnings by signing up directly from their website and not through CJ. Other companies like Discover Card and CreditReport.com, offer very lucrative affiliate programs here.
