Credit Card Affiliate Programs: Hefty Profit or Major Loss?

By Mary Ann Tordecilla

The rise of online stores, mobile phones, and computer savvy shoppers has led to people becoming more comfortable making online purchases.

The move away from traditional retail stores to ecommerce has also seen an increase in demand for credit and debit cards.

These cards that were once the preserve of the rich and famous are now essential to everyone who wants to do online shopping.

While this might seem like the perfect opportunity to promote credit card affiliate programs, we still need to see if increased consumer demand equates to a profitable niche for affiliate marketers.

Before anything else, it is important to conduct market research. In this Niche of the Week, we will look at the following factors:

Definition: What is it about?
Popularity: Is there really a demand?
Competitiveness: How to rank for keywords with high competition?
Affiliate Products: What are they? Is the payout good?
Marketing: How to promote this niche?

All the above are important questions that need answers. Let us go through each one of them.

Niche Definition

What is it about?

I won’t be defining what credit card or debit cards are as they are pretty much self-explanatory. For this section, we will be looking more at the needs of the market— the market now and the market to be.

By knowing the current needs and future needs of the buying market, we can fully understand and realize that with any niche that we plan to promote, we should not always have to define the niche as what it is, but rather, we need to learn what it is about by studying the market.

For some of you who are more into promoting sub-niches, knowing your market well will also provide you with a lot of sub-topics to cover since you will be researching the needs of the buying market.

So where should we start? We start by Googling. A simple, no-brainer step that I always do for niche research is to find similar websites and simply browse their pages to get ideas. You use this strategy to find the topics and sub-topics discussed on these sites.

For example, NerdWallet is a good go-to blog site that discusses money-saving tips. It includes a section for credit cards, which has a lot of good sub-topics to take note of like the best credit cards of 2018, the lowest interest rate credit cards, the best credit cards for if you have bad credit, and so on. If you look through the site’s pages, the content is all well thought out and all the topics are about the “needs” of the people interested in credit cards.

Another website example is Credit, which is more of a specialized website. Unlike the first example, this website is more about credit card topics only. They also have a lot of more targeted topics such as how to lower the interest rate, how to improve a credit score, credit card rewards, different types of credit cards, and so on.

With these two sites alone, you can get a lot of good ideas about the niche. You can use this information to learn the things that you will cover to supply the needs of your market.

Popularity

Is there really a market demand?

The good thing about affiliate marketing is you do not have to be a know-all to promote any topic of your choice, nor spend money acquiring information that you need. The Internet is a large basin of information. You just need to know where to look.

For this section, getting the popularity information is very easy with the availability of online tools such as Google Trends.

You can easily see the popularity of any keyword by simply typing it in the Google Trends search bar. Once you get the results, you can filter the information by location and timeframe, among many other variables.

For the credit card niche, I typed in the keyword “credit card”, then filtered the location to “worldwide”, and the timeframe to “5 years”. The result below showed a consistently high search interest for the last 5 years:

If the above is not enough as basis for popularity and demand, you may always search online for any up-to-date (and valid) market reports to get more justification, like this 2017 Consumer Credit Card Market report published by CFPB. While it only covers the US market, the report is still a good resource and basis for market popularity and demand since the US has the largest market for credit cards.

The report summarized that the credit card industry “has grown in size, in the number of its offerings and participants, and in the scope and features of its products”.

The Google Trends data and the market report from CFPB both showed that the credit card industry remains to be stable in terms of demand. There is a huge market for this niche and based on the industry report, the industry shows no sign of slowing down as the market’s demand continues to grow every year.

Keyword Research

How to choose and rank for competitive keywords

There is no doubt that the most in demand niches have the hardest keywords to rank in. While this is true, it does not mean that you have no chance of ranking for good keywords.

The first step is finding a good keyword tool to use. For registered members in Affilorama, you can take advantage of the free version of Affilotools. Just head over to your Affilotools account and make sure that you have properly set up your account first before you conduct any search queries. Click here for the detailed instructions on how you conduct keyword research using Affilotools.

Once you have your keyword tool, the second step is to look for your target keywords. This step can be overwhelming especially for beginners. While it is essential to choose the right keywords, you do not have to overthink this.

To help you choose the right and competitive keywords for your niche, you need to take note of the following:

1. The “search intent”

The funny thing is, I have been doing SEO for more than a decade now and when it comes to keyword research, I focused more on looking for keywords with high search volume and low competition. While there is nothing wrong with this strategy, I have missed a very important factor: that is the search intent.

What is search intent? Simply put, it is something that Google wants. Let me explain more. Let us say, we choose the keyword “credit cards for bad credit”, which in Affilotools is a highly competitive keyword (around 9M sites indexed under the keyword match!) with 110,000 local volume searches:

For most of us, the 9 million competitors for the keyword phrase: “credit cards for bad credit” is something that we will not risk since it is nearly impossible to rank for this term. But if we examine the keyword intent for the top 10 results for this term, we can see what Google wants for the term, “credit cards for bad credit”.

You can visit the top 10 links to see the content for these pages to learn why these pages are ranked for the particular term. This is what “search intent” is about. You have to know what Google wants to increase your chance of ranking for a very competitive keyword.

2. Filter the top 10 results based on authority

These are the top sites for the term “credit cards for bad credit”:

thebalance.com

creditcards.com

thesimpledollar.com

creditkarma.com

mastercard.us

wallethub.com

cardrates.com

nerdwallet.com

From the list above, only the site, mastercard.us is considered as an “authority site” (sites that are well-known online and offline), the rest are not. In this case, we ignore the authority sites and focus more on the top 3 sites that rank well for the term:

thebalance.com

creditcards.com

thesimpledollar.com

You notice that even for the high competition term, we have these top 3 non-authority sites, outranking mastercard.us. Why? Simply because these sites have good onsite SEO that most authority sites don’t have in the first place. Additionally, you may look at the “search intent” for these sites to know why they are ranking well for the term. Always remember to look at the search intent as this is the one factor that matters a lot when ranking for competitive keywords.

3. Content Analysis

The top sites rank well in Google for a reason. One of the most important reasons that we are all aware of is the quality of content. Look at the top 10 results and dig more into their content by taking note of the following:

length of words
internal links
backlinks to the site
prominent keywords used

Just like looking for the common denominator for search intent, you can see some similarities in content for the top sites in Google. Forget about building a lot of backlinks to your website through profile creation, forum posting, and blog commenting. Once you know the common factor on how these sites are chosen for their content, you can rank your page without spending too much time building a lot of backlinks.

Affiliate Programs

Recommended credit card affiliate programs for you

Searching for credit card offers is not that easy. In this case, you may always sign-up to third-party websites that can provide you with a lot of offers to choose from. Below are some of the recommended websites:

1. OfferVault

Unlike ClickBank, OfferVault is not an affiliate network. However, it provides you with an extensive list of offers. It is one of the largest offers on credit card affiliate programs. Currently, there are about 2,000 offers on “credit card” search on their database. For credit card affiliate program choices, OfferVault provides CPA, per sale, or per lead offers on their site.

How much can I make?
Payment varies per affiliate.