Lots of people ask about the health of the credit card affiliate market. So few people have good enough credit to get cards these days, banks are tightening lending, and fewer people have jobs. All of these things may have certainly changed the industry. It is different. The easy money is not as easy but there are still opportunities.

Here is my answer to a question from a member with a credit card site who used to make good money but it has dried up.

Ben,

When I was making money it was a different site that had only all of the American Express credit cards I could find. Most commissions were from the Gold Card.
But, the commissions dropped off before I took the other site down. It made good money from June 2007 – October 2007.

It became very difficult to keep updating the offers so I moved to the template driven site that I have now. I think maybe I am finding trouble finding keyword phrases
to drive traffic to such a wide variety of credit cards and keep the bid price low.

Plus, I asked Dave about the Google Adwords tracking and he said that the credit card company(s) would have to add the tracking code for each card separately, I wonder
if they would be willing to do that on such a large scale? Would I be better off creating sites with fewer focused products?

I know there is at least $20,000 per month to be had from credit cards, correct me if I’m wrong. It just seems like a great product to offer since there is nothing to purchase.

My Answer:

Hi Rick,

Yes – you are correct! Credit cards are a great market. Actually, I’m sure you can do more than $20,000 per month. Call up your rep at NCS and they’ll tell you they have some 100k+ per month earners.

Yes also to your question about being specific. The more specific you can be, the better. With respect to credit cards, this would be my suggestion:

- Find some specific niche brand keywords and drive those people to the relevant landing page directly. (I assume you’re not sending all your traffic right to your home page, right?!)

For instance, send your “Delta skymiles card” people directly to that page. I know you have several cards on the same url, but perhaps you can use anchor text to get them in front of the right offer. (not sure if you can incorporate anchor text into the destination url, but the bottom line is that there needs to be a match here when the person reaches your website)

Trust me – this method works!

- I also would focus on long tail and perhaps go in yahoo and bing only for now. You get some bargain clicks and don’t have to rebuild when google slaps you with a bad quality score.

With this approach you would go very broad – many long tail keywords for many products. Set the bids low.

I assume what will happen is you’ll have at least 3-4 good performing “mini-niches” here. You can start with that and then build from there.

Where you go from there is up to you…you can build out other sites, expand kw list, or do another product altogether.

There are TONS of cpa offers other than credit cards – take a look at Hydra Media and see the many, many cpa offers they have.