Ready To Promote Some High-Paying Credit Card Affiliate Programs?
Affiliate marketing is one the easiest and best ways to make money online, and in the sea of affiliate programs certain niches stand out as more profitable than others. One such vertical is the finance market and within that huge niche you find sub-niches like credit cards.
Credit card affiliate programs are particularly lucrative as most of these programs pay affiliates $25-250 per sale. Some affiliate programs even offer pay-per lead deals where you get paid anywhere from $1 to $25 just for getting possible clients to fill in their details on the credit card’s website.
“But isn’t the credit card niche too competitive” you may wonder. The good thing is that in big ponds like the credit card niche there is plenty of space for both the big fish and small players alike. In the US, the number of people applying for personal loans increase with 13% annually which gives us a lot of new people to target each and every year. People take up a lot more loans and credit now than what was the norm only a decade ago which makes credit card affiliate programs extremely lucrative for us affiliate marketers.
How To Choose The Best Credit Card Affiliate Program To Promote
When searching for credit card affiliate programs to promote there are a few things to keep in mind. Obviously, you want to make as much money as possible but how?
High-Paying Credit Card Affiliate Programs
You want to find affiliate programs that pay a high commission. Luckily, the finance niche is full of high-paying affiliate programs from reputable companies. Regardless of whether you choose to promote Cost-per lead/Pay-Per Lead offers (CPL/PPL) or offers paying per sale, you can find high-paying programs in the list below.
High Conversion Rate
It doesn’t matter if the offer pays top dollar per sale if you never see a conversion. Therefore, the conversion rate is even more important than the payout.
First of all, if you get a low conversion it becomes difficult to test properly because you’ll need to send a lot of traffic to get a sale. On the other hand, if you have high conversion but lower payout per sale, you can try changing the way you market the offer and do it quicker since you are getting a continuous stream of sales (= more data you can use to determine winning offers faster).
How To Promote Credit Card Affiliate Programs
You can promote credit card offers much in the same way you would promote any other affiliate program. If you have an established blog or website and can tap into existing traffic you can get a flying start by adding credit card offers to your range of existing affiliate offers.
One particularly popular method to promote these kinds of offers is through media buys on popular display ad networks such as Taboola, Airpush or Leadbolt. The competition is fierce, but you get instant feedback and if you set aside money and time to test and learn the art of media buys, you can build a solid business just off of that.
We’re not much into media buys at all, but there’s something magical about paying for ads when you find an offer that lets you scale quickly.
Here’s some money we made from pay-per lead affiliate marketing over just a few hours one random day in june. These numbers are ridiculously small by the way. There are affiliate marketers making thousands a day just from credit card affiliate programs:
This particular offer was promoted exclusively through paid advertising and we made a nice 75-125% daily profit until the offer was closed down.
Why Did We Choose These Exact Credit Card Affiliate Programs?
The main reasons we chose the affiliate programs on this list are:
- High-Paying or a combination of high-conversion and payout rate.
- Conversion focused marketing material available from the company or affiliate network.
- Easy to use tracking and conversion platform.
- Consistent on-schedule payouts and easy methods to withdraw commissions.
- Phone, email and/or chat access to your affiliate managers.
The Best Credit Card Affiliate Programs 2024
Before the 2008 financial crash, most credit card companies would run their own affiliate programs. Some still do, but for most affiliate marketers it would be more efficient to sign up to CPA & Affiliate Networks where you can choose between multiple offers. Therefore, we will focus on networks rather than individual credit card affiliate programs...
Commission Soup
You are probably already familiar with affiliate networks such as Clickbank.com, Commission Junction (CJ) and ShareASale. But have you heard of Commission Soup?
For twenty years they have been the forefront of the performance marketing industry, providing quality CPA offers in the credit card niche. So, unless you are running credit card offers you may not have encountered them yet, but if you have done anything related to credit cards you have probably already heard of them.
Commission Soup has their own proprietary technology which helps affiliates with ad optimizing, compliance monitoring and performance improvement.
You also get access to your own marketing representative who will help you figure out the best way to advertise their offers.
Some of the top offers from Commission Soup includes:
- Green Dot Primor Credit Card
- Capital One
- First Premier Bank
- Credit One Bank
- American Express
Commission: TBA (Varies)
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Credit.com
The Credit.com website may seem confusing at first. They brand themselves as a free credit score service in addition to being a price comparison site for everything related to insurance, loans and credit cards.
One of the main benefits of Credit.com is that you can access credit card affiliate programs normally only available to super affiliates.
The have offers from some of the biggest credit card brands in the world including:
- Citi
- Chase
- Amex
- First Progress
- Mastercard
- Group One
Credit.com has one drawback which is worth noting: You will not be able to promote individual cards but all links will point to credit.com where readers can compare different cards.
Commission: TBA (Varies)
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BankRate
Bankrate is similar to Credit.com in that they are an affiliate publisher in addition to being a credit card network for affiliates.
As a BankRate affiliate you get access to award-winning in-site tools such as a credit card search engine, rate cards, banners and text code. You can add all these tools to your blog using their javascript codes.
BankRate has a wide range of data feeds you can add to your site, including their rss, xml and api feed which can be customized to match the design of your website.
You will of course also have access to their team of affiliate managers who can help you find, and set up, profitable credit card offers.
Some of the top credit card offers available through BankRate are:
- Capital One
- Chase
- Citi
- American Express
- Discover
One drawback of BankRate is that affiliate commissions are not (always) disclosed upfront which makes choosing the best deals to promote a bit more difficult.
Commission: TBA, but usually $50-200 per sign-up.
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Open Sky Credit Card by Capital Bank
Do you know your audience? Got an audience with bad credit history? Then this is the card for you!
The Open Sky Visa Credit Card offered by Capital Bank requires no credit history to get approved. Your visitors can apply for an Open Sky card for a refundable $35 one-time deposit. There are not a lot of extra perks offered with the card because this card is first of all a card meant to help customers with a low credit score build up their FICO scores and this card can help with that.
This card requires literally no credit history, which means that most people can get approved. It’s the perfect card for finance bloggers and bloggers with a “low-credit-score” audience.
The affiliate payout is not among the highest, but the conversion rate is great with the right audience.
You can join the Open Sky Credit Card Affiliate Program through either CJ or Commission Soup.
Commission: $25
Cookie duration: 30 Days
BankAffiliates
Bank Affiliates is an exclusive performance marketing affiliate network that may not be the easiest to get accepted into, but if you do get accepted you can enjoy a lot of great offers.
They claim to have offers not available anywhere else and to have the highest payout in the industry.
They also have some awesome monthly contests, bonuses etc and you will get access to an helpful, hands-on, affiliate manager who can guide you in the right direction.
We recommend you only sign up to this network once you have a solid traffic level to make it worthwhile for their affiliate managers to help you out.
Some of their offers include:
- Prosper
- Lexington Law
- Credit Sesame
- Lending Club
- Personal Capital
- The Street
- CreditRepair.com
- Options House
- Discover
- SmarterBank
- Lendio
- … and many more.
Commission: Varies
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BONUS: MaxBounty
MaxBounty is not a dedicated credit card affiliate program or network, but they are one of my absolute favorite performance marketing networks. Their account managers are responsive and they have a lot of great offers across multiple verticals.
Even in the credit card niche they have plenty of offers to choose from. Most of the offers in the credit card space are cost-per lead offers, paying a few dollars per lead. Even if the payout isn’t top dollars, you can make good money with their offers if you have a lot of traffic, as you get paid (usually) per lead instead of per sale.
Join Here:
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are plenty of excellent credit card affiliate programs to choose from. Finance products, and credit card offers in particular, are not just for finance bloggers.
You can monetize almost any blog using credit card offers, not only finance blogs. Be creative and create your own spin on the offers and you will be able to find credit card offers suitable for almost any niche.
For instance, if you are blogging about cars you can find the best credit cards for car owners. If you run a SaaS blog you can recommend business credit cards because your readers may be business owners. If you write about home renovation ideas you can easily promote (review and rank) the best credit cards for homeowners.
We always recommend trying out just a few affiliate programs to start with and build rapport with the affiliate managers. They can often help you with coming up with ideas and telling you what might work. Did you find any new credit card affiliate programs to promote? Let us know in the comment section.
