My Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistake
Every affiliate makes mistakes. When you are new to this field, it’s easy to make mistakes. But one of the biggest mistakes that I made when entering this business was not doing my homework. I entered markets that I shouldn’t have, and I failed to do a proper market research to understand the dynamics of markets. When you choose a market, you should pay more attention to those little things that could go wrong. Don’t just think about how fat your pay check will be.
Take the credit card market. The players in this industry are highly regulated, and you should be extra careful entering in this market. These companies will ask you to make changes to your pages on a consistent basis. And they threaten to remove you every time you miss the smallest little thing. These guys can’t afford to have you misrepresent their offers, and that is why this market is such a pain in the butt. Let’s say you have a blog and you keep blogging about these credit cards. Something that you wrote years ago could come back to haunt you here. That’s right. Many credit card companies don’t care when you wrote your post. If they can see it, they are going to ask you to remove it.
What if you wrote a piece on top 5 credit cards years ago? You may have to remove one or two of those top 5 cards if you are warned by your affiliate manager. Then you are left with only 3 cards. You see the problem? You have to do major edits to fix the headaches caused by credit card companies. And this stuff is not exclusive to the credit industry. You are going to see it in most highly regulated industries. If you ask me, do yourself a favor and do a proper market research to make sure what you are getting yourself into. Getting $100 per credit card is nice, but the amount of work you have to go through to comply is a big turn off!
Credit Card Affiliates To Suffer Due to the State of Economy
Credit Card industry has always been a very attractive market for affiliates. People are always looking for credit cards and the pay outs are very good. The market is pretty much saturated in a sense that there are just too many sites competing against each other. Having said that, most affiliates have tried the credit card market at least once in their lives.
But the news is not good if you are in this market. Advanta, which in my book, has the best converting affiliate program has just announced that affiliates can expect to take a hit in approvals due to a change in underwriting. The reason for change? The state of economy! Basically it means that if your CPA is $140, you can expect it to go to $200 or more depending on how tough the new underwriting will be. First the NY State Fiasco and now this. Not a good couple of months for affiliates. Here is an excerpt from Advanta’s e-mail:
As you know, the current economic environment has forced a number of issuers to establish stricter lending criteria. To date Advanta has chosen not to do the same as our focus on high credit quality small business customers has allowed us to maintain the same underwriting standards in recent years. However, as a result of a recent analysis we have decided to make minor underwriting adjustments at this time. The impact of these changes on overall account approval results should be minimal and consistent with typical month-to-month fluctuations.