Abandon Adsense … Everything you need to know to run your own credit card affiliate site

With Adsense lowering payouts and Adwords upping their strictness, and more and more advertisers moving to a CPL model, everyone who bought into the content site dream are now feeling the squeeze. If you’re in that boat as I see it you have three options:

  • (A) Ride your content site to its bitter end 24 months from now
  • (B) Fold up shop and get out of the internet marketing game
  • (C) Stretch your skillset and get into something where your existing strengths can be utilized

If (C) looks like the best choice to you, one of the best alternatives is turning to affiliate sites as a hedge. For anyone who has navigated the worlds of online education, dating, insurance, debt consolidation, and other affiliate verticals, you’ll know that probably the most accessible and established vertical in true affiliate marketing is credit card leads.
Setting these sites up is relatively simple and straightforward, but there are a few information hurdles you’ll need to get through to be able to do so. So if you’re planning on entering the affiliate space, you should definitely read:

The Credit Card Affiliate Site Setup Toolbox: 70 Essential Tools

The article walks you through the various available affiliate programs as well as as how to setup a site running them. I can say from personal experience that actually getting these affiliate program people on the phone and getting yourself integrated into their programs is easier said than done. CardOffers in particular is very hard to get a hold of. But this article will at least give you the lay of the land, and you’ll know enough to set up the sort of basic credit card reviews sites like the one this article is produced on. In addition, here are a few more regular reads for those who want to educate themselves on entering the affiliate world:

7 thoughts on “Abandon Adsense … Everything you need to know to run your own credit card affiliate site

  1. I agree to an extent. I don’t think you should rely solely on Adsense, but I would never consider dropping it completely, not yet anyway. There are a lot of people that make very good money through the Adsense program, with traditional content type sites. However, you can make very good money promoting affiliate products if you do it right. So I would say use both, have several sites and increase your earnings ten fold.

  2. Ultimately credit cards are neither good nor evil, they are just a tool. But many of the credit card offers here in the US are designed to disadvantage the borrower and take those who have demonstrated over time they cannot deal effectively with debt and put them in further debt.

    If I set up a CC site and act as a lead generator for companies whose business model is designed to take advantage of others then I am no different.

    It is possible you don’t do business with companies like that Rich, but many do.

  3. Nick, credit, debts and payment methods are three different issues to deal with. That the USA have such big problems with CC debts is an internal subject. That doesn’t discredit the credit and the payment method. (I’m German and we don’t have those CC problems because CCs are bound to an existing bank account)

  4. I agree with your comments around AdSense — my brief foray with it has been pretty disappointing compared with my affiliate experiments.

    Sorry to sound negative, but I feel I must express my distaste at the notion of making money through credit card affiliate sites. Credit cards are a necessary evil, but I’ve seen many friends and family members get into trouble and go through hell to repay serious amounts of CC debt. The idea of making money off of someone else’s bad debt seems somewhat immoral to me. I think Amazon and eBay affiliate setups are probably a better way to go?

  5. I completely agree about not depending upon Google Adsense/Adwords; for all intensive purposes, I abandoned them years ago in favor of dynamic affiliate programs like eBay and Amazon.com. They allow you to monetize virtually any type of site with targeted products and offerings.

    Data points,

    Barbara Ling

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