Making money by talking... sounds too good to be true, but this is the real thing. The financial vertical and its high income are now attracting more and more bloggers and affiliates. Banks, aggregators for selecting credit cards, microfinance organizations, insurance companies, Forex brokers, and pension funds pay hundreds of dollars for each client. Such services are always in need, regardless of the political and economic situation. At the same time, you can earn money even in any way you want, say, by advertising a brand through social networks. But then there's a hitch.
Among beginners, the vertical has become a bone of contention. While some avoid it, intimidated by a demanding audience and complex topics, others consider the niche a hidden treasure. How does this even work? How can much money can you earn? Which financial affiliate programs should you pay attention to? How to drive traffic to financial offers?
Time to find out.
Financial Affiliate Programs: Perspectives
Financial CPA affiliate programs include programs related to financial companies and services: all kinds of insurance, micro-loans, Forex, credit cards, aggregators for searching for offers on loans or banking products, electronic payment systems, private pension funds, services for investing in the cloud mining, etc.
Financial affiliate programs pay for complex actions: filling out a form with passport data, submitting an application for a loan, having an approved and issued loan, and making a deposit. Here are the common payment formats:
RevShare is a percentage of the profit received from an attracted client (can be lifetime or within a limited amount). The format is used by Forex brokers, investment funds, and crypto exchanges;
CPL (Cost Per Lead) is payment for a lead: filling out a registration form indicating personal data (phone number, full name, passport data), or submitting an application for a loan. Typically, the model is used by aggregators of financial instruments;
CPS (Coast Per Sale) is payment for the sale: an issued loan (not just an application), insurance, an issued credit card, and replenishment of a deposit with a broker. The most common format of cooperation.
Finance is a controversial niche. On the one hand, it is a huge category of products for everyone: people with different interests, incomes, views, and even life principles. Insurance, bank cards, and electronic wallets are popular tools.
The sphere is legal; it undergoes moderation without problems in white advertising networks (Facebook Ads, Google Ads, YAN, Bing Ads). No cloaking or farming is allowed. It is well promoted through paid advertising and groups on social networks.
But you won’t be able to relax and enjoy the process. There is fierce competition here and high rates for advertising, both for impressions and for clicks. Not to waste your money in vain, you have to monitor advertising campaigns literally around the clock, improve creatives, and use complex acquisition chains. Here are the most common difficulties that affiliates face:
Marketing approaches are constantly changing. It’s not possible to set up a profitable combination once and make money on it for several years straight. Something may work for a couple of months; other options may endure only for a few weeks.
The approval rate is increasingly important. Even if you find good traffic, where every second visitor submits an application, the conversion may be low: a bank or microfinance organization rejects the majority of customer loan applications. It is necessary not only to select an affiliate program for the user but also to find the user for the affiliate program.
Traffic can be ruined by an advertising network in an instant. This applies to white exchanges and contextual and targeted advertising on social networks. The problem arises with microfinance organizations, binary options, dubious crypto exchanges (Google and Facebook can first accept creatives and then ban the account);
There is little vertical information. Affiliates and bloggers who work with the vertical are often large companies and professional marketers. They are reluctant to share their findings and experiences with newcomers. Solo affiliates are also in no hurry to forge friendships and discuss their achievements. You have to persistently search for information and learn by trial and error.
MFOs are a whole different thing. Some companies are outright scams. Before starting a promotional campaign, it is important to carefully test the situation to see if the company is involved in scandals: this fact alone might drive your conversion to zero.
Banking products are also far from perfect. Nine out of ten popular banks pay affiliate fees only to their clients (the exception is perhaps the US or Canada). The most popular products with minimal acquisition costs are no longer needed: opening an account in each bank takes too much time.
The vertical is worth the cost. More complex marketing combinations and the effort to create them are justified by high payouts. Advertising rates are lower than in gambling and dating, but the conversion rate, if you set up your targeting correctly, reaches 5-8%. In the case of financial blogs, it may rise up to 15%. Investments in advertising can be returned with a return of 300-400%. The last bonus is GEO: there are offers for any country, both for competitive and non-competitive regions.
Types
There are several types of high paying financial affiliate programs that offer a variety of offers.
Microloans
Microloans, also called payday money, are provided by MFOs, microfinance organizations that issue money for a short period of time, from a week to a month at outrageous interest rates, up to 2% per day. This option is popular in Tier 2 countries: Southeast Asia, CIS countries, and Latin America. The audience consists of students, gamblers, betters, and people urgently needing money.
Potential clients are people with low financial literacy, who usually earn little or don't have permanent employment, often with a blemished credit history and bad habits. The same audience as pawnshops and largely overlaps with the target audience of online casinos.
Credit, bank cards
There are cards from large banks and small organizations, for example, a retail chain card with cashback. Such affiliate programs pay little, but the good reputation of the banks and trust from the target audience help ensure a high conversion rate, sometimes up to 30% (on average, from 5 to 15%). The tool is popular in the TIER 1 and TIER 2 zones and works well in North America (not only the USA but also Canada and Mexico), Eastern Europe, and some Asian countries. It also works well in countries where high inflation has persisted for a long time, and the national currency has been steadily depreciating. For example, in Argentina, where everyone has a credit card (most people have at least two): there, the demand for new services is constantly high.
Credit cards are a universal tool. The target audience covers almost everyone: students, mothers on maternity leave, and pensioners. All you need to look at is GEO and the specific offer. In Southeast Asia, the emphasis should be on youth and entrepreneurs; in developed countries, there are separate cards for different categories: students, teenagers, housewives, pensioners, etc. In the CIS countries, such a service is balanced: one card is suitable for different categories of the target audience.
Business loans
In the business loans niche, the target audience is different. Most often, banks determine the potential audience in advance: loans for farmers, small businesses, startups in the IT field, manufacturing, construction, etc.
Electronic wallets and payment systems
This is a big group of all kinds of services for accepting payments with the ability to issue dollar cards (E-Payments, Payoneer, Skrill), online payment systems (PayPal, Apple Pay, AMAZON PAY), electronic wallets (Qiwi, Webmoney), prepaid cards for secure payments on the Internet (AdvCash, Payza, Entropay), etc. You can find an up-to-date tool for almost any country, including some TIER 3 regions. The target audience includes gamblers, betters, freelancers, shoppers buying in foreign online stores, and forex traders.
Fortunately, you can immediately see for whom the service is best suited on the main page of the service. The advertising campaign is easy: targeting settings and ad placement will coincide with the niche: if you're aiming for betting enthusiasts, ads will emerge on websites, forums with reviews, discussions of matches, sports portals, and thematic groups. If you're hunting gamers, run advertising on portals about online games (or a specific game). Likewise for other topics.
Insurance companies, pension funds
Insurance companies offer up to 30% per client. The service is popular in regions with a developed market for such services. These are the countries of the European Union, the USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and Argentina. Promoting auto insurance allows you to get a good income in Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe. The target audience depends on the type of insurance: car owners, travelers, and entrepreneurs, but first of all, this is a young audience who actively uses the Internet.
Aggregators
Aggregators are the sites where you can choose a credit card, insurance, or a loan. Such tools are easy to promote, and the conversion is high, but the payments are relatively low. Such platforms are widespread in almost all GEOs and are actively developing in TIER 3. They are best accessed through contextual advertising and for promotion through thematic blogs, for example, posts comparing services with titles like How to Choose a Credit Card. The target audience depends on the specific service, or, rather, promoted tools.
Forex, binary options, cryptocurrency exchanges
Experienced affiliate marketers use this niche as their main source. The company offers large payments per client (for some brokers, it is more than $100) plus a lifetime commission (revenue share). Forex is equally popular in TIER 1 and TIER 2 countries.
According to the target audience, there are several portraits with opposite parameters:
Users looking for quick and easy money (the portrait is similar to that of gamblers and betters);
Users looking for an opportunity to make money on financial and stock markets but only starting to get acquainted with the topic;
Experienced traders who make money and don’t mind finding a more convenient tool with lower commissions - there will be close attention to every detail.
Passive income
Platforms and funds that offer investments in insurance companies, startups, cloud mining, and loan issuing services. This is not the easiest option. The competition here is lower, but so is the conversion. Another thing you should know is that the target audience is scattered, and the acquisition chain is longer. The main disadvantage is that there are a lot of scams: companies collect money and disappear. User distrust increases the cost of a lead. Such a company can vanish and scam not only the client but also you.
In short, you should choose financial offers carefully and do a little research before you start driving traffic. Remember, reliable products are easier to promote.
Find Your Traffic
In this vertical, traffic sources cannot be limited to the standard options; you can also come across much less ordinary ones, such as, for example, storefronts.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising can be considered a universal source of conversion traffic. Context, automatically generated for the user based on their browsing history and search queries, reaches the previously warmed-up audience. Naturally, you have to pay for high conversion: the rates are several times higher than for targeted advertising on social networks.
However, you should always be extra careful, even if you don't have to worry about your budget. For example, Google prohibits binary options advertising and takes a dim view of microloans and consumer loans with inflated rates. Contextual advertising traffic may also be prohibited by affiliate programs: financial organizations prefer to use the tool on their own and do not want competition (you can bypass the ban by sending traffic through pre-landings, but be prepared that the scheme will be revealed, and the traffic will be rejected).
Popular networks: Google Ads, Bing Ads. If you work with the USA, Canada, Britain, and Mexico, try Yahoo Gemini.
Storefronts
Storefronts are extremely popular, and you can create a mini-showcase without tiresome development and programming. This could be a dynamic script that will be used by blog visitors or a full-fledged website that can be launched on your hosting or on cloud services and promoted through search or banner advertising.
Storefronts are cheap, and affiliate programs sometimes provide ready-made templates. This is the creative that brings in high-quality traffic with high conversion, as users observe the illusion of choice they can make. In addition, the application can cut off non-converting leads. What’s important is that you don’t need to rack your brains over the USP: just take ready-made logos and enter the characteristics.
You can create a storefront using popular builders such as Wix, LPGenerator, and Tilda. Or you can also assemble them based on ready-made templates via CMS (Joomla, WordPress, Drupal) and place them on any hosting.
Social Media
You can refer to graphs and studies all you want, but you can't deny the obvious: today, marketers can't do without social media. There is room here for both affiliate marketers and SMM specialists. This could be a separate community dedicated to financial tools or an unofficial public page of a specific company (banks and microcredit organizations are not very fond of promotion on social networks. Too bad for them.) An alternative is promotion in public groups dedicated to finance through recommendations.
Email marketing is still alive and produces leads when used correctly. This could be a description of a specific offer or a letter written in the form of a showcase. In any case, you need a base of clients interested in the service. We use the tool in tow with a landing page or in addition to a public page on social networks, a blog, or a storefront website.
Note that it is not necessary to do the mailing manually: some tools and services can do this for you (GetResponse, MailChimp, SendPulse.)
SEO
SEO traffic is natural traffic that comes from a blog or entertainment portal. However, you can promote a landing page or storefront in search results, but it will take at least two to three months if you promote it for a specific city.
Promoting your own blog takes a lot of time and effort. If you start from scratch, you won’t get tangible income soon; it may take up to six months or a year and a half. But if you don’t have start-up capital, do without it. After promoting the site, it will generate consistently high income even when you are away for a short time, for example, if you went on vacation and temporarily do not publish new posts.
To promote financial offers, you don’t have to start a blog about finance (although this is the most obvious topic), investing, or Forex. This could be an entertainment portal, a site where all kinds of goods and services are compared, or you can compare credit cards or electronic wallets for paying for an X-Box or Netflix subscription.
Speaking of games, sometimes banks offer credit and debit cards with cashback for a World of Tanks or All Games premium account. Such cards can be advertised on thematic forums or blogs dedicated to computer games, a news portal about WoT events. A similar approach is used in other verticals.
For example, in Ukraine, a whole mobile SportBank is successfully operating with cashback and bonuses when purchasing (online and offline) tickets to sporting events, sporting goods, and sports nutrition. The card can be promoted on blogs dedicated to personal training, active lifestyle, and betting sites.
Brokerage Traffic
This type of traffic is rare but popular in the finance niche. The idea is to collect contact information and then transfer it via API to an affiliate program. The scheme is widespread among banks, microfinance organizations, and forex brokers. You can collect customer requests using a landing page, storefront, or blog.
MFO Apps
This could be a browser extension or add-on that contains advertising on the target site. Such applications can be obtained from an affiliate or developed independently based on ready-made templates. The method is convenient because such advertising does not require moderation. The application will constantly remind the user about the product by sending PUSH messages. The disadvantage is the complex development. To make a user install the app, one should actually provide benefits.
Teasers
Financial affiliate programs can also be promoted through teasers: traffic is cheap, and you can use dirty tricks. But remember: money loves silence. Shocking content surrounded by credit card advertisements does not increase trust among the audience. The vertical works well with Forex and microloans. Attractive pictures with provocative inscriptions such as Loans with a bad credit
history or Trading strategy that will raise your deposit by 100% in a week: CLICK HERE give excellent results.
Teasers are usually posted on entertainment sites and online cinemas with pirated content, in places where the main target audience of the MFO is found. Therefore, it’s easier with targeting settings. Paying for clicks allows you to plan your budget more flexibly and opens up room for maneuver.
Popular advertising networks: TeaserNet and BodyClick (Russia, CIS), MGid, Kadam, EvaDav, Clickadu, PropellerAds, Oblivki (traffic for any GEO).
How to Make Money: Guided Tour
There is no one-size-fits-all guide to making money with affiliate marketing, especially when it comes to finance and financial CPA affiliate programs. There's a wide range of subtleties one should acknowledge but nevertheless, the niche still reacts to certain general approaches that will help you start earning money.
Find the Offer
The direction is not as important as the conditions: fundamentally, there is no difference between Forex and microloans. The approval percentage is far more significant: the higher, the better. In effect, white hat products (bank cards, consumer loans) are more difficult to promote. Banks carefully select borrowers and sometimes reject up to 75% of applications.
Advice. Don't take many offers at once. Instead, start promoting a couple of offers in different directions to evaluate where the ROI is higher.
Make a Budget
Don't waste your last hundred bucks on affiliate marketing, buy yourself a drink instead. The financial vertical is a sure way to kiss your deposit goodbye if you're a beginner.
If you want to earn money, allocate the amount you are willing to lose. With a high probability, the first couple of hundred bucks will be spent on tests, and you may not be able to get back at least half of them.
Distribute your budget evenly. Count before running an ad. If contextual advertising rates are too high and only enough for 50 clicks, while targeted advertising may have 500 clicks, it is better to choose the second option. The amount of payments from the advertiser must cover the advertising rates. Then, conversion: stable 5-8% turn into 1% for a beginner. Finally, the approval rate, the percentage of applications approved by the affiliate program, can be 90%, or maybe 5%.
Example. If the payout is $5, and the cost per click is $0.5, even with a conversion of 10% and approval of applications of 95%, we get a 25-cent loss. Before launching a campaign, we calculate ROI (return on investment) and the cost of attracting a client. The last indicator can be easily calculated using the following formula.
We divide the advertising rate (PPC) into conversion and approval. In our example, this is:
0.5 / 10% / 95% = 5.26
If there's a bid for impressions (PPM or PPV), you also need to divide it by the click-through rate (also as a percentage). For the above example, the attraction cost was $5.26, which is higher than the payment from the affiliate program. Often the approximate CR and CTR are indicated in the offer description.
Targeting the Audience
Credit cards, business loans, insurance, microloans, investments... Each vertical has a radically opposite target audience and marketing approach. Credit cards are a young, progressive audience that loves entertainment and travel. The audience of MFOs resembles gambling addicts, and the promotion of loans is similar to advertising of premium goods.
However, things are not as difficult as they seem. You can understand which target audience the affiliate program is aimed at in the offer description or by looking at its creatives. For example, loans for BUSINESS. Banners that strongly resemble advertising for online casinos speak colorfully about MFO clients. The description of the capabilities of electronic payment systems usually indicates who they are made for.
The fastest way to understand the topic is to look at the targeting settings and creatives of other arbitrators and advertising agencies. You can find it using SPY services.
Creatives
Creatives depend on the specific product and target audience. The topic is hard to explain in detail, but thank God we have SPY services to come to the rescue. Using them, you can explore banners and (pre)landing pages, thus clarifying the entire process of user attraction.
In general terms, even for microloans, banners and landing pages must be of high quality. In Forex and investments, pre-landing pages with stories from successful traders and recommendations from 'experts' work well. You can use a review of strategies, trading robots, or forecasts as pre-landers. You need to understand the topic at least a little: catchy headlines and naked gals with a striking car just won't do.
Creative formats:
Classic banner (static or dynamic) highlighting the advantages: loan without approval or loan in 3 minutes without income certificate. There may be a teaser with a trigger here they give out money without interest, or you have been approved for a loan of %sum%, or a credit card with increased cashback awaits;
A storefront is not necessarily a landing page. It can be a banner where the user sees three or four offers from different banks or microfinance organizations;
Ad promoting an idea. For example, there may be an advertisement for a smartphone or travel on an installment plan.
Landing
In some verticals, you can’t do without a landing page. It can be used to collect contacts (brokerage traffic) to transfer them to the bank or to put pressure on the client’s pain. Landing pages should cover all questions and fears so that the visitor does not go elsewhere. If this is a Forex broker, we indicate the license, jurisdiction, which payment systems can be used, withdrawal time, commissions, etc. We confirm the information with customer reviews about the fast withdrawal of money and payment screens. An alternative idea for a landing page is to provide a comparison of several offers.
Avoiding Mistakes
It is impossible to completely avoid mistakes. The audience is changing, new interests are emerging, and new products are entering the market.
However, turn your mistakes into knowledge and eventually into benefits:
Run tests and evaluate the results. If the outcome is not satisfactory, change creatives and targeting settings;
Use analytics. Sometimes the devil is in the details, not in the creatives: it could very well be bad timing. Follow the graphs and see which creatives give higher conversions;
Look at other people's creatives, but make your own. The idea is that someone else’s banner may have already used up some of its potential.
FAQ
