The Forbidden Fruit: Marketing Credit Cards Online

A common question and topic of discussion among Internet marketers is, "What market should I go after?" The number of answers to this question are as varied as there are grains of sand in the Sahara, but there is one thing that I have noticed in my eight years marketing online: people tend to shy away from and even be scared of ultra-competitive markets.

What type of markets am I talking about? Well, there are quite a few. Industries like travel, web hosting, and dating come to mind. One just has to look at the typical commissions being offered to marketers to promote these types of products to realize that there is quite a large mark-up on these services, and therefore mounds of competition.

However, there is one industry that trumps them all: the financial industry. Whether it is mortgages, loans, or investments, there is simply no other market that even comes close to the amount of fierce competition and ultra-high commissions than financial products. The financial market that I'd like to discuss in this article is the credit card market.

"In Short, It's Where The Money Is... Literally."

Credit card companies have been marketing their cards online since the early days of affiliate marketing. Back then, they had affiliate programs that would pay out anywhere from $10 to $20 per completed credit card application. With increased competition, and more people putting their trust into the web than ever before, this situation has drastically changed.

Now, online marketers can pull in a commission of around $30 to $40 for each referral and completed application. This is more than double the commissions being made as recently as five years ago, and more accurately reflects the high profit margins and lifetime value of the customer to the credit card company.

With such high commissions, hordes of marketers flock to push these offers on PPC networks such as Google Adwords and Overture, skyrocketing the bid levels up to astronomical heights. It is for this reason that many less brazen marketers shy away from this market, and may even feel intimidated by it. But rest assured, even with such a high level of market penetration, there is ample opportunity for a savvy marketer to experience very handsome profits.

"The Secret To Success In This Market Is... "

The secret is that a marketer needs to be crafty to succeed in this market. You can't just blindly throw up a PPC campaign, outbid whoever is in the #1 position, and hope to profit. It's just not that simple ? this is a mature market. Instead, the best strategy is to uncover ways of sending prospects to the offers that are often overlooked. The fact is, there are unlimited amounts of ways to send leads to highly profitable offers, without paying upwards of $10 per click to do so.

Let me just give you one idea to get your mind working. If you sell anything online, then you have probably had the experience of a customer asking if they can pay by check or money order. Even if you have not had a customer ask this, it's likely that some customers are leaving your site if the only option is to pay by credit card. What better time than that, to put a link saying "Need a credit card?"

Those who don't will just ignore it. And those who do could not have been your customer anyway, since you only accept credit cards. In that case, you provide them with something that they need and also give them the opportunity to buy your product with the very credit card you referred them to (and pocketed a $40 commission for doing so).

You'd be surprised at how effective this method is, and it costs you nothing. You turn a lost customer into a paying customer, and get paid $40 for doing so. What could be better?

There Are Dozens of Simple And Low Cost Ways To Market Highly-Competitive Products

If you use your head, you can uncover dozens of simple tactics like this to promote highly profitable markets and products at minimal cost. These techniques don't just work for marketing credit cards ? they work for any high-demand, high-margin, commodity product. So get cracking, and stop shying away from the competition. Thrive on it!

Joe Lloyd, The Money Marketer?, is the founder of Zen Marketing LLC and the online marketing group, Profit Guild?, located at http://www.ProfitGuild.com. His company has recently created a unique and simple system - known as Credit Profits? - that allows online entrepreneurs to earn commissions marketing credit cards online. More information at http://www.CreditProfits.com