Lori, of B Money Savvy, mentioned this program and asked if I knew anything about it. Since I didn’t, I went and did my usual bit of signing up for it to see what was behind it.
The basic idea is that this company has setup a fairly typical landing page to apply online for credit cards. They’ve done a good job of categorizing cards based on their reward type, interest rates, cash back amount, etc. While this review isn’t about landing pages, this is a great example of a site that keeps people there until they find what they want.
So with a great landing page that’s linked to various credit cards via affiliate links, what they need next is a lot of traffic going to that page. The traditional approach would be to pay for PPC ads and hope that the amount paid for the ads wasn’t more than the amount they made from the affiliate programs.
These folks didn’t go that route. Instead they created their own affiliate program, and pay people to drive traffic to their site. As an affiliate you get a decent payout for every approved credit card application made through your affiliate link. The biggest payout you can get is $110.40 (with the upgrade option, more on that below) for a Business Gold Rewards card. If you go to the American Express affiliate program, you’ll see that the commission for that card is $200. So the people running MyCreditCardCash.com are splitting the commission with you.
Why should you want to split the commission? Well, they do have a great landing page. And to create the same thing you’d have to sign up for a dozen or so affiliate programs through Commission Junction, which is a bit of a hassle, and then create the website, and then drive traffic to it. By being an affiliate of MyCreditCardCash.com, all you have to do is drive traffic to it. You don’t make as much money as you could otherwise, but it’s far easier.
The cost is $1 for the first month, $37.95 every month after the first. The $37.95 fee is waived as soon as you’ve had 4 people be approved for credit cards through your affiliate link. The $37.95 fee is pretty outrageous, given that they’re not really providing you with anything more than an affiliate link, but it does motivate people to get those first 4 signups (one of those is probably the person themselves, and the other ones family or friends), which makes everyone money.
There is an upgrade option, too. For a single payment of $21.95 you can get the highest commission level, which gets you the $110.40 for the highest paying card. Without the upgrade, you’re making $96 for the same sale. At the lower end of card payouts, an upgraded member makes $31.05 and a non-upgraded member makes $27.
Upgrading makes sense once you start getting regular signups, other than friends and family.
As an opportunity, this one is pretty reasonable. It isn’t MLM, and they don’t try to get much money out of you unless you can’t manage to get 4 credit cards approved in your first month. Since it isn’t MLM, though, it’s up to your own personal effort to get traffic to your site.
This is a popular niche, though, if you can still call something a niche after it’s popular. On Squidoo, there are 869 lenses about credit cards, all having some sort of affliliate link in them. On Google Adwords, to get in the top position for the very broad keyword “credit card” would cost about $13, which is way too much to be profitable. There are still some relevant long tail keywords that can be had for under $0.50, which might be low enough to be profitable. Most people are advertising this in the traditional ways, so going non-traditional might work well.
If you’re good at getting free traffic to a website, you can throw a bunch of traffic at your affiliate link and hope some of it sticks. Or if you’re good at PPC advertising, you can drive some targeted traffic that way and probably do pretty well.
If you’re not good at either, you probably won’t have much luck at this opportunity.
Great review Jay! I am lucky enough to have had 4 approvals already. I used basic methods for traffic results. I posted to groups, forums, and of course all my blogs. It seems to be doing good so far. I might try a little PPC a little later. Thank you for taking the time to do a review. It’s greatly appreciated.
Lori, congratulations on getting your 4 signups! PPC can be a tough field to get into. If you give it a try, don’t forget to set a daily budget to keep your spending where you want it.
Will do Buckaroo!
Thanks for taking the time to review our website as we really appreciate it! Just wanted to let everyone know we have been working to improve our service and now we only require 2 credit card sign ups for our service to be free instead of 4!
I have been an affiliate for about 3 weeks now. Things are going fine. I can’t complain really. I have a feeling that this site is not owned by too many partners or a corporate-like body. So, some problems such as delayed responses to emails you write, delays in cancellation etc. may be normal since it is a fairly small operation although in business THERE ARE NO EXCUSES FOR BEING NOT-PERFECT. Anyway, I have no problems with the site.
Can anybody here clarify for me about the payment credit?
I saw in the faqs that it can take up to 3-5 days for a credit to be shown on your account. Does this mean that you won’t know if there has been an approval until up to 5 days later, so no commission will show until then. Or does it mean that they just won’t physically be in your account for up to 5 days?
I have about 15 credit card clicks in my first week, but nothing is showing up in commissions…I just wanted to verify that was because they weren’t being approved, or they just haven’t shown up yet.
Thanks for any and all responses
I never did make a sale, not having really had the time for the program, so can’t comment on how long it takes for them to appear in your stats. Maybe Lori will see this and comment on how long hers took.
Or, you could sign up for one yourself, and then track when it appears in your stats.
It can take even longer than 3-5 days for a sale to show up so NO, you won’t know if you had made a sale until there is an approval. This is something that I have been speaking to them about and they’re working it.
You won’t see anything (commission or otherwise) until the approval has gone through.
And I haven’t done much with the lately but I’ve made probably around 50 sales since I started with them. I do even better with the affiliate program though;)
i really want to take a chance and try this program but i just don’t know does any one really think that it is worth it in the long run. an is it worth giving it at least a one month trail.
Hi CW, your results may vary from program to program and how you promote it. For something like this, you need to make sure that you’re getting people to the site who are interested in getting a credit card soon. Otherwise they may bookmark the site and come back to it months later.