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!
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