Please note that affiliate links may be included in some posts.
In this post, I’m going to discuss some credit repair affiliate promotional strategies.
What Is Credit Repair?
According to Credit Karma, “Credit repair companies often promise to help remove negative items from your credit reports, in exchange for a fee. You can take the same steps yourself without the fee.”
Credit Repair Affiliate Programs
Below are some of the most popular credit repair affiliate programs.
This is not an exhaustive list.
I recommend that you do your own due diligence.
For example, my instinct would be to try to find the best converting option rather than the highest paying option.
In my experience, it’s better to push traffic to things that convert, even if they have a lower payout, than pushing traffic to affiliate programs with higher payouts but inferior performance.
- Reliant Credit Repair: 40% commission
- Progrexion
- ERA Credit Services: “$100 and residual on a monthly basis on each client”
- Credit Repair Agents: $5-$50 per sign up
- My Fico: $5-$100 per sign up
- Flex Offers (this is an affiliate network- they have a bunch of programs)
There is a range of different affiliate programs available- though some of the affiliate signup pages look suspiciously outdated.
I would be inclined to work through a well-known network like Flex Offers. That way I could compare the offers within the network and potentially get support from an affiliate manager regarding which ones to promote.
Plus, I’m generally more confident in the integrity, reporting and tracking capabilities of an established affiliate network than an independent affiliate program.
My Advice
To get a sense of how to promote these credit repair affiliate programs, I took a look at one of the top-ranking websites: CreditRepair.com.
I used Ahrefs to examine its top 1,000 organic keywords. This will help you determine what content ranks and ultimately converts people on credit repair offers:
Obviously, that’s on the organic side of things. There are a lot of people running ads in this niche- that’s an entirely different ballgame.
Although, the keywords I’ve listed out below can also help if you are doing pay per click advertising, which is a more aggressive style of affiliate marketing.
As you can see in the keyword research table, there is a range of different types of keywords. Whenever I look at keyword research, I like to break them down into different themes. Here we can see keyword seems clustering around concepts like:
- Credit repair (duh!)
- Credit bureaus
- Credit repair costs
- Specific credit scores (i.e., “690 credit score”)
- Credit dispute letters
- Credit score questions (i.e., “what is a good credit score for a college student”)
From a content marketing perspective, there are some good opportunities here.
For example, the keyword search “tri merge credit report” gets 800 searches a month, has a keyword difficulty of 2, and a cost-per-click of $15. And the creditrepair.com landing page is getting 1,000 visits a month from organic traffic, according to Ahrefs.
There’s definitely a lot of high cost-per-click opportunities here. This means that if you’re able to generate enough organic traffic, this could be a great display advertising opportunity.
In terms of generating organic traffic, I recommend producing 1,500+ word articles that definitively cover the keyword topic.
Long-form content is going to naturally capture many of the long-tail keyword searches. If you need inspiration, head over to NerdWallet – they are essentially the authority when it comes to content-marketing financial products.
Backlinks
If you’re doing SEO and want to rank, you will need to get some backlinks.
You can check out my Backlink Breakthrough course. It’s essentially an advanced guide to reverse guest posting.
Or you can check out whitehat guest posting services from Authority.Builders and DFY Links. Besides the purchase price of my course, my link building strategy prioritizes no-cost link building.
However, it can be a little bit of a daily grind to do.
If you just want to have all the backlinking done for you, I would check out the two done-for-you link building services. They are not inexpensive, but high-quality links, especially in a competitive SEO landscape like this, will help to get your rankings kick-started.
Local SEO?
There are even some local SEO opportunities- check out the screenshot below where I search for “Brooklyn credit repair”.
You can see that the Keywords Everywhere tool is estimating that this specific query gets 70 searches a month.
You could experiment with creating some micro-targeted landing pages for different areas or even buying ads in different locations. You might be able to discover a solid arbitrage opportunity in different locations.
Doing PPC
I used Ahrefs to see how many ads are running for the term “credit repair”. They found over 1,100 different ads.
The screenshot below shows some of the top performers. You can use Ahrefs to brainstorm different ad creative and also see what landing page is the top ad buyers are driving traffic to:
What I would do
There’s definitely an ethical responsibility here- I wouldn’t want to push traffic to affiliate offers I don’t believe in.
If Credit Karma is correct, users can actually do a lot of this credit repair themselves without spending any money.
That said, you could create some organic content and run ads on it- that would be a bit more ethical than pushing traffic to affiliate offers that users really aren’t best served by.
Combining Organic, Social, Paid + Email Marketing
If I were comfortable promoting credit repair affiliate programs, I’d probably consider a mixture of organic content marketing, social media (YouTube), pay per click advertising and automated email marketing.
I would analyze the keyword research, group the keywords into different content clusters, and then produce long-form, authoritative content designed to rank in the search engines for those keywords concepts.
I would then harvest that content to create social media creative that I could distribute across all of the different platforms.
I might specifically investigate YouTube – you can get a lot of traffic from YouTube organically.
(Here’s an example of a YouTube credit repair video with a lot of views)
So it would be worth figuring out how to produce video content on the platform.
Maybe you do screen shares discussing your blog posts. Or you can use video creation tools to produce slide share style videos.
If done correctly slide share videos can get a lot of traffic. Obviously, you’ll want to push traffic from YouTube back to your website or to the affiliate offer directly.
I would also make sure that I have email lead capture set up right from the start. You can set up an autoresponder that circulates all of your content marketing to your list pretty easily.
Affiliate Ad Creative
There are a bunch of ways you can experiment pushing traffic to the affiliate offer.
I use the Thirsty Affiliates WordPress plugin and automatically affiliate-link certain keywords across my entire website.
You can also design some visual, calls-to-action and use a WordPress plugin like Ad Inserter to automatically insert images into all of your content at specified placements. Just look at what Credit Karma uses to push traffic to its free credit score page:
Display Ads
As you can see in the keyword research table, there are some really high cost per click keywords you can optimize for.
This will be great for display ad opportunities.
Once I got around 100 visitors a day, I would consider applying for AdSense and experiment managing my own ad placements or use their Auto Ads feature to automatically integrate AdSense ads into the financial content.
Once I had three successive months of 25,000 monthly page views, I would apply to Mediavine. It is the display advertising network I use and in my experience they have better CPMs than what I can manage on my own.
Summing Up
There’s definitely a lot of opportunity in this financial niche. Generally, financial terms are pretty competitive to rank for, get a lot more scrutiny from Google, and have a lot of ad buyers vying for traffic.
I would recommend a holistic approach, combining organic, social, email and paid to build up recurring traffic.
Once I have some traffic to play around with, I would experiment with different affiliate offers and different methods of promoting it.
I would spend a lot of time analyzing what the other top sites are doing in terms of how they get traffic; promote their offers on their website and through their email and social platforms; and run some structured split tests to figure out the best method for my own website.
Last Updated on June 21, 2020 by Ryan Nelson
