The 25+ Best Insurance Affiliate Programs | How To Monetize Them

The international insurance market is a trillion-dollar industry (Source).

Selecting the right coverage can be incredibly complex for buyers, with a range of different providers offering a variety of membership levels.

On the provider side, when you sign up someone for an insurance plan, they rarely leave it.

Where I live, in fact, our beneficent government dramatically restricts your ability to change plans.

That’s an incredible business model for the insurance provider who is able to lock buyers into long-term contracts that are difficult to leave.

Naturally, given this lucrative and competitive landscape, many insurance providers are willing to pay for qualified, converting traffic.

In this niche report, I’m going to take a look at how insurance affiliate sites are acquiring traffic and converting it on different affiliate offers.

Some of the top affiliates like Nerd Wallet are producing some pretty slick creative. Check out how they’re promoting auto insurance (here’s the page).

Types Of Insurance Affiliate Programs

There are a bunch of different types of insurance options you can promote.

Liberty Mutual has a popular affiliate program- check out all their different offers:

1. auto & vehicle insurance affiliate program
2. property insurance affiliate programs
3. health insurance affiliate programs
4. pet insurance affiliate program
5. travel insurance affiliate programs
6. dental insurance affiliate programs
7. life insurance affiliate programs
8. identity theft affiliate programs
9. small business affiliate programs
10. accident affiliate programs
11. critical illness affiliate programs

Popular Programs & Networks

Some of the popular programs and networks include:

1. The Allstate Insurance Affiliate Program ($5-$20 per lead)
2. The eHealth Insurance Affiliate Program ($10-$75 per lead)
3. The American Automobile Association (AAA) Affiliate Program: ($.30 per click)
4. The Liberty Mutual Affiliate Program: ($3-$17 per lead)

The FlexOffers affiliate network also has a bunch of different options:

• My CoPay is Too High Affiliate Program
• Breeze | Affordable Disability Insurance Affiliate Program
• Trip Cover Affiliate Program
• Lemonade (US) Affiliate Program
• Mason Finance Affiliate Program
• Travel Insurance Saver Affiliate Program
• AardvarkInsure.com Affiliate Program
• Direct Asia Insurance Affiliate Program
• Insure the GAP Affiliate Program
• Allianz Pojistovna, A.s. – CZ Affiliate Program
• Premium Health Connections Affiliate Program
• Towergate Touring Caravan Insurance Affiliate Program
• Jet2 Insurance Affiliate Program
• Midcounties Co-operative Travel Insurance Affiliate Program
• Zelf NL Affiliate Program
• Pedalsure Affiliate Program

Niche Site Analysis

To get a sense of what insurance affiliates are doing to acquire and convert this traffic, I started Googling around and found a couple of different affiliate sites. One of the bigger ones I found that was wholly dedicated to insurance was US Insurance Agents.

You can see that the site ranks for over 110,000 organic keywords. That’s not a gigantic number, per se. Especially compared with some of the other niche sites I have examined, but this is a pretty competitive space, so these rankings are very solid.

Keyword Research

I extracted 1,000 of their top-performing organic keywords to get a sense of the content they rank for and the type of traffic they’re acquiring.

Content Themes

• You can see that they rank for the brand names of the insurance providers (“kemper insurance”),
• review keywords like “state auto insurance reviews”,
• and general information queries like “can i insure a car that is not in my name”.

If you are going to build a content site that acquires traffic passively, you’ll want to examine the industry’s keywords and figure out the type of content you want to create the rank for them.

As well, this keyword research will help inform your content creation efforts on platforms like YouTube.

Maybe you focus on a silo of ‘review’ content and a silo of content answering common industry questions like “how to check what vehicles are registered in my name”, which is a low difficulty keyword from the research table above.

I’ll discuss the importance of keyword research and content creation a bit more in the following sections.

Competitor Sites

I used Ahrefs to find their top organic competitors. In the table below, you can see 10 of US Insurance Agents’ top competitors.

Many of them are not wholly dedicated to insurance. For example, Reviews.com is a general review site that has a good deal with insurance information on it:

How They Get Traffic

According to SimilarWeb, the bulk of their traffic comes from search with a little bit of direct traffic as well.

This definitely makes sense- insurance is a very dry niche and there isn’t likely to be much social opportunity here.

Ads?

I used Ahrefs to dig up some ads that are running for the term insurance review. There were a lot of them- below you can see a screenshot of some examples:

When it comes to ads, you’ll want to make sure that you’re playing by the rules.

I’m not entirely sure what Google Ads’ policies are regarding insurance keywords, but that is something I would investigate before starting a campaign. It’s also important that you figure out how to do tracking properly and define conversion so that you aren’t flying blind.

I’ve seen a lot of sites run traffic to a ‘top 10’ type list (I’ve got a screenshot below of this type of landing page).

For example, bidding on the keyword “best health insurance” and pushing traffic to a page that rank orders the best options. I imagine the cost per click would be pretty high- so it would be a game of art and math to get the margins profitable.

How They Make Money

Interestingly, US Insurance Agents doesn’t seem to be running any ads on their website. Instead, they have a call to action banner across their site for a free insurance quote (#1) and an affiliate link to the website (#2). You can see both in the screenshot below:

Once you click that, you’re directed to a landing page with a variety of different Insurance programs (Geico, Progressive Insurance, Esurance, Pretected, Insured Nation, Rate Fetcher & Best Auto Insurance) you can get your free quote from. These are all obviously affiliate links:

What I Would Do

I would use GoDaddy to search out a brandable domain name. You can read my guide on selecting brandable domain names – I’d want something catchy and modern-looking.

Keyword Research

I would spend a lot of time doing keyword research to figure out the type of content to create that gets traffic.

Specifically, I would use Ahrefs or SEMrush to see what the top websites in the insurance niche are ranking for.

Content Styles

I would also examine the style of content that is ranking.

For example, the U.S. Insurance Agents website primarily ranks using user-generated content, i.e. all the user reviews:

A new website isn’t going to get a lot of user traction. So I would look through the keywords and begin creating long-form reviews of these different insurance agencies and insurance types, incorporating feedback from user reviews on other websites.

In addition, you can publish public information like support numbers, mailing addresses and other information people are searching for.

This helps make your page more usable, which should help with rankings. Many sites create handy knowledge boxes containing this information at the top of the page- this gives the content a premium feel.

I would also figure out a way to solicit user reviews.

I profiled Pissed Consumer– which does both knowledge boxes and user review solicitation really well.

You can build out custom forms and solicit user reviews on your website, even linking to them from social media. That way you can begin to curate a flow of user-generated content.

Monetization

In terms of monetization, I would wait until the site is getting at least 50 to 100 unique users a day before applying to an insurance affiliate program.

If you apply too soon before your site has significant traffic, you might not be approved or you might be removed from the affiliate program because you’re not sending any traffic.

I would use an affiliate link tracking plugin like Thirsty Affiliates to manage my affiliate links and even automatically link keywords across my sight to different insurance programs.

There are a lot of high cost-per-click keywords in this niche, so I would look to get into an ad network like AdSense once I had around 100 uniques a day.

Secondary Traffic Sources

I would also consider creating YouTube content. YouTube can be a powerful secondary or even primary traffic source I’ve been either direct linking to the Insurance affiliate program or pushing traffic back to your website.

Here’s an example of a popular car insurance video:

Summing Up

I think that this is a pretty competitive niche and Google might scrutinize sites competing in this vertical more strongly than in other niches- plus you need to be aware of lead provider regulatory issues.

I do think that with a decent volume of traffic, you could see good ad revenue for these high CPC terms. I would want to examine the different affiliate programs to really understand how lucrative the payouts actually are.

As well, if you go into the ShareASale or CJ Affiliate networks, they do provide some performance metrics. That way you do have some insight into anticipated conversion capability.

Last Updated on March 14, 2021 by Ryan Nelson