Payday Loan Affiliate Program by LeadsMarket.com Review
December 22, 2011 Posted by Michael KwanThe following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page
The world of affiliate marketing is increasingly competitive, especially when it comes to some of the most popular and lucrative niches. Payday loans are one such example, because there is so much money at stake. And if you want to make money in this niche, there is a new player in the game that could put a lot of cash in your pocket.
Boasting that it offers the “best payday loan affiliate program,” LeadsMarket.com offers one of the largest marketplaces on the Internet to sell leads for payday loans. The buyers get their leads, the customers get their money quickly, and you earn a hefty commission.
Making Money By Offering Money
For the time being, LeadsMarket is focusing solely on its payday loan affiliate program, but there appear to be plans in the future for other verticals as well. If you take a look at the homepage, they are gearing up for offers in the flowers, mortgage, education, and dating industries.
Easily the most appealing feature that sets this affiliate program apart from the many other programs out there for payday loans is the commission rate. When it comes to the cash advances and payday loans, affiliates earn an impressive 90% revenue share. This means that LeadsMarket only takes a 10% cut. This is the revenue share you get right from the beginning without having to earn your way up to a higher tier.
Based on the Feedback of Real Affiliates
Rather than simply diving into things, the founders of LeadsMarket took their time to consult with thousands of affiliates to “understand what [the] best payday loan affiliate program should have.” From this, they developed ten guiding principles. For instance, they promise that each affiliate will be treated as a true long term business partner, that only exclusive direct offers will be promoted to affiliates, and that affiliates get the “lion’s share” of the “generous commission.”
The Dashboard
Powering the LeadsMarket engine is a proprietary technology called Optimo. This has a self-learning algorithm that is designed to optimize the distribution of leads and maximize revenue for affiliates.
Signing up for an affiliate account with LeadsMarket is very easy. There is just a single page form that asks for you name, address, phone number, and website URL, as well as the marketing methods you plan on using. You gain instant access to the dashboard, as shown above, but the account itself does not become active until it has been approved. In my experience, this happened within 24 hours.
As far as the affiliate dashboard itself, the layout is clear and easy to understand. The traffic report features front and center with basic metrics shown above it. There are pulldown menus to bring up other reports. Along the left side is information about your current balance and earnings, while up top is all the primary navigation.
You’ll also notice that every affiliate is assigned a personal account manager. This account manager can be contacted via email or telephone at any time. The “friendly affiliate concierge” brings a wealth of real experience him/herself and knows what it takes to succeed.
Creatives and Landing Pages
LeadsMarket is designed to give you as much flexibility as possible to promote the payday loans offer, as well as any other offers they may have in the future. This includes marketing via email, PPC, banners, mobile, pop-ups, and pop-unders. You can also promote via social networking and job listing sites, but you must first get the approval of your affiliate manager.
Digging into the creatives, LeadsMarket aims to provide as much support and updates as possible. This means you can send traffic directly to the websites via banners, for example, as well as integrate the form into your own website for greater optimization and control.
For instance, I can send visitors directly to a predesigned landing page and these leads could then be captured. You could easily embed these landing pages in iframes on your own custom URLs and domains so that you can hide your affiliate ID. There are also a range of text emails and banners of varying sizes, as seen above.
Reports and Payouts
Naturally, LeadsMarket is also set up to provide you with comprehensive reports and deep analytics. These reports are all provided with real-time data, allowing you to get information for specific date ranges and for specific domains.
This is relatively simple at the moment, because there is just the one affiliate offer on the table, but you will have the ability to crunch the report down based on campaigns when there are more. You can also group by date, offer, campaign, subID and domain.
The payout structure is fairly standard. LeadsMarket pays out on a net-30 schedule, meaning that you will receive your commission for the month of December around the end of January. You will need to reach a minimum of $100 in revenue to generate a payment. For now, it appears that payments are only available by check, wire transfer, and direct deposit, though the FAQ also mentions PayQuicker, Payoneer, and PayPal. Top affiliates can request a more frequent payment plan.
There is also mention of an affiliate referrals program where you earn a 3% bonus on all commissions generated by the affiliates that you refer, but the link in the dashboard for “refer a friend” simply directs me to the “create new campaign” page. Presumably, the referral program will be a new “offer” added at some point in the near future.
Conclusion
It is generally easier to sign up for a couple of affiliate networks and have access to the widest range of affiliate offers possible. However, this does not necessarily provide you with the most flexibility, the best affiliate support, or the most lucrative opportunities. And that’s why something more focused like the payday loan affiliate program from LeadsMarket might be a good fit as part of your overall Internet marketing portfolio.
The high level of support is welcome, the 90% revenue share is astounding, and the flexibility of promoting the offers is greatly appreciated. If you’re interested in getting into the payday loan and cash advance niche, this could be the way to go.
Affiliate Marketing Update: $1,276.50 Yesterday
December 19, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzI set yet another 2 new records with yesterday’s affiliate marketing performance, but I got tired of titling these posts as such.
Yesterday was good, setting 2 new personal affiliate marketing records of mine, but the bad news is that I didn’t set a new net profit record yesterday. In fact, my overall ROI dropped from the previous day’s considerably (by about 50%).
However, I can’t complain. I still made just shy of $500 net yesterday, and I can’t expect to set 3 new records every single day.
New Record #1: 642 Leads in 1 Day
To be honest, as time goes on and I begin to send in these amounts of traffic, this particular "record" diminishes in its appeal to me, and so I’m not sure how much longer I’ll continue to update when I break this particular record.
That being said, my campaigns brought in a total of 642 leads yesterday. That’s really a lot when you really think about it. If a company wants a lot of potential paying customers on a mailing list and you tell them that you can deliver 20,000 people a month, that is a really valuable source of new customers for the company.
New Record #2: $1,276.50 Gross in 1 Day
Okay, so the title of this post may be a little misleading… as my campaigns made a gross total of $1,276.50 yesterday, not net profit.
Nevertheless, it’s still a notable achievement, IMHO. It’s also more cash in my pocket.
I have a Visa that gives me 1% cash back on my purchases, and I spent $800 yesterday, which means that Visa gave me $8. It’s not much in comparison, but it’s nice to know that even if I broke even on my affiliate campaigns that I’d still get $240 a month from Visa.
Actually, scrap that. I just checked and it’s capped at $250 a year, which is stupid. Oh well.
Budgeting Mistake
I learned a valuable lesson yesterday.
I was analyzing, optimizing, and working on my campaigns yesterday morning which included adding more funds to my various traffic sources. Some of my traffic sources require that I prepay, as opposed to billing me for my traffic later, so I’m constantly having to refill them.
I knew, of course, that it’d be much more convenient to add a lot of funds so that I wouldn’t have to keep adding more daily, but I am also beginning to spend a fair bit each day ($800 yesterday) so it’s a little bit scary to deposit a lot of funds at once.
However, it is important that I make sure I have a healthy amount in. I thought I did yesterday morning when I deposited, but then after working I went out to badminton for a couple hours and then came home and ate while watching Super-8 (it’s so-so, BTW), and therefore didn’t check my campaign balances for around 5-6 hours.
When I did check one of my sources, I was surprised to discover that one of my campaign balances was completely empty! What sucked is that this was one of my winning campaigns, meaning that I was losing out on profit. I’m not sure how long it was empty for, probably only an hour or two, but it’s still a simple mistake that shouldn’t be made.
And then 15-20 minutes later I discovered that 2 campaigns on another of my other traffic sources were empty (or nearly empty, I forget to be honest) as well!
So, the lesson learned is to keep my balances well funded so that I can take advantage of as much traffic as I can get.
That being said, it isn’t fail-safe; there are the real dangers such as that a campaign could suddenly convert very poorly, offers could be paused or capped, hosting goes down, etc.
I think that in the long run, though, that it’s still better to keep a healthy amount of balance if you have winning campaigns.
What do you think?
Judgement Day Cometh
As mentioned in my previous posts, tomorrow is an extremely important and vital day for me.
It is the day when my affiliate manager will receive a report on my recent traffic and check its quality. If things look good, then it means I’ll be able to continue at my current (and growing) rate. Also, if things look good, I’ll likely be getting a bump of $0.25 but possibly even more.
With a $0.25 bump, I’m pretty confident that I could push $60,000 in January, which would make an absolute AWESOME start to the year.
So, please wish me luck. Tomorrow is seriously a very important day. It will either suck hardcore or be one of the most important days for me business-wise I’ve ever had.
Affiliate Marketing Update: 3 More New Records
December 18, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzThis post is going to look eerily similar to yesterday’s post, as I already managed to completely break and smash all 3 of the new records I just posted yesterday!
I am exhausted. It is 9AM and I only ‘napped’ 3 hours last night. All of this recent explosive growth in my affiliate marketing campaigns has made sleep a real difficult lately.
It’s not just a matter of excitement either. Since I’m starting to do some real volume now, I like to closely monitor how and what things are doing, as a small oversight or misstep could cause me a lot of money and/or grief.
Anyway, yesterday was my best day of affiliate marketing ever, by far. Here are my 3 new affiliate marketing records:
New Record #1: 578 Leads in 1 Day
Yesterday I posted how I was amazed to have brought in a total of 333 leads for the previous day, but I managed to once again completely smash that record by bringing in a whopping 578 leads in yesterday!
I had a difficult time bringing that many leads in a month before, let alone a day.
I might actually beat that again today, but I think it will be close either way.
New Record #2: $1,149.05 Gross in 1 Day
Craziness. Up to a week ago, my highest-ever grossing day for my affiliate campaigns brought in a total of $397, which I considered to be a lot (and still do, to be honest).
But then yesterday brings in $1,149.50 and I’m completely shell-shocked.
I’m starting to do so much volume, in fact, that a few hours ago I just put in a request for a credit increase on my Visa. I don’t want to be stuck in the frustrating position where I could be making money but am limited by my line of available credit.
New Record #3: $590.72 Net Profit in 1 Day
Yesterday I posted how had I set a net profit record the previous day of $272.06.
While it was a new record for me, it didn’t really feel all that impressive to be honest. But maybe I’m just saying that now because of what I ended up profiting yesterday, which was $590.72.
The strange thing is that my ROI actually increased from the previous day’s net profit record of 70.33% to 105%
You can see though why I needed to raise my Visa limit; $558.33 a day, that works out to nearly $17,000 a month in ad spend, and that doesn’t factor in room for any growth nor my existing expenses (hosting, for example).
Anyway, I am really proud to have netted so much from my affiliate campaigns in a single day. I know it pales in comparison to so many affiliate marketers out there, but for me this is an incredible jump.
Now, let’s see how long I can keep this up for… as that’s the real test here.
Still a Lot of Room for Growth
While yesterday was an absolutely amazing day for me, there is still a lot of room for growth on my campaigns.
There are many untapped traffic sources I haven’t touched yet and offers I haven’t run.
Also, as I mentioned in my last post, I am expecting (and hoping) for a bump in a few days. It will probably be $0.25 but may be higher.
At 578 leads a day, a $0.25 bump works out to an extra $144.50. If I had that bump in place yesterday, I would have profited $735.22 instead of $590.72.
And with the higher ROI, I would be able to scale even more.
Anyway, we’ll see how long this lasts. I’ll keep you guys posted with any new records and notable updates from my affiliate marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Marketing Update: 3 New Records!
December 17, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzWhat’s this? Three consecutive posts in 3 days!?
Well, these affiliate marketing update posts are pretty quick and easy to write. I don’t plan on posting so many regular updates on my affiliate marketing campaigns, but it’s just that things have really been moving the past couple weeks.
In fact, things have been moving so fast that I’ve been having a hard time sleeping lately.
Yesterday, I managed to break 3 new personal records on my affiliate campaigns.
New Record #1: 333 Leads in 1 Day
My previous record for number of leads in 1 day was 250, which I set back on November 7th.
I completely smashed that record yesterday with a total of 333!
What’s scary is that I am on pace to pass that today…
New Record #2: $665.10 Gross in 1 Day
I just posted yesterday how I had set a new personal record by grossing $441.90, and I already broke that with yesterday’s total of $665.10!
As I mentioned yesterday, I know that the ‘gross’ record is rather meaningless, but it is still a bit telling. For example, you can assume a guy who does $30,000 gross in a single day is very likely profiting big time, or else he wouldn’t have the funds to push such high numbers for very long.
Jumping the gun and counting the chickens before they hatch, if you assume an average of $665.10 per day, that works out to $20K a month and nearly a quarter million dollars a year.
New Record #3: $272.06 Net Profit in 1 Day
While I’ve certainly made far more than $272.06 net profit in a single day before, I’ve never made that much from any of my past affiliate marketing campaigns.
While the 2 records above are meaningful to me personally, this is probably the only record that you would care about.
$272.06 a day works out to over $8,000 a month, but the real question of course is how long will this last. It could last forever or it could end tomorrow.
I’m certainly not so naive as to expect to average this for the next 20 years. In fact, if this lasts for the next month I’ll be really happy.
That being said, I currently don’t see anything that hints that this is only a very temporary thing.
Still a Lot of Room for Growth
While yesterday was an absolutely amazing day for me, there is still a lot of room for growth on my campaigns.
There are many untapped traffic sources I haven’t touched yet and offers I haven’t run.
Also, as I mentioned in my last post, I am expecting (and hoping) for a bump next week. It will probably be $0.25 but may be higher.
At 333 leads a day, a $0.25 bump works out to an extra $83.25. If I had that bump yesterday, I would have profited $355.31 instead of $272.06.
And with the higher ROI, I would be able to scale even more.
Anyway, we’ll see how long this lasts. I’ll keep you guys posted with any new records from my affiliate marketing campaigns.
