As an Affiliate Marketer, the kind of credit card that you use can make all the difference in the world. You should be treating affiliate marketing as a business, and as such you need a serious business card. If you are using your personal credit card for your online efforts you might as well be flushing that money down the toilet.
- Separate business expenses from personal expenses - your accountant will love you come tax time
- Build a business profile and credit which qualifies you for a Dun & Bradstreet profile and EIN number
- Qualify for 2x the amount of rewards you would be eligible for as an individual
Affiliate Marketers spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their sites, often in the thousands per day just to test a campaign to see if it’s profitable or not. If a particular campaign converts really well then a smart affiliate marketer will throw a lot of money behind the campaign, anywhere from $5k, $10k on up. Try that with your personal credit cards.
The best card for Affiliate marketing in my humble opinion has to be the American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Business Card, and what I especially love about the Starwood card is:
- The User Management portal is very organized and detailed
- They have a great number of some of the coolest hotels anywhere (W hotels, Westin, Starwood etc)
- Redeem any 20,000 Starwood points to mileage and get a 5,000 bonus on any airline - adds up quicker than you think!
Plus you get a 10,000 starwood points signup bonus.
One important thing to note is that a lot of people think Amex cards do not have spending limits, and this is a lie. Once you get an Amex card or any other business card for that matter - you should always set a spending profile with the credit card company. Let them know what the card is mainly going to be used for and the amounts of money you expect to spend. You don’t want to wait until after you’ve launched your campaign to realize you don’t have the money to keep them running. You will miss out on a hot offer and feel like kicking yourself in the head later - trust me I’ve been there.
Cash back cards? Puhlease - a majority of them don’t even come close, here’s a quick example why:
Say you’re going to Affiliate Summit West and you need a hotel to stay. Pull up the Starwood Preferred Guest site and search for hotels in Las Vegas. The site returns two options, the Westin & Planet Hollywood. Planet Hollywood gets my vote because they just re-opened recently after a total renovation and it’s on the main strip - close to all the action.
Change the options from cash to Starpoints to see how many points I would need to get a free night, and the answer is 16,000. The cash amount is $235 per night.
So a 1% cash back card would mean that you would have to spend $23,500 vs roughly $16,000 for the Starwood card. That’s a $7500 difference. Plus you get double Starpoints for every Starpoint property you stay at. Go figure.
If you don’t have the Starwood American Express Preferred Business card yet, get yours here …. and get 10,000 Starpoints with your first purchase.
This post was brought to you by the Ultimate Credit eBook - Do you have A+ Credit?
Back in July, I wrote an article about link building and since that time I’ve done a lot of research but also had some negative results on my blog that has made me rethink the whole 3 way linking strategy.
?