Is Travel Insurance a Dead-End Niche?
I’m hitting my first serious roadblock in building my affiliate site.
My niche is travel insurance. This type of insurance protects you and your belongings while you travel for pleasure or business.
If you lose your luggage, travel insurance can reimburse you. If you break your leg while hiking, travel insurance can provide medical evacuation and pay for hospital costs.
Roadblocks
The significant roadblock I’ve encountered concerns hooking up with an affiliate network called Commission Junction (CJ).
CJ offers publishers connections to affiliate businesses. That includes connections with insurance companies that offer travel insurance.
The Problem
Here’s the problem:
Publishers must apply individually to each company they want to establish a relationship with. In other words, it’s up to the affiliate marketer to set up terms with each company in order to market the product on the affiliate website.
What’s the point to that? CJ is standing there as a useless middleman who will probably demand a cut of each sale because you joined through CJ’s website.
Why go through CJ when I have to cut deals myself with each company? It would be better to not use CJ and communicate directly with these companies to establish an affiliate relationship.
Counterproductive
In addition, CJ has racked up a good number of bad reviews from other affiliate marketers.
Finally, it appears that you cannot apply for an affiliate relationship until you’re pulling 10k visitors per month. Wow! So I’m expected to create a website that attracts 10k visitors per month while not earning a penny.
That seems counterproductive to the affiliate goal of earning small sums of money while establishing your niche.
The Question
Here are my questions:
1. How do you establish affiliate relationships with companies without going through an affiliate network?
2. If insurance companies only allow publishers to join through affiliate networks, mainly CJ, then does that mean that travel insurance is a dead-end niche?
Note: I’m just starting, so I may find ways to solve these problems as I continue learning at WA.
Recent Comments
8
Hi - have a look on Google. Type travel insurance + affiliate program That should bring up companies who have their own program.
Just read the reviews and CJ sounds like a total scam.
I think travel insurance marketing is a great niche, however. Is it possible to find an up-and-coming company that is advertising for affiliates directly? Sometimes you can see it on the very bottom of their main website "Info for Affiliates" or some such.
CJ works fine (I like it), affiliate networks are pretty common to use, and Travel Insurance is definitely not a dead niche. Any niche can work! I Was Totally Wrong (So Trust Your Gut) People NEED insurance, so I think this could be a cool niche to do if you actually like researching and writing about it. Sounds boring to me, which is why a lot of marketers probably stay away from it.
That means easy work for you :)
See more comments
Hi,
As per the comments below as to how to manipulate around Affiliate connectors such as CJ, t may well beif I were you I would use both methods as CJ are not as bad or restrictive as you seem to imagine. They generally accept anyone, its the individual companies that impose minimum traffic limits amongst a whole load of other restrictions. You will fins that, indeed worse in individual programs.
I tend to use both approaches, I am on several Affiliate introducing programs such as CJ, Awin, and others, I also approach individual companies.
As for your niche, I think that it is far from dead. In fact I believe that it may just be in for a massive boost. If Brexit, goes ahead then the European Health insurance scheme will no longer be valid to Brits visiting Europe, or indeed visitors in the opposite direction which will introduce a brand new 30M clients to the insurance market.
Appreciate your insight, adrian. Very helpful.