I have an issue and I’d like to get some advice from readers. We post a lot of bank account bonus content but I’ve recently been running into the same issue on a fairly regular basis. The issue is that some bonuses only have an affiliate link available and no public non affiliate link.
We don’t use affiliate links for bank accounts (or credit cards). Traditionally what I’ve been able to do is to contact the financial institution and ask that instead of giving us a commission they offer our readers a better bonus instead. When that works, it’s fantastic. Unfortunately getting a response/deal in place rarely happens.
Before people get angry in the comments, don’t worry we still won’t be using those links and this isn’t a trap post to start adding them to the site. The few banks that do do this usually have public links that come along, but the affiliate links are almost always available (e.g public non affiliate links might be available 3-4 months of the year and the affiliate links available for 10+ months).
Normally I’d just refer readers to other sites that cover bank bonuses, unfortunately most of those just steal content without attribution. I’m really writing this post because I don’t know what to do.
Update: Thanks everybody for the response. I feel like most readers in the comments are missing the reasons why I don’t want to use affiliate links in the first place:
- Editorial Control. If you have affiliate links then the company you’re promoting can dictate what is/isn’t discussed. For example with credit cards they don’t want you to mention churning for example.One of our best and most popular posts is what counts as a direct deposit. I don’t want to give companies the ability to tell us we aren’t allowed to list them there.
- Bias/perception of bias. Currently when we post a deal, readers know we are posting it (and reviewing it) fairly because we don’t have any incentive to do otherwise. If we have affiliate links then there is a temptation to rank certain bonuses that pay us higher than others. Even if we don’t give in to these temptations reader can have the perception that we have and question our motives. Currently if I rank a bonus as the best then readers might question why it’s #1, but they won’t say something like “this is only #1 because it pays you”.
I think I’ve found a solution that will work going forwards and will discuss this in further detail at a later stage.
