Niche Affilate Marketting

Are you losing money to exchange rate fee?

Where is the money going?

To be honest with you I’m losing 100s and 1000s of dollars with having to do exchange rate and paying conversion fee on my credit card and to my bank. The profits I make are in US dollars. But at the end of the month when everything is said and done, I end up with way less in Canadian dollars than what it says in my book.

Basically, I have a business account in Canadian dollars. The money I get paid is in US. So every time I go to the bank with my cheque or every time I get a wire, the bank charges me 2.5% fee for currency exchange in CND.

On the other hand, I pay my bills In Canadian dollars. I have a business CC in CND dollars, however I make my payments (everything except for Google Adwords) in US dollars. My CC company charges with 2.5% for currency exchange as well. So every time I get billed in US, I get slapped extra 2.5% on top on the amount charged.

Yahoo is pain in the ass. They don’t have billing in CND dollars. So, I end up paying 2.5% extra when they charge me. They don’t have pre-paid billing either. So, I have to fund my account first to continue running my ads. They require you to have 3x your daily limit budget in your account all the time.

Get everything in USD

For everyone outside of US, you need to open a US banking account, get a credit card in USD and get a new Adwords account in USD. Basically, do everything in US dollars.

I recently opened a new bank account in US dollars, applied for a credit card in USD and opened up a new Adwords account in US$.

Can you change the currency setting in your Adwords account?

Unfortunately, Adwords doesn’t allow that. Once you open an account in one currency, you can’t change it afterward. You will need to open a new account in your preferred currency.

Can I transfer my account history to my new Adwords account?

Again, the answer is No. With a new account you will need to build up history again. However, I must point out that, when you transfer your campaigns to your new account, domain history will automatically be transferred over, which is good. I was talking to an Adwords representative and this what he had to say about transferring account history and quality score from old account to a new account.

Adwords support:

It is possible to transfer your account keywords, ad text, etc to a new account. However, it is not possible to transfer account history information…While your quality score will start fresh, there are several factors of quality that will carry over and so will help you in establishing new quality score. These include: the historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group, the quality of your landing page, and the historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google. Consequently, while factors such as account performance will be lost, several factors of quality score will remain.

Is there a good USD credit card for Canadian affiliates?

The only card which is comparable to my AMEX card is the BMO Mosaik MasterCard. You can get this card in USD. You also have the option to choose either 1% cash back or Air-miles reward miles. I went with air-miles since I had airmiles reward miles with my old card. I basically switched my airmiles points from my old card to this card.

http://www3.bmo.com/mosaik/usd

-G