Martin Lee Affiliate Marketing

I have been advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing for some time. Since my account is in US dollars but my local currency is in Singapore dollars, there is a need to convert the amount charged by Yahoo (in US$) to the Singapore dollar equivalent. All these while, I have been making payment using a credit card.

If you make any type of foreign currency transaction on your credit card, there’s actually something you can optimize to save money.

Depending on which bank your credit card belongs to, the forex exchange rate used to convert the US$ to your local currency could vary by quite a fair bit. I did a simple test between two banks in Singapore. I charged the same amount to two different credit cards at the same time.

For a charge of US$500, one bank charged me about S$740. Another bank charged me about S$730. That is a difference of $10. If you spend US$10,000 on advertising every year, that would be a difference of S$200.

So, you can make your advertising budget go a longer way if you know which credit card gives you the best exchange rate. Note that there might also be a difference between Visa and Mastercard charges for the same bank. The last time I investigated, there was a charge of 1% for overseas transactions for Mastercard. Not too sure what it is now so you might also want to investigate.

That is not the end of my findings.

After I did the simple comparison, I did the next natural thing of logging into my Yahoo Search Marketing account to change my credit card to the “optimal” one. I found out that Yahoo actually offers paypal as one of the payment option!

I didn’t know when they started to have that option but without hesitate, I switched my payment option to paypal.

Why did I do that?

Simple. A lot of my affiliate commissions go to my paypal account. The exchange rates that paypal offers for converting my US$ to S$ suck big time (If spot rate is 1.45, they will offer around 1.40). Therefore, I always try to avoid withdrawing money from my paypal account. If I can pay for something using paypal instead of using my credit card, I will always do that.

By using paypal instead of my credit card to fund my Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, I estimate I will save about S$50 on every US$1000 of spending. Every dollar saved on advertising is an additional dollar in profit.

So it makes sense to do this.

By the way, if you have ever considered advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing, you can use this link to get a US$50 credit when you sign up for a new account.

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