For many marketers, CPA marketing is the ideal balance between the amount of work they have to put in and the amount of potential profit they can see. It’s fairly easy to set up and get going, and even to make a few bucks, but it has a high enough skill ceiling and high enough potential profits that you can easily end up making quite a living.

How CPA Works

CPA marketing is usually a synonym with affiliate marketing. It’s a cost per action form of commerce. You put links on your site that lead to landing pages. Users click those links, which hooks them up with a referral using your unique code. They fill out the form on the landing page – the action – and you get paid. If they don’t have your affiliate code, or they don’t fill out the form, you don’t get paid.

That’s a simplistic view of things, which tends to leave out other parts of the value chain, but that’s okay. We don’t need to know about where AdSense can fall into this, how much the product owner makes, or anything else. All we need to know is where the money comes from and how to improve it.

There are essentially two ways you can increase your earnings with CPA marketing. One is to get more people clicking your links and filling out your offers. You’ll get paid more for 10 signups than you will for 5. The second is to find more valuable offers. 5 signups on a $1 offer will earn you less than 5 signups on a $2 offer, right?

As you might think based on the title, the focus of this article is on improving the value of your CPA offers. Where can you find better paying offers and niches?

Boosting CPA Value

There’s really only one way to find valuable niches, and that’s to go looking. You can find and sign up for various affiliate networks and browse their offerings. This will give you a good idea of what the values are for the offers they have available. It will help if you have some idea of what niche you want to look into. We covered this before, but I’ll summarize here.

• Gaming, specifically mobile and browser games, tend to be valuable for about six months before their value drops off. If you’re agile at building and rebuilding sites, you can jump from one to the next as the hits are released.
• Casinos and online gambling can be very lucrative if you find the right offers, but there are a lot of low paying offers and the niche is relatively saturated.
• School and education, generally advertising for trade schools and tech schools, can be great as long as you find a way to compete with the few giant sites that dominate search.
• Health supplements tend to rotate with trends. If you can capitalize on whatever Doctor Oz is pushing on his show, you can follow trends and keep up a decent level of income.
• Loans and financial offers can be very high value, but that’s often because they’re extreme cases that don’t have a lot of demand. The most high frequency tend to be payday loans, but their value is low because Google actively devalues sites that market them.
• Dating sites pay a lot because, believe it or not, not many people actually sign up for them. If you can figure out a way to actually get people to complete the signup, you can get quite a bit of cash.
• Technology moves fast, but it enables a lasting brand if you can follow the trends and capitalize on news. Become an industry news site and follow announcements with offers attached.

As you can see, a lot of niches tend to move quickly, which means it’s very hard to set up a site and let it go on making you money indefinitely. You need to check back and see if there’s something new in your niche on an almost monthly basis. The more sites and the more niches you can run, the better off you’ll be.

Now, when I talk about browsing CPA networks to look at offers, what do I mean? Well, there are two ways to find affiliate offers. One is to go to the companies directly. Some companies have their own referral programs you can use. The Dollar Shave Club is one recent example; you probably aren’t going to find them on a network, but you can get an affiliate link from them directly.

The other option is to go through networks. Some big brands don’t want to have to care about their affiliate programs and leave the network to do the work. They pay the network, the network handles the rest.

There are a lot of networks out there. Clickbooth, Neverblue, MaxBounty, PeerFly, Panthera Network, and dozens more. You can create accounts on all of them and browse their offers, but that’s a slow and inefficient way of doing it.

If only there were some kind of meta-network, an aggregator that would compile the offers from various public networks, so you can see what they pay, what you have to do, and even ratings from other affiliates.

They exist, of course. The two biggest of them are oDigger and OfferVault.

Here’s how to use OfferVault to find high paying CPA niches.

1. Visit OfferVault at the URL in the link above.
2. Click the “payout” bit at the top of the results to sort by payout. It will show you percentage payouts; these are usually not great. Click it a second time to see the highest monetary payouts.
3. Browse the offers that show up. Some of them are going to be terrible or fake, unfortunately.

For example, right now the #1 highest payout is a lead generation for Mundo Media that claims to pay $2,217.60 per lead. This is highly unlikely, and also, the description for the offer is completely generic. It gives you no information about what you might be selling. Avoid offers like this.

The highest value actual CPA offers are for Xarelto, which pay $875 per action. The action in this case is signing up to be part of a class action lawsuit, which means that despite the high value, you’re unlikely to have a very high number of conversions. Even one is great, but it’s not a great niche to get into.

The next one down the list is a $600 lead generation offer for markets.com. However, this is limited to foreign countries. Italy, Germany, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and various Nordic countries. It also has strict requirements; no using incentives, no co registration, no classified, and it requires at least $150 in a minimum deposit from the user and at least one trade. In other words, a lead is not enough. Again; high value, highly unlikely actually achieve.

Seeing a trend? The most valuable offers tend to be in the financial and legal niches, but they are also extremely hard to get. Not only do they require stiff and specific actions in order to count as a successful lead, but they’re also packed with competition, both from seasoned marketers and from novices looking for the most value per hit. Almost all of the highest value offers are like the last one I listed; Forex trading that has specific requirements, generally in terms of language as well as conversion actions.

Now, if you want to run a search for, say, a specific category, you can do that too. Click the advanced search option on OfferVault and you will be taken to a lightbox with a bunch of different options. Unclick the categories you don’t want and limit yourself to the ones you do. For example, I can run a search with all networks, all topics, all countries, and all payouts, but just in the Gaming category. This gives me offers primarily in casinos in foreign countries, like the UK, Canada, and Germany.

Unfortunately, the high paying offers are still packed with Forex and financial offers. These sites think because they put a gamification layer over their investment system, they can count as a gaming site. It makes filtering through offers a little tricky.

You can set other search options, but a lot of the more advanced features of OfferVault are gated behind creating an account. Accounts are free, and I recommend that you make one, but up until this point everything has been available for free users.

Using oDigger works the same way as OfferVault. You can click to search offers with no query and it will pull up an open list, and you can sort by payout type. There are some spammy offers here too, of course. Who really thinks 777casino.com is going to pay $11,400 for a CPA offer? I certainly don’t. It’s either a spam offer or it’s a glitch in the way oDigger harvests data and is supposed to be $11.40. I actually suspect this to be the case; it’s a foreign offer, and foreigners tend to use the , instead of the . in their currency. $11.40 is a lot more reasonable for this kind of offer.

Once again, the highest value legitimate offers you’ll find tend to be either the legal class action offers or the high end financial offers. If you don’t want to get into one of those niches, you’ll have to filter. At least oDigger has fewer financial sites masquerading as games for my test query here.

Vetting Offers

There’s more to finding high paying CPA offers than just running searches on these aggregators. You also have to vet the offer to see if it’s something you can actually do. Here are some common issues you might run into.

• The country is specific and it’s not your native country. As enticing as a German offer may be, unless you speak German or can hire someone who does, you’re not going to be able to properly optimize a site for converting German users.
• The landing page looks sketchy. If the site doesn’t look kosher to you, it probably won’t look legit to your users either. That means it will have a low conversion rate, if it converts at all.
• The restrictions. If the offer claims to be CPA but it requires a purchase or an initial deposit, it’s harder for you to track who does and doesn’t actually convert. It will be a lower converting offer than simple lead generation, and it opens you up to more potential fraud if the host of the offer wants to short you.
• The competition. Run some searches for the keywords involved or the link to the landing page to see what other sorts of sites are running offers for that particular company. If there’s some pretty stiff competition, it might be hard for you to rank. If everything out there is pretty minimal, you can dominate the niche with a little SEO motivation. It’s up to your confidence in your skills and your ability to out-do the competition.
• Your traffic. If you’re running a site and you’re not making much money on the offers you currently you, you might consider looking into the actual demographics your site is attracting. There may be offers that are more suited to them. For example, a writer at Backlinko ran a dating site and was trying to monetize with match.com style dating sites. When he checked, though, he saw that his demographic was more along the lines of grade schoolers looking for advice. He switched his offers to gaming – win a free Xbox – and dramatically increased his conversions.

Above all, make sure to use a little common sense. If an offer seems extremely good, it’s either too good to be true – and thus isn’t true at all – or it’s extremely hard to achieve. If it’s somehow high value and low barrier to conversion, it’s probably packed chock full of a ton of different sites competing to deliver it.

Competition isn’t an offer killer. It just makes your life harder. If you catch an offer when it’s new, you can sometimes get in before everyone else. Otherwise it’s a game of catch-up and you’re at a disadvantage. Either way, the key is picking a good offer that works for you, not just an offer with a high $ next to it.

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