If you’re in the affiliate marketing industry, you know all about CPA marketing. If you’re new, though, I’ll give you a quick rundown.
CPA networking is a form of advertising where you build a site and run offers from various companies. It’s your job to get as many people as possible to sign up for those offers or buy the products on offer. For each lead you generate or each offer claimed, you get paid. CPA itself stands for Cost Per Action, where the offer claims and leads generated are the actions.
CPA is one part of a spectrum of affiliate marketing. Other forms include ads that pay you per thousand views, or ads that pay you per click. You also have straight affiliate sales, where you try to get users to buy products, and you’re paid a commission on every sale. Of these, product sales can be the most lucrative based on either sheer volume or on selling high priced items. Beyond that, CPA is the most lucrative. Views are the easiest, followed by clicks, followed by leads; thus views pay the least, and offers the most.
If you’re getting into making money online using CPA, you want to take every step possible to maximize the amount of money you earn. How can you do that?
In order to gain access to offers, you need to be part of a CPA network. There are literally hundreds of networks out there available, ranging from utter filth to insanely lucrative. They also range between “accepts everyone” and “you have to be a six-figure earner professional to get in.”
The more exclusive the network, the better the offers you find. This is because the companies willing to pay a lot for leads don’t want unqualified leads coming from spam sites; it wastes their time and it tarnishes their brand image. When they work with a network, they want that network to vet their advertisers to meet certain minimum standards.
When you’re first starting with CPA, you won’t be able to get into the best networks. You’ll be limited to a lot of low-tier networks. That said, you should join every network you can, or at least the best ten or twenty that accept you. This way you have your pick of a wide range of offers from various networks and can experiment. You can also:
Work your way up. As you join networks, you gain experience. You can leverage that experience and those past earnings as proof that you know what you’re doing and you can work successfully in CPA. Leverage the name recognition of those networks to get into slightly more exclusive better networks.
Repeat this process. Join networks, use them for a while, and then apply to better networks using your existing experience. You’ll be able to climb up the ladder in terms of network quality, which also lets you access better offers, so you can make more money while you’re at it.
Offers are just one side of the CPA coin. On the other side, you have your site. In reality, you will have numerous sites, spread out throughout various niches. The goal is to find lucrative offers and build sites around those offers. Work to optimize the traffic and the audience visiting a site, to boost your conversion rate and your raw conversion numbers.
For the most part, this will involve all the basics of SEO and site building that come with any form of website ownership. You’ll need a solid design that appeals to both desktop and mobile users. You’ll need enough content to make your site look legitimate and helpful. If possible, you’ll want to keep an ongoing update schedule, though you don’t need more than one post per week to maintain a niche affiliate site. Just make sure your content isn’t copied or stolen, and that it’s high quality and useful.
As you grow and rise in the ranks of exclusive networks, you’ll find a lot of appealing offers that don’t quite fit your niche. The number one killer of CPA sites is trying to cram those offers into your existing sites. Rather than waste time and dilute your audience with a shift in focus, just make another site. You can take the basic template of your successful site and apply that to a new niche, with new content and new topics.
Once you have the pattern down, it’s very possible to start a site from scratch and build it into a solid earner in the space of a few months. Some successful CPA marketers build a new site every 3-6 months. They also aren’t afraid to sell off old sites through a site sales marketplace to get rid of lower earners and focus on the higher earners.
It’s easy to find one offer that converts well and run with it, but sometimes better offers will come out. You can do two things about this.
The first is to switch to new offers when they become available. However, you want to do some split testing first to make sure the new offer converts as well as the old offer. It’s no good switching to something that pays $1 more per action if you lose 25% of your conversions doing so.
The second is to play two networks off each other. Talk to your account representative on one network and bring up the fact that you found a similar offer on a different network and it pays more. In order to keep your business on their network, they’ll probably try to negotiate a better offer for you. By doing this when a new offer appears, you can stay ahead of the curve.
You’re an advertiser and a marketer, and if you’re not spending on advertising, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your potential audience. Using other forms of advertising through other ad networks, you can bring people to your CPA site. There, they’ll be exposed to your content and your offers, where they can convert and earn you cash. You have to spend money to make money, after all.
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