CPA advertising or cost-per-action, is a form of online marketing that involves earning money every time your audience does something specific. For example, you might want someone to click on a link, enter an email address or submit a photo in order to get paid. Just like other forms of online marketing, you have the opportunity to make a lot of money with CPA marketing. You must understand what to do, you must take consistent action and you must continue to study the experts so that you don’t make the same mistakes they had to in order to get to the top of their game. The following will provide you with the CPA know-how to own every campaign you start. What you do with this information is completely up to you.
2 Sub-Categories Of CPA Marketing
When you begin to look for cost-per-action offers, you will notice two distinct categories. These include:
Cost-Per-Lead: Every company that deals with customers wants leads. Whenever you generate a lead for a company, whether you gather a name, an email address or the person’s entire mailing address, you get paid.
Cost-Per-Sale: Just as with any other type of sale, the visitor must buy something in order for you to get paid from these types of CPA offers.
Joining A Cost-Per-Action Network
Before you can begin advertising CPA offers, you need to join a network. Some popular ones include Neverblue, MaxBounty, ClickBooth and that’s just to name a few.
When considering networks, you will want to look at a set of factors, including:
- The Offers: What sorts of products and services will you be promoting? Are the offers primarily lead based or sale based?
- Payouts: Are they the highest payout for that particular offer? Most importantly, what sorts of payout methods does the network offer? Also important is how often the network makes payments to its affiliates.
- Response Time and Professionalism: Did the network respond to your application right away or did you have to wait weeks for an answer? What about your emails? If the network won’t respond to you when you have a simple question, how is their response time going to be when they owe you money?
You will have to apply to the network in question. Make sure you fill out your application in its entirety and prepare yourself for a phone call interview, which is becoming more common these days. The network wants to know that you are serious about promoting their cost-per-action offers. Give them what they want, put your best foot forward and you’ll soon be part of a great network with plenty of terrific CPA offers.
Meet Your Affiliate Manager
When you join a network, you will be assigned an affiliate manager. Really get to know your affiliate manager and get on his or her good side. This might help you earn higher payouts, faster payments, you might get invites to exclusive offers or even suggestions on how to improve your current cost-per-action campaigns.
Once you have chosen the offers you want to promote, you will want to put some top expert tips into action to make sure you have the right ones. The following tips will help you choose the lucrative offers from those that will only waste your time and possibly your advertising budget.
- Would You Sign-Up/Buy?: Before you choose an offer, put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Would you become a lead for this particular company? Would you buy whatever the company is selling? If the answer is no, then you should move on and choose another offer.
- Basic Is Best: The highest converting offers are the ones that offer the least complexity. These include forms that ask for only a zip code or only an email address. The longer the submit form and the more complex the action, the harder your job is going to be when trying to get your visitors to convert.
- Hungry Niche: Is the offer something that your visitors are chomping at the bit for or is it the same basic offer found everywhere else? If you can be fortunate enough to find a great offer that is unique to that network and that your audience is dying to obtain, the higher your conversions and the more money you’re likely to make.
Promoting Your Offers
Once you have chosen your CPA offers, your next step is to promote those offers. The great thing about cost-per-action offers is that you can promote them using most every other form of Internet marketing. If you have a link, you can send that link to your email marketing subscribers, you can post it to Facebook to share with your friends and followers and you can post that link on your website to entice visitors to take action, buy or whatever else you’re trying to get them to do.
The rules of marketing your CPA offers are the same as all other forms of online marketing. Make sure your audience knows what they’re getting when they click on your links or offers, make sure your audience is hungry for whatever you’re offering and make sure your marketing materials are top-notch so that there is no question as to your relevance and authority.
If you choose your offers wisely and you create marketing materials that always speak to your prospects and customers and you consistently give them what they ask for , you’ll own every one of your cost-per-action campaigns and you’ll see just how lucrative this form of marketing can be.