Uncovering New Revenue Streams With CPA Marketing
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009Welcome back!
Uncovering New Revenue Streams With CPA Marketing
Over the past few months, we’ve talked about several online businesses you can launch. I’ve explained how 
you can make money with membership sites, create information products, and build an empire of sites for ad revenue. We haven’t explored CPA marketing.
CPA stands for “cost per action.” That can include a purchase of a product or the simple act of filling out a form. Each time a person takes the defined action, you’ll earn a commission. There are affiliates who focus exclusively on CPA offers who make in excess of $500,000 monthly. Today, I’m going to explain how you can get started in this business.
Selecting CPA Offers To Promote
There are dozens of affiliate networks (similar to Clickbank) that specialize in CPA offers. To promote their offers, you must apply and be accepted as a member of the network.
To sign up for Clickbank Click here!
Some offers pay as little as $.25 per conversion while others pay $30 and above. These commissions are paid for actions, not just purchases. A person does not have to buy anything in order for you to earn a commission. In many cases, they simply need to fill out a form.
Most networks have hundreds of CPA offers from which you can choose. Start with one that matches your own interests. That way, you’ll be able to put yourself into the mind of your audience and understand intuitively the triggers that motivate them to act.
The commission you’ll earn reflects the number of fields a person is required to fill out. For example, short forms with 4 fields or less might pay $3 while multi-page forms with 20+ fields might pay $25 or more.
Creating Your Keyword List
While there are many ways to drive traffic to CPA offers, PPC is the highest-converting approach. As with search engine optimization strategies, your keyword list is critical. A word of caution: there are many novice CPA affiliates who believe the largest keyword list wins. In fact, that’s not true. A list of 10 high-converting, high-traffic keywords matched with the right offer can generate a full-time income on autopilot. Focus on conversion potential.
Get into the mind of your prospect. For example, consider a home loan CPA offer. What would people who are interested in a home loan search for on Google? They’ll certainly search for “free home loan,” but the PPC bid prices will be high. How about “free house loan in San Diego”?
The point is to create a keyword list that is ultra-targeted to attract low-cost clicks that generate a defined action.
Launching, Testing, And Expanding Your Campaigns
The next step is to launch a PPC campaign. Start small and test ferociously, especially if you’re on a limited budget. Watch your ad positions, clicks, costs, and conversions (in this case, filling out a form). The CPA marketing business is tightly focused on an ROI that you can identify immediately.
For example, suppose you’re paying $.30 per click and you send 100 people to a home loan offer. The offer pays a $25 commission each time a visitor successfully fills out a 20-field form. Of the 100 people you send to the form, 2 fill it out. You’ll earn $50. Your PPC costs for sending 100 people to the offer at $.30 per click is $30. You’ve earned $50 on a $30 PPC spend, a fantastic ROI.
The trick is to expand. You have a keyword that converts with a high ROI. You can expand your profit by driving more traffic from the same PPC platform (i.e. Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, etc.) or launching a new campaign on an additional platform. This is how high-earning CPA marketers build their profitable campaigns.
Trust Your Own Data And Experience
In CPA marketing, you should only trust your own data and experience. I cannot overstate this. If you spend any time on internet marketing forums, you’ll invariably run across CPA affiliates who give inaccurate information. They’ll claim certain offers fail to convert or the PPC platforms will shut down campaigns that link directly to offers. Sometimes, you’ll hear specific networks don’t track clicks and conversions properly. Your data and experience should trump everything you hear from others.
There is an enormous amount of money being made through promoting CPA offers. We have only scraped the surface regarding how to do it effectively. In the future, we’ll take a much closer look.
