CPA marketing and other affiliate marketing have very steep learning curves, especially if you are trying to make money fast. There is one method that simplifies what you have to do and is almost copy and paste. This may sound too good to be true but it has been a proven tact of affiliate marketers for years and it is a legitimate way to make money online. This method is call Media Buys
Media Buys as a term has been around for quite a long time and originally comes from old school marketing on Television or in newspapers and magazines. This method refers to buying advertisements. As society changes its focus to the Internet and on-line everything, this process has changed as well.
Basically, media buys are buying advertising space on websites, (such as banner ads) with the price varying depending on how popular the website is, how much advertising you want to do, what times of day the ads are displayed, and so on
Payment for these campaigns usually is figured out with “CPM” (cost per thousand impressions), meaning that you are paying a fixed rate whenever a visitor sees your ad. Unlike PPC when you pay each time someone actually clicks your ad.
Back when this type of advertising was done on TV and in print, the advertisers had to design and provide their own material which naturally is quite costly. Thankfully things have changed and the vast majority of affiliate programs offer pre-made banners and other types of ads which can quickly and easily be posted into online campaigns.
As the promoter, your job is simply to cut and paste the code required for each banner. You do not have to write the code, tweak the ads or find images, etc. Everything has already been done for you.
Naturally running ad campaigns is not always simple and everyone could benefit from some mentoring and the chance to learn the tricks of the trade. There are many different programs and tutorials available to get you up and running and making money with media buys.
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If you want another simple but very effective way of marketing WITHOUT having to sell anything… one way to do that is through CPA networks.
This stands for Cost-Per-Action or Cost-Per-Acquisition.
And what that really means is that advertisers are willing to pay you top dollar simply for sending them traffic or generating leads.
Now, the leads could be a zip code, an e-mail address, their mailing address… anything. But, the important thing is that it doesn’t need to be a sale!
All you do is get targeted visitors – cheaply – and send them to an offer. You will then get paid a commission for every lead…
If you really think about it, you can be called a “traffic broker” – you buy traffic from one place for a price…
…let’s say it’s from Adwords at 30 cents per click…
And let’s say a CPA offer pays you $3.00 per lead. Not all traffic you send will convert into a lead…
Let’s say 1 out of 4 visitors fill out your CPA offer. So you pay $1.20 to make $3.00 giving you a profit of $1.80 This may seen like an insignificant amount, BUT if you find something that consistently converts like this
example, you’ve struck gold!
Now spend 100 times the amount for traffic $120, you’ll make $180 ($300-$120)…
NOW… increase advertising by ten times and you’ll profit $1800! And this is only one CPA offer!
And you can duplicate this same process with another offer… and then another… AND THEN ANOTHER!
And I didn’t even mention about the offers paying $30+ dollars per lead! CPA offers are becoming the biggest, most talked about subject right now.
Get started right now:
CPA Arbitrage
In case you got a CPA offer and this is your first time, the most common thing that has happened is that your request was declined when you tried to get approved to some Cost Per Action network.
That does not mean you sould give it up.
The following 3 tips will aid you to get Accepted with Cost Per Action Networks:
1. Do not commit the mistake of not completing the entire application. Whenever there is any section not applicable to you, just write NA (Not Applicable) there. You should know that one of the most common reasons for Cost Per Action offer applications being reject is incomplete form.
2. There is a good chance that the Cost Per Action manager has some additional queries in order to approve your application. In that case there might be a follow up call from the CPA manager. Make sure you answer the call. There are a lot of example where the individual did not reply to corresponding email or phone call and their requests was cancelled. In the situation you miss the phone call don’t forget to that you call back the Cost Per Action manager quickly.
3. It would really help if you have a blog and a professional website and blog. A professional email account is a must. Avoid making the fault of using free websites or blogs and mail accounts. You should have your own website, and you should use that email address which is supplied by the domain contributor (for example, “yourdomain.com”)
You should make sure you your website are professional designed and organized and that they offers relevant information. It is preferable that you spend some time before you decide on the topic of your website. You can always use the free resources to use as templates and themes for your site; but make sure to use article directories to direct you to the desired content. Generally if your blog manages to look common but its hollow in terms of content, it is, most probably, going to be denied.
Typically once you have request you get a phone call from the network. In case you do not get that, don´t give up or make it an ego issue; rather call the CPA network yourself.
To learn More about effective CPA marketing, I highly recommend the Cost Per Action Profit Blueprint or read my Dirty CPA Review to learn more about CPA Network Marketing ]]>
One of the most widely quoted reasons for many large global corporations who advertise online starting to turn away from PPC advertising is that click fraud is now allegedly costing them something like 20% of their total advertising budgets! In other words, one out of every five clicks on ads placed using PPC advertising methods is a fraudulent or false click.
For any business, no matter what size, this would represent a significant hole in their advertising budget, and as a consequence, many of these organizations are turning to CPA advertising as it is claimed that it is not possible to ‘cheat’ such programs.
Unfortunately, however, this is only half true. Of course, as there is nothing to be financially gained from merely clicking on an advert, then click fraud as it is currently understood will simply not work in association with CPA advertising.
Nevertheless, it is also widely acknowledged in online business circles that there are many ways that people can ‘cheat’ using the CPA advertising business model. It should also be noted, however, that this works both ways, a fact to which many experienced and knowledgeable CPA program affiliates would be more than willing to attest.
It is obvious that when any company chooses to use the CPA advertising program sales of their products or services, then it is going to be almost impossible for less scrupulous affiliates is to cheat the system. Any customers sent to the advertising web site by the affiliate will either buy or not, and if they do not buy, then the advertiser will obviously not pay the affiliate the commission.
The picture becomes considerably less clear, however, when you are looking at CPA advertisers who are paying for leads generated. In this situation, the advertiser is looking for good quality targeted potential customers who they are able to add to their mailing list, so that they can continually mail out special offers, newsletters, and so on.
In this way, they will put their company and sales messages in front of the potential customer on a regular basis, which will significantly increase their chances of generating sales at a later date when the customer is in the market for their type of product or service.
This desire to only attract high-quality targeted potential customers to their mailing list is the reason that they can be very selective about the websites that they are willing to advertise on. It does, however, also mean that anybody who signs up for their mailing list who is knowingly disinterested in the products or services that they offer or is not in a position to take advantage of them is a complete waste of money as far as the advertiser is concerned. So, signing up for an advertiser’s mailing list in these circumstances could be constituted as cheating the advertiser.
Is cheating currently happening?
The unfortunate answer to this question is a categorical ‘yes’, and this is important to you as a potential publisher or affiliate for two reasons. Firstly, the more that advertiser’s feels that they have been cheated, the less they will be willing to pay out for the leads that they are gathering through their site. Secondly, the more such cheating becomes evident, the less flexible and accommodating the advertisers will become, and, as they are forced to spend more and more money on anti-cheating measures, payouts will once again suffer.
It is, for example, extremely likely that the bigger corporations and organizations will become less and less willing to entertain the idea of working with anything but the most prominent publishers and affiliates, those who have long established track records.
However, cheating does exist.
For example, it is not uncommon for less honest or scrupulous affiliates to pay people to signup with higher paying CPA programs, purely to generate the commission.
If, for example, a CPA advertiser is paying the affiliate $15 per lead, it clearly makes financial sense for the affiliate to pay hard-up friends or relatives $5 to sign up with that particular program. In this case, both the affiliate and their friend does very nicely from the arrangement, and the only loser is the CPA advertiser who has just paid $15 for what is effectively a totally worthless lead.
On the other side of the fence, however, many more experienced and knowledgeable affiliates are convinced that the CPA advertisers themselves counter this to a certain extent by indulging in their own form of cheating. This is possible because to a large extent, an affiliate is relying upon the honesty of the CPA advertiser to report how many leads they actually receive from the promotional efforts of that individual.
And, in most cases, there is no way of independently checking the numbers that any CPA advertiser produces. So it is widely suspected that many advertisers only report 80% of the leads that they actually receive to their affiliates, meaning that those affiliates remain permanently unpaid for 20% of the work that they have done.
As highlighted above, this element of ‘cheating and contra-cheating’ within the CPA advertising industry is something that will ultimately directly affect you if you choose to use advertising of this type on your website or blog. In this scenario, it is inevitable that advertisers will have to bear increased costs, and these costs will gradually filter down to affiliates in the form of either lower payouts or stricter payment criteria being enforced.
It is not, therefore, in your best interests to be tempted into trying to cheat the system yourself. Whilst this may make money for you in the very short term, over the longer term it will significantly reduce the earnings potential of any advertising that you carry, and this will inevitably threaten the long-term survival of your business. Attempting to cheat the CPA advertising system represents a classic case of ‘short term gain but long term pain!’
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Whilst I have already suggested that affiliate marketing is effectively CPA by another name, it does not necessarily follow that CPA advertising and affiliate marketing are exactly the same, even though under both kinds of arrangement, the people at ‘the sharp end’, those who are doing the actual selling (for example, website or blog publishers) are often referred to as affiliates.
Nevertheless, there are some crucial differences between affiliate programs and CPA advertising networks.
Firstly, affiliate marketing programs are always focused on selling a product or service, and the affiliate for such a program almost never receives any reward if no sale is made. Under a CPA based advertising arrangement, however, it is possible that the advertiser will be willing to pay for other events as well, either in addition to or instead of paying for every sale that is made.
For example, in many industries, advertisers are willing to pay for leads so that when a visitor goes to the advertiser’s site and completes an online form, the affiliate who sent the visitor earns himself a commission for generating this highly qualified targeted lead. It is also common for CPA advertising network websites to work in close partnership with their advertising clientele, whereas most sites that offer affiliate products (such as Clickbank.com) deal with ‘advertisers’ (i.e. those who create the affiliate products that they then promote and try to attract affiliates to through sites like Clickbank) in a much more distant, ‘arms length’ fashion.
CPA advertising networks are, in this way, very client focused whereas the majority of affiliate networks tend to be considerably more passive when it comes to the individual performance of their affiliates.
In addition, affiliate networks commonly ask affiliates to pay a joining fee, and they may also want to attract only affiliates who are also pre-qualified.
CPA networks, on the other hand, are generally much less demanding about who can enroll in the network and are most often free to join.
As well as tending to be very focused on individual advertisers’ performances, CPA networks are also likely to work very hard to retain their affiliated ‘sales people’, often by adopting the simple but expedient tactic of paying them extremely well and making sure that payments go out on a regular timetabled basis.
]]>Many of the leading advertising company websites will offer you several choices of advertising models that you can use on websites, blogs, and the search engine results pages that they control. These might include PPC, CPA, and also what is known as CPM advertising, where you will pay per 1000 exposures of your advert, irrespective of any actions that site visitors who see the ads might take.
However, assuming that you choose the CPA option, then it is most likely that your advert will be shown until a pre-specified number of the actions that you require have been recorded. For example, if you set up your campaign to generate 100 sales, then your adverts will stop showing once that target is reached.
Again, as an advertiser, there are quite a few other things that you can use CPA advertising for as well. For example, you can:
• Use CPA adverts to test the effectiveness of your ads before launching a major campaign. After a CPA test run, you can quickly see how many sales have been generated by your campaign, and, although you will not necessarily know exactly how many times your advert has been shown, you will nevertheless be able to establish how long the ad has been running. From this, it will be fairly easy to calculate approximately how many sales you will be able to generate from a more significant campaign if you were to use the same CPA strategy.
• Effectively allocate and spend a restricted advertising budget. The very nature of the CPA model means that this particular form of advertising is very effective in budgetary terms. If you’re working on a limited budget, you will know from the outset that the only time you will pay for your adverts is when a site visitor takes the action that you specifically require of them.
• Boost sales performance. If you have been advertising using other methods, and enjoying little success, then CPA advertising represents an almost risk-free alternative that you might want to try in order to boost your sales figures.
• Use CPA advertising to test a new affiliate program. Since most affiliate programs are essentially CPA advertising campaigns ‘dressed up’ in a different guise, you can use CPA to test the effectiveness of any affiliate program that you plan to launch for your business without worrying about any longer term commitments to people who might choose to affiliate with you.
From a website or blog publisher’s point of view, CPA works in pretty much exactly the same way as AdSense or any other leading PPC arrangement. You would simply join an advertising website that offered a CPA option, choose the type of adverts that you want to show on your site, and finally copy a few lines of code from the site and paste them onto your web pages where you want the advertising to appear. You should then start seeing targeted advertising appear on your site almost immediately, and all you need do is drive as many visitors to your own web pages as possible, in the hope that they will see the ads and click through on them.
Now, if you are using AdSense or another PPC advertising program, then this would be the point at which you would have generated a payment to be added to your account. Using CPA, however, the visitor that you have just sent to the advertiser’s website still has one more step to take before you can expect to get paid.
This demonstrates what is widely perceived as the main disadvantage of using CPA advertising. However, it should be noted that CPA programs will generally pay you a great deal more than you could ever hope to earn for one click using a PPC program, and this vastly increased payout per success does go quite some way to offsetting what many perceive to be the disadvantages of using CPA advertising.
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It is common knowlege that PPC advertising can be extremely expensive for an online advertiser to use. There is, therefore, a significant risk for any advertiser considering using the PPC advertising model for promoting their business or products online. And, in contrast to the PPC advertising business model, which is predicated on driving high volumes of visitor traffic to an advertiser’s website, the still emerging CPA advertising business model operates on the basis that any website visitor must perform a required action before the website or blog publisher will get paid. Thus, the first factor that should be noted about CPA advertising is that the risk is 100% borne by the website or blog publisher, and that there is accordingly no risk for the advertiser.
With the more common PPC advertising format, the advertiser will pay every time his ad is opened and viewed, but using CPA advertising means that it does not matter how many people click through from an advert to a website and then choose not to buy.If a website visitor does not undertake the task that the advertiser has chosen to pay for, then the website owner who drove that visitor to the advertiser site does not get paid, pure and simple.
For The Advertiser
The primary benefit for an advertiser using CPA should therefore be immediately obvious. That is, they get what they pay for.
It is therefore equally obvious why an advertiser is likely to prefer to use CPA advertising as opposed to PPC programs like AdSense and AdWords. By using CPA, he passes the entire risk to the website owner, whilst at the same time making it a far simpler matter to quantify the effectiveness of his advertising efforts by reference to easily identifiable ROI figures.
In the most common CPA scenario, the advertiser will pay a revenue share percentage to the blog or website publisher when he or she drives a visitor to the advertiser website who then, in turn, performs the task that is required of them. And, although the task that the advertiser requires a site visitor to perform is entirely up to them, the most common situation is where the advertiser will pay the website or blog publisher for any sales or 7 customer leads that are generated for the advertiser’s business through the publisher site or blog.
For The Publisher
For a website or blog publisher, however, CPA is not as attractive as using AdSense, for example. And, once again, the reasons for this should be relatively obvious. Firstly, it should be evident that the financial risk that is being carried by the publisher is considerably higher when he chooses to use CPA advertising as opposed to using PPC. If a CPA advertising campaign (over which he has little or no control, remember) is a failure, and therefore does not generate any response from the visitors that are sent to the advertiser’s website, he or she will receive no payment, irrespective of how much time and effort they might have put into promoting their site in an effort to generate visitors for an advertiser.
It can also be difficult for a publisher to effectively track the number of actions that their efforts on behalf of the advertising have actually generated, and they may be reliant on the advertiser’s own figures when they try to calculate how successful they have been. For these reasons, it is not difficult to see why website and blog publishers have been relatively slow to encompass the CPA advertising model with the same enthusiasm with which they adopted AdSense, for example. The bottom line, of course, for any blogger or website owner publishing any form of third-party advertising is how much money they make from it, and, so far at least, the results from CPA advertising do seem to lag a little behind those from the leading PPC programs.
Furthermore, it is also true that placing any form of third-party advertising on your website or blog that needs a site visitor to take any form of action carries the risk that the ad itself is not well designed or written, and that visitors do not therefore do what both you and the advertiser want them to do. This is true of either PPC or CPA advertising, and for this reason some publishers will be perfectly happy to try out CPA advertising as a viable alternative to PPC. CPA is still a relatively undeveloped online advertising model, and it is probably fair to suggest that Google will have a large part to play in how the business model and therefore CPA markets develop.
Without any doubt, given the size of their advertising network, when Google eventually launch their own CPA advertising model, then the chances are that the market will change almost overnight.It is also worth noting that eBay, who are primarily in the business of contacting people and bringing them together, are now also actively promoting their own affiliate program which is based on the CPA model.To have such a well-known brand name starting to utilize CPA advertising to promote the services of one of the world’s top ten websites can obviously do little to harm the popularity that CPA offers as a way of monetizing websites and blogs.
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I will not say that everybody who reads this article does know precisely what CPA is all about and so I’ll start with a quick overview that highlights exactly what CPA marketing is, and how it can make you money.
CPA (cost per action) is also called PPA (pay per action) and is a web based marketing opportunity that pays you based on a specific structure or model. For instance, if you took part in CPA offers, you would be paid each time a prospect completed a specific action, such as registering on a website, completing a form, signing up for an offer, or maybe just visiting a specific site.
The actions that a visitor has to take often range between a one time e-mail registration to lengthier form processing including three, four page surveys, application forms as well as downloading screen savers, demos, scripts and software.
While CPA offers vary and the requirements associated with beingcommissioned for an ‘action’, there are a surplus of extremely well paying Cost-Per-Action offers and programs that you can become involved in.
CPA marketing is, in fact, one of the easiest ways to make money on the internet with tiny effort compared with many of the traditional marketing campaigns and opportunities.
A lot of CPA Companies pay commissions anywhere from $.25 right up to $4.00 for a single e-mail opt-in form, with other CPA offers paying out as much as $150.00 for a more in-depth process or a more in depth obligation where your visitor may need to confirm their email address, accept a free trial offer and on occasion, your commission will only be paid weeks later once your visitor has completed the actions.
As an example, an advertising company pays the CPA program that you are a part of $10 for every lead generated as a consequence of their members process. In turn, the CPA company pays a commission of 70% from the $10, earning $3 for connecting you with the advertisers.
In order to start getting paid with CPA offers, you will need to enroll into a handful of CPA based programs. There are networks available on the internet that host an enormous variety of CPA offers, which makes it possible to join one web site and being given the chance to take part in multiple opportunities from several different companies.
CPA programs work as the middleman, connecting publishers and advertisers together, and typically coordinates the placement of opportunities from participating publishers and firms with affiliate marketers, in return for a little fee or proportion of the offer itself.
After you was accepted from a CPA program, you’ll receive an unique affiliate link, just as you would if you did join an affiliate program.
This link identifies you as an affiliate and tracks all your activity, primarily your sales and in exchange, serves you with conversion rates and other information that do help you determine how well your traffic generations are doing.
The CPA program itself takes care of all the tracking, where your account details are being stored. One of the best things about working with a CPA network is that you can promote several CPA offers, covering a wide variety of niche markets and get one commissioncheck for all of your earnings combined.
Furthermore, most CPA networks will delegate an affiliate agent to help you in getting started as well as answer any questions you may have during your initial training period.
Every CPA network offers several opportunities, the most popular programs offering up to 1,500 different offers in their database at any given time.
Furthermore, nearly all of the CPA networks supply you with many of the promotional media you need, including email campaign, banners, graphic ads, ad copy and text ads.
To learn more about CPA marketing visit this CPA Arbitrage Review and discover how you can start making money online by promoting CPA offers.
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