Making Money With CPA Affiliate Opportunities

In this module I want to go back to the bingo campaign example and summarize some important factors to consider and how to focus on a target audience.

Evaluating your target audience

You need to understand your market if you wish to do well with affiliate marketing. By knowing what types of campaigns and promotional offers your website visitors would be interested in, you are able to effectively set up targeted campaigns that will convert.

Are your visitors interested in free magazine subscriptions? If so, what genre would they primarily be interested in?

Survey your website visitors, ask them what they are interested in and use that information to select appropriate campaigns.

There are some campaigns like the bingo example that are very obvious as to who the target market is. For example, most people who play bingo are 35 years or older females, who like games. How do I know this? Well I could guess or I could use a free service like http://www.quantcast.com or the Google ad planner tool which will tell me all about which demographics like certain topics, or what other sites these people like to visit.

In fact we have a couple really great guest posts from Chad Hamzeh himself who talks all about how to find out your target, and how to get targeted traffic. Here is the post: Mass Marketing CPA Offers With Low Budget Media Buys.

So once you know your target you can now buy traffic from places your target hangs out online. It’s really that simple – there is no need for a “loophole” when something is so simple

Another trick is to buy targeted ads from Facebook. Facebook allows you to target people who like certain things and your ad will only display in front of people who like that certain thing.

Be Flexible

Don’t just choose one CPA campaign and stick to it, be open to exploring all of the many opportunities available. Spend time experimenting with different lead generation tactics, create squeeze pages, and subscribe to multiple CPA opportunities so that you can thoroughly evaluate what campaigns will work best for your website.

Read The Rules

Don’t venture into CPA without first learning the strategies that have worked for seasoned marketers, and save yourself time and money by structuring a step-by-step system that will help you maximize your traffic and revenue.

Make sure that you understand the guidelines, rules and any restrictions that may be in place. Often times, CPA companies require specific information in order for you to be credited with a lead or sale. Your affiliate manager can actually help you, and will sometimes even tell the exact traffic channels you should use to make the offers convert. In addition, there are specific methods of advertising that may be considered misleading, going against the terms of service of most of the established CPA companies, so always read over the guidelines and follow them and ask your manager if you are ok with doing certain things.

Choosing The Best CPA Offers

When you first get started with CPA, you will quickly notice how certain opportunities generate better results than others. It’s important to always stay on top of the campaigns that you are involved in, so that you are generating the highest conversions for the time and money you put into your marketing efforts.

While CPA can run on auto pilot once you have your campaign up and running, you will have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty when first starting out. Create a system where you are able to review your progress each day, weeding out ineffective campaigns and tweaking campaigns that are working well.

I use Tracking202 as my main tracking system and it is completely free. I highly recommend you too get a tracking system that allows you to login and track performance. You will likely find that 90% of the campaigns you try will need some major changes in order to make them profitable. Sometimes you will get lucky and start one right in the profit zone. It helps to look at what others are doing and copy or mimic their campaigns if they have been running for any decent amount of time. For example, if you keep seeing the same ad in the same place for a few weeks then it is likely a profitable campaign.

When choosing CPA offers that appeal to you, do some online research to determine if other marketers have been successful with these offers as well as the methods that they are using to promote these campaigns successfully.

When evaluating a CPA offer, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1) Less Action Equals More Money

Obviously the less that a visitor or subscriber has to do, the better. If you are being paid for every email address entered in an online form, you will make more money than campaigns that require a user to complete a series of steps.

When you are first starting out with CPA, choose simple campaigns, so that you can get a feel for how your audience responds to your offers, as well as how CPA marketing works.

2) Free Offers

People love receiving free gifts, trial offers, subscriptions and so on, and these are quite often some of the easiest CPA opportunities available that will generate quick cash for very little work. Take the bingo offer for example. This is very easy to convince someone to sign up especially if they are getting $20 free. This is an “incentive type” of offer and they work extremely well. After all, you are giving people something for free, eliminating any pre-selling.

Important Factors to Consider

Research your target traffic. Know how to dig down into your market and know exactly how to determine what campaigns are likely to yield instant results. Also understand what your target market likes and think about how you can present your angle to them. Sometimes doing the obvious sell does not work, but you present the offer in a different way then it might work.

Evaluate niche markets, methods of generating targeted traffic and blend CPA opportunities with specific groups of people, so that you are offering them exactly what they are looking for.

Evaluate your websites and marketing campaigns from their perspective. Does it sound good? Believable?

Ask yourself from the perspective of a consumer. Would you sign up for your own offer? Would you be enticed to provide your email address in exchange for what you are offering?

Avoid hype or gimmicks and let people know exactly what to expect and what they are required to do in order to receive what they are being offered.

Keep it Simple

Set up your campaigns so they are comprehensive and easy. You want your visitors to go through the process quickly and error free. Whenever you set up a poll, a list or an opt-in form, be sure to go through the steps yourself to ensure that there are no problems, broken links, images or pages.

Participate in campaigns with existing promotional material that has been tested and proven to convert. These will save you a lot of time and effort, because the bulk of the work has already been done for you. Evaluate it once again, from a consumer’s perspective. Is it attractive? Clear? Comprehensive?

Go for something that is not commonly promoted.

Think of how the competition will be and balance out the risk of getting fewer conversions by participating in campaigns that are less promoted, especially when starting out. Timing is of the essence for CPA marketing like any other business.

It will also be good to be among the first to market a new offer.

Promoting CPA Offers

Once you have chosen the CPA offers that you want to market, commit to marketing it and following through with your strategy, even if the results are slow yielding at first.

If you have a website, make good use of it to push by integrating CPA offers into your existing pages.

Make sure that the CPA offer blends well with the purpose of your website. Do not make the mistake of featuring an off targeted advertisement, or not properly evaluating your market. This is especially true if you are building a list and trying to promote to your list. Do not send too many off topic offers to your list.

Lead generating or squeeze pages are excellent channels for CPA marketing especially if you are looking to build a long term online business. Free ebooks, reviews, and other free digital goods can be given away to help build the confidence of your target market and encouraging them to follow through with various CPA offers, and it also allows you to build a list.

Once you become more comfortable with the various aspects of CPA marketing, you will be more confident in exploring the different offers and discovering new ways that will help you maximize your income, so take it one step at a time.

Conclusion

I highly encourage you to start putting this information into action. there is basically 3 things to do:

1. Build an Affiliate Website

2. Send Traffic To This Site

3. Collect Your Commission Checks

The only way to know the details of REALLY what works is to start doing it and trying it for yourself!

You have received all the information you need to start making massive money with CPA, and if you still don’t know what to do, then there are still some great resources to check out that I have offered free on the CPA Training Vault Website, and also there is a ton of information on how to get traffic by checking out our post on the Traffic Blackbook review including a ton of great video, e-books, and CPA marketing methods, and some more in depth reports and case studies, & methods.

I also would highly encourage you to start building your own landing pages and testing offers. Once you think you have designed a great landing page that converts you simply need to increase traffic to your page. The Traffic Blackbook is a great place to learn about generating massive traffic numbers to your offers and landing pages.

FAQ

“When choosing CPA offers that appeal to you, do some online research to determine if other marketers have been successful with these offers as well as the methods that they are using to promote these campaigns successfully.”

I would like specifics on how to do this.

I understand how to research a targeted market via Quantcast, Ad Planner, etc., but where is the data about fully researching one’s competition?

There are tools like WhatRunsWhere.com and other spy tools like Adbeat.com, or Spyfu. But really I have had my best luck just when I am surfing around and all of a sudden I see an ad. Then you need to “reverse engineer” it. That means you go through the funnel and see what improvements you can make to make this better and then run with it.

As I am looking at offers on the CPA Network, when I click to see the offer, I sometimes see a page that says: “not available for your country”, a blank page, or another page in Thai, which is the country I am located in.

Is there a way to see the offers as someone in the US would?

Some CPA networks block your access to offers that you are unable to promote. I would suggest that you contact your AM (Affiliate Manager) to get permissions set so that you can promote these offers in the US.

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