Cost Per Action – CPA

What is CPA Marketing?

CPA stands for Cost Per Action and it refers to a type of marketing that usually involves you generating leads for companies and in turn, those companies giving you a small payment for each lead.

It works like this:

You generate traffic from one or more sources which you then send to an offer. The offer is usually for a free trial or free gift that the customer can get by filling out a survey or similar. In most cases, the company that has created the offer requires the customer to opt in or fill out their address before they pay you for that lead. Once they’ve done that, you get your payment. Simple!

How Do I Do It?

I was introduced to CPA marketing by a friend of mine who then recommended a course by Saj P called Zero Friction Marketing. This course taught me everything I’m going to share with you here and if you can still get a copy, I’d recommend you do.

So how do you get started with CPA marketing?

Well, it happens in stages.

1. Sign up with an affiliate network
2. Find a method of driving targeted traffic (which I’ll show you in a moment)
3. Get your affiliate links
4. Drive traffic to the links

The first stage is to sign up with a CPA affiliate network. You will need to sign up as an affiliate, sometimes known as publishers (not advertisers). A publisher is someone who ‘publishes’ ads on sites or search engines using pay-per-click advertising. That’s what you’ll be doing.

There are a large number of networks around including NeverBlue, Copeac, ClickBooth, Convert2Media and Commission Junction. The one that I’m using at this stage is MaxBounty. You can sign up to MaxBounty using my link (below) which may help you get accepted quicker:

www.MaxBounty.com

Signing up with an affiliate network sounds easy but there is a way of doing it that will ensure that you have a better chance of getting accepted. You see, many of the networks have quite strict conditions for getting into them. You need to show them that you have the knowledge and the ability to drive traffic to them.

To give you an idea of the application process, I was rejected from NeverBlue, ClickBooth and C2M when I first applied. I got into MaxBounty on my first attempt, but only after I got rejected from the others and learned what they were looking for. Commission Junction (CJ) will accept you straightaway as it’s less of a CPA network and more of a traditional affiliate network where you get paid to sell actual products, rather than giveaway offers.

So, how do I drive traffic to the offers?

Well, there are several effective ways to get people viewing your offers. I’m going to cover one in some depth here, but to give you an idea, here is a list of some of the methods that I use or that I know some of my colleagues are using effectively.

• Buying links or entire channels on YouTube and then adding a link to the offer in the video description (I have four channels I currently use for this).
• Creating Facebook groups with catchy titles that are based around a solution to a problem, or are based around a product. For example you could create a group called iPhones Rock! and then link to offers for other Apple products, like a ‘Test and Keep an iPad’ offer.
• Using Facebook ads.
• Creating blogs reviewing several offers in the same niche e.g. Weight Loss and linking to the offers from there. You could also add offers to existing sites if you have them.

Whether you use one of the above methods, or the one I’m going to detail here, focus on that until you can make it profitable. Then move onto the next one. Many people make the mistake of trying several things at once and not following through with them for long enough to understand them and get results.

The way I’m currently driving traffic to offers…

I’m currently using banner advertising to get traffic to my offers. This is also known as ‘Media Buying’, as you’re buying ads on high traffic media sites like blogs. It’s the same principle as buying ads in a newspaper, but in a far more targeted way.

Again, there are a number of ways to do this but I’m using an ad broker called BuySellAds.

What this site allows you to do is to search for sites that are selling advertising space on them according to price, ad size, related keywords and number of impressions. As a quick sidenote, the number of impressions is the number of times your ad is loaded up. Every time that someone visits the page that your ad is on, your ad will be shown, which is one impression. With BuySellAds you could be getting over 5,000,000 impressions per month.

What’s cool about this is that instead of paying for each click as you would if you were using Google Adwords, you pay for the amount of time the ad is on the site. So you pay the same whether your ad gets 5 clicks or 500 clicks. If your ad is good and converts well (and is targeted to the audience of the site), then you can maximise the number of clickthroughs you get.

Once you sign up for an account with BuySellAds, you can choose to be either an advertiser or a publisher. Now, unlike the CPA networks where you’re a publisher, on BuySellAds, you’re an advertiser, because it’s you that’s advertising the product. I try not to think about all the definitions too much. It makes my brain hurt a bit.

If you click on the ‘Buy Ads’ tab at the top of the screen, you’ll be able to start searching the sites and ad placements, narrowing your search using the criteria on the left-hand side.

I’d suggest you familiarise yourself with the offers on your CPA network so that you can start to see which of the offers would fit in with the sites you have at your disposal on BuySellAds. That way, when you’re searching on BuySellAds, you can recall the niches you have offers for and target them. For example, there are several sites about Apple products, so you can use the offer I mentioned earlier from MaxBounty and promote that on the Apple-related site. You see how that works?

When you’re looking for sites (and depending on your budget) here are a few tips for finding the right kind of ads:

• Look for sites that will give you the most amount of impressions for your money (sounds obvious but worth bearing in mind).
• Look for ad placements that are not right at the top of the site or right at the bottom, but somewhere more central.
• Try and get larger square or rectangular type ads rather than actual banner-shaped ads. The dimensions you’re ideally looking for are 300 x 250. All the CPA networks will have ads that are that size and these ads have been proven to get the best clickthrough rate.

OK, so let’s say you’ve found a site that has the ad space you’re looking for. It gets a good number of impressions, say 250,000 and it’s going to cost you $100. Before you add the site to the cart, you’re going to want to check who visits the site. If the site is big in Pakistan but your CPA network only has offers for the US and UK, then you can get all the impressions and clicks you like, it ain’t going to be profitable.

There are two sites you can use for this: Alexa.com and Quantcast.com. In both cases, you simply type in the name of the site that you saw on BuySellAds and click Search and it will give you a strong idea of who uses the site. Just look under the ‘Audience’ bit of data. Let’s say it’s a site about Apple iPhones. Forty-six percent of the traffic to the site is from the US and the majority of visitors are in the 18-35 bracket. In that case, you find an offer that would suit them, such as an offer for US visitors to get a free iPad in exchange for their zip code and participation.

Incidentally, beware of sites that have mostly teenage users, purely because you’ll need to find offers that are targeted to them and that don’t require a minimum age. Many offers require you to be 18+ to participate.

If you’re happy that you have an offer to match the audience of the site, simply add the site to your cart in BuySellAds. You then need to click on ‘Add Creative’. Here’s where you upload the ad creatives from your CPA network. Simply save the correct size ad from the list of creatives in the network to your computer, then upload it to BuySellAds.

Finally and most importantly, you need to add the link that the user will be taken to when they click your ad. You’ll find this with the creatives in your CPA network. You’re looking for the code that goes with the ad, and in particular, the web address that comes after <a href=”http://www.ThisAddressHere.com”…..

Just copy the address (without any other code) and paste that into your BuySellAds cart. Save it and then check out. Job done! You’ve just done your first media buy.

You can now monitor your impressions and clicks on BuySellAds and your leads (and revenue) on your CPA network.

Hope it Helps you!

Regards,

umreviews.com