Now that you have more of an understanding about CPA Affiliate marketing and know how the Cost Per Action CPA affiliate networks actually work: you sign up with a CPA network and get some ad campaigns from their advertising clients to promote on your own website.
As visitors fill out forms, leave email addresses, or even buy the client’s product or service through your links, you get some sort of payment for each lead you generate.
The vendor (client) pays the network a predetermined fee per lead, and both you as the CPA Affiliate and the network receive a percentage of that payment. By this means, the client doesn’t waste a lot of money on a nebulous sales campaign, but pays for advertising that very explicitly works.
This is the general procedure when one is part of a CPA affiliate network, and generally it works quite well. But one of the keys, in order for you to succeed as an affiliate marketer, is to be sure you sign up with the right network from the start. You need to do some research into the available networks, and be sure before joining one of them that the one you’re considering is reputable and both treats and pays its people well.
The Right CPA Network Can Make All The Difference To The CPA Affiliate
This will require considerable amount of advance work on your part, you can use the free Google keyword tool or if you have it a keyword tool such as Keyword Elite 2.0 since your initial search engine results will undoubtedly bring up several pages of networks promoting themselves.
That’s obviously not a good way to discover any problems they might have, so you’ll have to refine your search terms to find objective reviews.
One thing you also need to consider, even when you’ve determined that several networks are equally reputable and reliable, is what types of ad campaigns they run, for what types of products or services. This is important because the promotions are going to appear on your own website, and you’d like the two to be at least loosely matched.
If your site deals mostly with baby-related products, you probably will be less likely to get good results from a CPA marketing campaign that’s all about online war games or solar panels.
Only Run CPA Affiliate Campaigns That Are Relevant To Your Niche Market
You would get much better results with your CPA affiliate marketing, both for the advertising clients and for your own bank balance, if you ran ad campaigns for things like free games or free smiley’s, and you could probably justify other things like education campaigns or perhaps even downloadable tool-bars.
You need to be able to legitimize the pairing of your website with the ads you are running there, so visitors to your site won’t roll their eyes and leave.
Try to ensure that the CPA affiliate campaigns you are selecting are for long term gains and not something that is only going to be popular for a month or so as you find that you are constantly having to research new niche markets and even creating completely new websites each time that online trend drops away.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be doing that it is just more viable to setup a site initially that can give you some long term income before chasing after the faster money in niche markets.
You’ll also need to have some idea of how the CPA network will expect you to run your CPA affiliate marketing campaigns. If the network expects you to plaster your website with affiliate program banners, ads, and links, it’s probably a bad idea to sign up with that organization.
That’s the sort of over-promotion that makes visitors to a website run screaming in the other direction. You would without doubt achieve bad results for the campaigns you are running on such a site, and undoubtedly experience failure for your efforts, as well as not being paid very much.
Make Sure You Have Access To Your CPA Network Statistics
Look into how the network handles its payments to CPA Affiliate Marketers, and what commissions you would get for each lead generated from your site. Make sure the CPA network has a way that you yourself can check your statistics, this function is invaluable to you, both to see how well your campaign is doing, but also as a check on whether you’re being paid properly and whether the actual campaign is viable.
The important thing is to find out ahead of time how you and your website would fit with the particular CPA affiliate marketing program you’re interested in. If you do as much advance research as possible, you can likely find one in which you mesh well, to the benefit of the network, the client, and or course you the CPA affiliate.
Fantastic post.
Too many newcomers are so desperate to get accepted to networks that they rush out and apply and once accepted are at a loss.
With the transitory nature of CPA the method is in the market not in the offer, glad you’ve touched on tis.
Great points on researching the network you are applying for too.
Great work overall will definitely be back to read more. 😀
Jason.
Hi Jason
Yes you are right about people rushing into things, however I don’t really believe it is their fault simply because everywhere you look online you see people claiming to make 1000’s of dollars a month and with very little work.
You need to research everything that you do online and that includes any affiliate/cpa networks you want to promote products or services for as an affiliate, after all it is pointless to promote an offer if you are never going to be paid for your efforts, and this does happen.
By doing your own research you will be well informed about what is not happening with your selected networks but you will also be more aware of how things work making less likely of being taken by some online scam.