Before I tell you what CPA Marketing is, I think it would be best to let you know what CPA stands for “Cost Per Action” or “Cost Per Acquisition”. CPA is basically used for lead generation – simple put you send a person to a site they provide their details and the affiliate merchant pays you for that lead.
CPA had also been called CPL “Cost Per Lead”, when you sign up to the CPA networks you may also come across offers that do require a sale before you get paid a commission. This is still a lead for the affiliate merchant as they can use that sale/lead to sell to the buyer again.
For Example: An affiliate merchant has an offer for a free recipe tool bar download.
If you send traffic to the merchants website and the visitor downloads and installs the tool bar then you will earn a commission.
The action a merchant requires from a person that visits their site before you earn your commission can range from them simply entering their email address to downloading software as shown in the example and even in some cases entering their credit card details.
It does not matter what information the merchant requires from the person that visits their site, when the Action is completed you earn the commission.
How much does it pay?
The payment for each lead or sale varies depending on the CPA network and what information the affiliate merchant requires.
You would normally expect between $1 -$5 per lead depending on the offer. Saying that I’ve seen offers as low as 40 cents for a lead right up to $140 for a sale. For starting off I would recommend going for offers that pay between the $1 – $5.
How Do I Do CPA marketing?
To get started with CPA marketing you have to go through 6 steps
1. Sign up with an CPA network
2. Once approved look at all the offers within the network
3. Think about how you’re going to drive targeted traffic to the offers
4. Pick the offer that allows the type of traffic you’re going to use
5. Get your affiliate’s links
6. Start driving the traffic to the links
The first step is to sign up with a CPA network as an affiliate, sometimes this is also known as a publisher. You don’t want to sign up as an advertiser. A Publisher or an affiliate is someone who publishers advertising on sites, Pay-per-click, email marketing or social media marketing. This is what you’ll be doing
There are many CPA networks to choose from here are just a few clickBooth, Convert2media, MaxBounty and NeverBlue.
Personally for people just starting out with CPA I would recommend MaxBounty, this is the network I started out with and found then very friendly and easy to deal with. The backend on MaxBounty is very easy to use.
Signing up with a CPA network sounds like an easy step but many of them have strict terms and conditions for getting your account approved. Don’t let this put you off you just need to show them that you know how you will be driving traffic to the offers and also what type of offers you are interested in.
The first CPA network I applied for was Neverblue but I was turned down, this did not faze me I just applied to another network which was MaxBounty. I completed the publishers sign up form and waited for the call. When they called me I was asked a couple of questions regarding my back ground with Inter Marketing, what sort of traffic I would be using and the offers I was interested in.
When you come to signing up for a network and going through the approval stage, be honest with them up front. If you’re new to CPA tell them the truth but let them know you’re learning Internet Marketing and provide them examples of the type of traffic you will be using. Just use EMFH site to learn about the different ways to drive traffic to the offers.
Driving traffic to you CPA Offer
Now you‘ve been accepted in to a CPA network you will be itching to get started.
There are several ways to get people to view your offer
- Creating Facebook groups targeted towards a niche for example, iphone, ipads or Imac’s then posting offers based around these products. 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.
- Creating videos and uploading them to You tube and other video sites
- Email marketing, but be very careful not to spam anyone as you could get your CPA account deleted and any earnings will not be paid.
Check out my other posts from more in depth traffic generation