How To Make Money Online With CPA Networks Part-4

Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 17:10

This is part 4 of my previous posts about ,how to make money with CPA networks part 1, part 2, part 3, i don’t know how long this post will be i have so much on my mind,and i think that this “course” will extend to part 10 ,so bare with me..

Cons

As the previous posts about CPA Networks illustrates, the negatives are probably a matter of whether you are a publisher or an advertiser. As an advertiser, you would find strict fraud prevention rules a very big plus, but that same action can mean that as a publisher, you are going to be policed a little more than usual. And, as is the case in CPA networks, the networks themselves take a keen interest in their members to make sure they are not only marketers that are playing by the rules, but also that they are good Internet marketers that are providing results to their advertiser. So, keep in mind that as we go through this list of negatives that it all depends on whether you want to be an advertiser or a publisher and how you use the networks as to whether a feature ends up being a positive or a negative feature for you.

Hard To Be Accepted Into Networks

Since the CPA networks themselves are policing their members, they tend to be a lot more stringent when it comes to registration requirements. You can’t just put up a website yesterday and then sign up via a form and be instantly accepted, unlike other types of program. You can expect to go through a very stringent process that is put in place to weed out Internet marketers that aren’t going to provide the benefit that their advertisers want or need, i will write some tips here or in next posts,on“How To Apply To Selective CPA Networks.” You have to expect to put your best foot forward in order to get accepted as they will check you out and make sure you are who you say you are.

Some CPA Networks Aren’t Worth Joining

You are going to have to do a bit of research when picking a CPA network,since there are so many of them out there. You want to be sure you are dealing with one that also polices the advertisers who join and make sure that payouts are done in accordance with the terms they signed up for. Otherwise, you can get into a situation where the opposite of click fraud occurs: the advertisers do not pay for actions performed on their site or pay less than what they promised. So, you want to be sure that when you choose a CPA network that it has a good reputation for being legitimate. One of the ways to check this out is to pick some that offer payout minimums that are low and then watch your account and traffic that you send.

Most people estimate a 1% to 2% conversion rate for click traffic, so CPA should fall at least within this minimum. If you know how much traffic you are generating, and know what the CPA payout is, you should be able to somewhat estimate how much you can make. If you find you are not being paid or are not converting quickly enough, it could be the offers on the CPA advertisers’ site are not effective, your traffic didn’t convert or wasn’t counted, or the payout was fudged.Either way, you want to be sure you are in a partnership with someone that benefits you as well as them, in order to continue making money online. We will discuss some other things to pay attention also.

How You Can Make Money On Them

There are a couple of ways to make money on CPA networks. You can make money being a publisher or you can make money by advertising your websites on a CPA network. Making money on a CPA network as a publisher is a pay-per-lead model that pays you for the lead when a visitor completes some action. Making money as an advertiser would require you to convert those leads to sales. But, there’s still another way you can make money with CPA networks, and that’s to set one of your own up! We’ll discuss the third option later, for now, we’re going to concentrate on how to make money using someone else’s CPA network, either as a publisher or as an advertiser.

Find A Profitable Niche

Some things apply to both advertisers and publishers. For instance, finding a profitable niche is one such issue. You do want to create ads that are going to attract publishers, as an advertiser, and those are going to be in niches that can be exploited for the maximum traffic, as that is how publishers will eventually make more leads. In addition, you don’t want to waste valuable time creating a campaign that is hard to sell to both publishers and visitors alike. As a previous publisher, maybe with Google AdSense, you’ll have some experience with picking valuable niches and affiliate offers that can create income within specific niches that resonate with your own websites. In fact, finding those niches can be done the same way, by searching out relevant keywords and the level of interest online in various categories.

You can look up top searches on popular social news sites like Digg.com to see what people are talking about or review popular, top, blogs in a category of choice on Technorati.com. As an advertiser, you’ll want to pay close attention on how well your products and service offers are converting leads to customers. If you pick a profitable niche and still find that your sales aren’t converting, then it’s probably due to poor landing pages or sales offers. You may get loads of traffic from your CPA affiliates and they may end up in your sales funnel with a CPA offer, but if no sale is associated, then it becomes an expense that doesn’t provide a return on your investment. Tracking the profitability of a niche is very important for the advertiser. If they can’t pinpoint niches that are going to attract sufficient publishers or yield a pretty good conversion from lead to customer, it’s going to eat up the advertising budget very quickly.

So, pay attention to which offers succeed, which have a low CPA affiliate sign up and keep tweaking until you get it right.There are many ebooks written on how to find a profitable niche, and it is truly an art. So, if you don’t know much about this, it’s time to buckle down and find out more about it. This is going to determine how much success you have from the start and in the long term too.

Get The Traffic Flowing!

Getting the traffic flowing is going to be the #1 priority for the publishers. Without attracting enough traffic, they will never be able to get enough people to create actions that increase their bottom line. And, since the advertisers are going to be most responsible for converting that traffic to sales (unless they are paying for the action of a sale), then that leaves making sure the traffic actually gets to the CPA network partners site where they can perform the action that is going to mean a payment to the publisher. And, how does one attract traffic to these offers if your own publishing websites don’t actually have much traffic to begin with? Well, that’s the beauty of CPA networks. You don’t actually have to bring traffic to your own website first and then get them to click on an ad there to take them to the CPA partner’s site.

You can do that, but you can also go directly from the major portals where all the traffic originates. It can be harvested from a variety of different places, from bulletin boards, newsgroups, answer forums, social networking sites, social news sites, press releases, your website, blogs, article marketing, and more. There really is much more opportunity to get traffic to the CPA network offer directly without having to attract them with content to your site first. Just be careful that whatever third party forum or website that you are on that you aren’t violating the Terms Of Service (TOS) agreement. This can happen if they specifically request that you do not link to a commercial solicitation in a URL. In that case, they may or may not allow a bridge page.

That’s a page on your own websites to take them further into your sales funnel and that has the affiliate offer link somewhere within it. Depending on which third party website you visit, they may or may not be diligent about checking whether you comply with the TOS. And, if you have various email addresses and user accounts, if one gets shut down, you can always try with another one. Many marketers do cross-linking of their mass article marketing, blog commenting, websites, and affiliate offers. This can serve up a rich traffic environment and exposes your visitors to more and more of your offers. So, even if they don’t necessarily click on the link for a specific offer you had in mind for one of your comments on a third party site, they might eventually get there through various cross links or even pick a different offer all together. After all, it doesn’t matter what offers they click on, it only matters that they produce some action so that you get paid.

The All important Landing Pages

If you are not concentrating on creating bridge pages or sending traffic from your particular websites, as a publisher, to the CPA advertisers’ site, then you won’t be planning or designing all that many landing pages. If you are the advertiser, the burden falls more on your side in CPA network models, to create a landing page for traffic sent to you that will convert people from visitors to contacts or sales. This can start from the moment you create ads for the publishers to put on their own website, to the final landing page, which can also contain more of those ads or a particular ad offer. Either way, you are going to use your Google keyword research to find out which niche and keywords are going to attract attention and then you are going to create attention-grabbing headlines or titles so that people will want to read the rest of your ad.

Pay-Per-Lead

If you’ve decided that you want publishers to create contacts for you at the start of your sales funnel, you will want to concentrate on ads that compel people to participate and cooperate with you in your promotions. These promotions can be contests, polls, quizzes, or online raffles that offer a chance to win some prize in exchange for email contact information. These types of offers use keywords, and some incentive, to get people to sign up.

Create An Incentive

The incentives are usually prizes or discounts for a product or service. At times, you can try to use some sort of competitive strategy as in the ads on Facebook that try to create an incentive to participate with a poll by withholding results, unless participation is completed, or hints that others in your particular social group have completed the test and you can find out how they did and compare yourself against them. An example of this is also done with celebrities and an IQ quiz, where you see the ads suggest that some well known celebrity’s IQ score is such and such, and can you do better? Many times people who won’t give out their email address or participate for a prize or a discount, will be intrigued to do it to see how well they compare to other people. If you do run a contest, be sure that you are doing it in accordance with local, state, and Federal laws. Some raffles can be illegal, as well as some contests. So, before you advertise a $50,000 scholarship giveaway, be sure that you are abiding by the legal details too.

Explain The Benefits

Your landing page is a modified sales page, or if the action is a sale, then it would be a genuine sales page. Either way, you want to give the visitor information on the benefits of performing the action that you want. Just like you would have to sell a product or service based on its benefit to your demographics, you’ll have to sell the action too.

Know Your Demographics

This is even more important in CPA networks than other types of affiliate offers. That’s because some contests and offers won’t be legal in some states and will be in others. You may be able to offer a prize, but that prize can’t be shipped out of the continental United States. These are things that you have to explain and also limit. You can find the demographics of your likely visitors by checking out Quantacast.com for the landing pages of competitor offers. The same people that visit them will visit you, most likely.

Ask For The Action

So many marketers make the classic mistake of not asking for the sale! Well, in pay-per-lead models you have to ask for the action too! Don’t think that once a visitor reads the benefits they’ll take it upon themselves to do what you want them to do. Gently guide them to what you want them to do, whether it is click on a button, select a choice from a list in a poll, or enter an email address in a form.

Pay-Per-Sale

Maybe, you’ve decided as an advertiser or as a publisher to focus on the cost per action that demands a sale for a payout. These are harder to close, but also worth more in commission and as a bottom line hard addition to the advertiser. Obviously, you can expect the CPA network advertising partner to have convincing ads in various formats and landing pages to tempt the visitors to buy their products and services. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t help boost the potential of this action by offering reviews and your own benefits list to the potential visitor. If people are being guided from your website, in particular, and then to the affiliate landing page, you have an excellent opportunity to add your two cent’s worth. This can take the form of an endorsement, really good product placement, or an incentive of your own. Don’t think that just because the affiliate advertiser is offering a discount, that you can’t offer something too.

Bundle Your Offers

Bundling, in this economic recession, will be very popular and is a great way to create incentives for people to buy. If you can find a way to create a landing page where you offer some of your own products and services, at a discount or free, if they buy one of your CPA network offers (which you don’t have to explain too much), then you will have a way to create a win-win for the customer and you. You get to bundle some of your products, hopefully nothing with too much overhead or shipping costs, and expose this client to your products while creating a revenue stream from your CPA network.

Damn..long post in next part i will write about how to set up your own cpa network,it will be short because this is also way over my head..so i will take it slowly.