CPA Marketing

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This is a introduction guide to CPA marketing. CPA, in my opinion, is the evolved form of traditional affiliate marketing such as ClickBank.

*** Note *** This is a very detailed introduction to CPA marketing. If you really want to get into CPA marketing (which I think it's the biggest game on the Internet), I strongly suggest you to spend some time and go through this guide.

What You'll Learn In This Lesson:

• What Are CPA Networks?
• What to Look For in a CPA Network?
• How to Join a CPA Network?
• Landing Pages
• Demographics Marketing

CPA Marketing Terms That You Should Know:

• CPA, Cost Per Action - The amount of money you spend in order to get an "action" on a website. An example of an action can be having the visitor to fill up a form.
• EPA, Earnings Per Action - The amount of money you make per action on a website.
• EPC, Earnings Per Click - The average amount of money you earn per each click on a website.
• CPC, Cost Per Click - The average amount of money you pay to get a click on a website.
• RPC, Revenue Per Click - RPC is simply the difference between EPC and CPC: The amount of money you earned minus the amount of money you paid.
• PPC, Pay Per Click - This is an advertising method such as Google Adwords. You pay every time one clicks on your advertising links.
• PPL, Pay Per Lead - The amount of money you get paid per lead. A lead can be having one to fill up a form with name and email.
• PPS, Pay Per Sale - The amount of money you get paid per sale. An classic example of this would be ClickBank.
• AM, Affiliate Manager - In every CPA network, you will be assigned to an affiliate manager. When you join a CPA network you become an affiliate of the network. The affiliate managers are there to help you earn more by promoting their offers. They get paid on commission basis, and their share is often calculated by a certain percentage of the amount of money the affiliates make.
• LP, Landing Page - A website that leads to the offer page.
• CTR, Click Through Rate - The CTR of a link or a banner is calculated based on the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (page views)
• CR, Conversion Rate - The CR of an offer page is calculated based on the number of sales divided by the number of unique visits to the offer page.
• RPM, Revenue Per 1000 Unique Visitors - The RPM of a website is the average amount of money you make per 1000 unique visitors.

An example

You joined an affiliate network and were promoting an offer that pays you $38.00 per action. You' built up an offer landing page and bought a banner spot that costs you $1000 a month.

• Over the past month you have received 10,000 unique clicks to your landing page, the advertising website gets about 1,000,000 page views a month and your banner is displayed on every page.
• Of those 10,000 clicks to your landing page, 5,000 clicked to your offer page
• You've made 100 sales resulting in $3,800 payout.

Therefore...

• Your EPA (Earning Per Action) is $38
• Your CPC (Cost Per Click) is $0.10
• Your EPC (Earning Per Click) is $0.38
• Your CTR of your banner posted externally is 1%
• Your CTR of your banner on your landing page linking to the offer page is 50%
• The offer page CR is 2%
• The overall CR is 1%
• Your RPM is $380

The RPM is what's important. EPA, CPC, EPC, CTR, CR...etc. are all factors of the final RPM of a website.

With the example above, you know that you will be able to make $380 per 1000 unique visitors. Therefore, as long as you can get 1000 unique visitors for less than $380, you will profit.

CPA Offers

• CPA offers are affiliate products or programs that often offer much higher payout than the traditional affiliate programs such as ClickBank.
• CPA offers are often on pay per lead basis where visitors don't have to pay, or don't have to pay much. Examples would be things such as risk free trials.

There are so many CPA networks out there but not all of them are worth joining. Things you should look for:

• Does the offer have high payout?
• How is the offer landing page?
• Do they pay on time?

To check which CPA networks have high pay outs, a great resource is http://www.offervault.com

Introduction to Landing Pages

A landing page is often referred to as a "pre-sale" page. To keep it short, yes, landing pages are essential.
Never direct your visitors directly to the offer page!

Using landing pages is an excellent marketing strategy to raise up the interest of the offer to your visitors. What you will find is that using landing pages will dramatically improve your conversion rate.

Think about it this way, if you spend $1,000 for 10,000, you want to get the best out of the 10,000 visits you just bought. If you direct your visitors to the offer directly, the visitors only have 2 choices to make - to go with the offer, or get out.

With landing pages, you can add various components to make the offer more real and trust worthy. The more people you have into believing in what you have to offer the higher conversion rate you will get.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing page optimization is all about testing. In the end, it's all about raising up conversion rate and improving the RPM.

Here are some common factors that affects conversion rate:

Traffic source - You have to study and know what your visitors need. For example, directing traffic from a chat site to a teeth whitening landing page may not work as well as directing traffic from a health related site to a teeth whitening landing page.
Banner designs - It is definitely worth the time to test different set of banners. For example:
Landing page copy - You'll be amazed on how much difference it makes by simply changing the size of a sentence. Testing different landing page copies is crucial.

There are many many other things you can do to a landing page to improve its conversion rate. In fact, not a single strategy will work on all landing pages. Just because this landing page copy and banner do well on this site doesn't mean that they will do well on the next.

The more time you spend on testing, the more revenue you will generate over time. Don't be discourage if your tweaks fail. I fail all the time. For a particular site a change I tested dropped the RPM from $1100 down to $500. I was losing over $1000 a day because of this change.

Understand this, if you fail to test one thing, you can always REVERT back. But if you test something that makes a huge improvement, it pays off far more than what you've lost.

Demographics Marketing

In the world of Internet marketing, traffic is the most important factor in terms of how well you can monetize a website. You can get traffic from the following sources:

• Search Engines (Organic) - With proper on-page and off-page search engine optimization, you can get a website to rank high for competitive keywords. So when people search for these keywords on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, they will land on your website.
• Search Engines (Paid, Sponsored Listing) - You can also have a site shown on first page of Google by participating in search engine advertising programs such as Google Adwords.
• Emails - Using email campaigns, you can also drive a decent amount of traffic to any website.
• Buying Media (Offline and Online) - Basically any form of advertising, online or offline, can potentially bring you traffic to your website.
• Spams (Black Hat) - That's right, spamming on blogs, forums, social media bookmarking sites, social communities, article directories, link directories...etc. are all traffic generation tactics.
• Press Releases - Submitting and Distributing Press Releases can also be a good way to drive traffic to a website.
• Social Media (White Hat) - Popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace...etc, have a lot of potential in terms of bringing in traffic.

In short, getting traffic to a website relies on the ways you communicate and connect with others. There are countless ways of getting traffic to a website. As long as you can make a connection to anyone out there, online or offline, you can potentially attract visitors to you.

In the world of marketing, it is important that you market to the RIGHT people. For example, if you market to people with your eyes closed... you might be:

• Promoting expensive retirement products to teenagers who can't understand the purpose of your products and don't have the budget to pay.
• Promoting books that are written in English to people in France, who can't read in English.

If you don't pay attention to who you market to, you are missing out a lot of potential revenue.

Let's do an example.

• You have joined a CPA network and have decided to promote a Work at Home offer
• You login to your CPA network and pick an offer with high payout
• You preview the landing pages of these offers and find the root domain of the offers.
• You go to Google Ad Planner (www.google.com/adplanner) and look at the Demographics Data for Unitied States (Assuming you'll be promoting to people in the States)
• You noticed that the majority of the visitors who went to the site were Females between the age of 45-54

That data right there is crucial to your marketing campaign. If you are setting up Facebook or Myspace campaigns, you can set your campaigns to display ads only to Females between the age of 45 to 54.

Or if you are buying media (BuySellAds.com for example), you can check the demograhics data (With Google Ad Planner) of the sites you plan to advertise on and make sure the audience matches the demographics data of the offer page. This will ensure that you get the most clicks out of your advertising budget.