So you’re thinking of ways to expand your income earning opportunities? Or maybe you are new to making money on the internet!
You will find lots of money making programs and schemes so much that making the right choice becomes almost impossible.
From time memorial, people have always acted as intermediaries for financial transactions between buyers and sellers, earning commissions for every sale facilitated by the intermediaries.
Rather than this business model going extinct, we have witnessed an evolution up to this era of the internet. By this business model, I am referring to the intermediaries that make business transactions happen.
This is popularly referred to affiliate marketing in our day and age – a business model that allows publishers to promote the products of advertisers through their traffic sources and earn commissions for every completed transaction.
By transaction, I mean a sale; completed action or exposure. We will delve into details later on in this guide.
Our focus is on CPA marketing and how online marketers can best seize this opportunity to build their traffic sources and monetize the same for income.
The main topics discussed in our CPA marketing guide include:
- What is CPA Marketing and How it Works!
- Why the Choice of CPA?
- The Main Players of a CPA Network
- Strategies for CPA Marketing
- Determining Your Traffic Sources
- Conclusion
What is CPA Marketing and How it Works
CPA (Cost per Action) marketing is an online marketing model offering commissions to marketers when their audience successfully completes a task.
CPA marketing is only one of the many online marketing models available to both advertisers and marketers. Others include CPC, CPI, CPL and CPM. Each of these advertising models has its distinct features, benefits and rewards to marketers. Marketers usually opt for the options best suited for them.
Commissions paid to marketers under CPA marketing are dependent on the CPA network, particular advertiser, or required action to be completed. Marketers are at liberty to use any traffic source allowed by the CPA network or advertiser for promotions. High quality traffic usually leads to better conversion rate for marketers.
Tasks are assigned to marketers depending on particular needs of advertisers. Some common CPA tasks include signing up for an account, registering for an event, filling a survey or questionnaire, and subscribing to an email newsletter.
CPA marketing offers great opportunities for affiliate marketers both new and experienced. A good understanding of how CPA marketing works is vital for the success of marketers.
How Does CPA Marketing Work?
The CPA marketing model works mainly through a CPA Network where advertisers sign up to have their products promoted, and marketers or publishers assigned products or tasks to promote via their traffic sources.
We will elaborate on this mechanism much later when we address the main players of a CPA Network.
Why the Choice of CPA?
Advertisers have long discovered that CPA marketing is one of the most effective means of conversion rather than CPI that is focused on the target audience, or CPC for simply clicking on the advert.
CPA offers a more effective means of advertising because advertisers only pay for completed tasks.
For marketers, there are immense benefits to enjoy through CPA Networks. Here are some of the very obvious ones:
1. Best Pricing Model
CPA is the best ad model for both advertisers and marketers. For publishers, there is the benefit of best ROI on advertising spending while marketers enjoy the best pricing model especially for those who have high quality traffic. The earning potential is one of the best for marketers.
Other models
I. CPC (Cost Per Click) – Marketers earn commissions on each click of their unique affiliate links irrespective of the outcome.
II. CPI (Cost Per Impression) – Pricing model that pays commissions to affiliate marketers based on the number of impressions the ads make. The commissions are usually measured per 1,000 impressions.
An example is CPI of $7.50, meaning that the affiliate marketer earns a total of $7.50 for every 1,000 visitors that view the ads. This pricing model is also called CPM (Cost per Mile).
III. CPL (Cost per Lead) – A model that pays affiliate marketers to generate leads for advertisers.
The CPA model offers the best earning opportunities for affiliate marketers compared to the earlier mentioned models.
2. Long Term Residual income
CPA networks support affiliate commissions earned from recurring payments like subscriptions. Marketers can earn commissions for as long as possible after referring users who pay monthly subscriptions on products or services. Subscription based payments like web hosting and online courses are great offers that provide passive income to CPA affiliate marketers.
This is an excellent incentive for marketers to earn lifetime incomes for doing little or no work in the future.
3. Relatively Low Entry Barrier
Affiliate marketers are allowed the use of various traffic sources in driving promotion of advertisers’ offers. These sources could include blogs, social media platforms, email newsletters and paid ads.
As a result of this flexibility, there is no need for expensive setup of blogs or paid ads. Marketers can deploy available traffic sources and still be very profitable in their affiliate marketing business.
4. Get Affiliate Offers That Match Your Niche
CPA offers span virtually every known niche and all marketers have to do is find offers that match their niches.
Niches like making money online, forex trading, web hosting, online training and cryptocurrency are available for marketers whose traffic matches the niches.
5. Uniqueness of Affiliate Networks
There are so many affiliate networks with each having its unique strengths and capabilities. The same goes for CPA networks having unique strengths, the right resources, tools and supply for marketers.
6. Ideal for Beginners
CPA networks by virtue of accepting different traffic sources make the barrier to low entry, and easy for marketers who are new to the industry. Marketers can use social media networks and ads networks to drive promotions of advertisers’ offers.
The Main Players of a CPA Network
The ecosystem of a CPA network comprises some main players which every affiliate marketer ought to be aware of. These main players continually interact with one another to deliver value to all involved.
1. Affiliate Networks – Affiliate networks play the role of intermediaries by bringing advertisers and marketers together for the purpose of delivering value to both.
The affiliate networks also provide platforms for marketers to manage their affiliate business. Usually through dashboards that contain information like available advertisers, available offers, marketers’ unique affiliate links, and tools to track and manage their performance.
Advertisers are able to monitor the progress of their offers and in some cases interact directly with marketers.
2. Advertisers – These are businesses or brands that provide offers for marketers to promote. CPA offers could be anything from filling a form, making a purchase, downloading an app, or signing up for email subscription.
Advertisers connect with marketers through affiliate networks, and are responsible for determining the commissions that marketers earn on their offers for each completed task.
Advertisers may provide landing pages or product pages where traffic from marketers is directed to.
3. Users – These are basically the customers or target audience for the CPA promotions. Users must match the requirements of advertisers that may be demographic, niche based, or based on a particular location or country of residence.
Marketers invest time and resources in building quality traffic that matches their target audience. The higher the quality of the target audience the higher the expected conversion rate!
Marketers earn commissions for every user that completes the assigned task.
4. Affiliates – These are the marketers saddled with the responsibility of promoting offers belonging to the advertisers. Depending on the choice of the CPA network, these may be referred to as publishers or promoters.
The primary role of marketers is to first build quality traffic based on some particular niches. This could be achieved through blogging, social media marketing or email marketing.
The next step is monetizing the traffic through CPA networks. Marketers who have succeeded in building high quality traffic are usually attractive to advertisers in similar niches.
Marketers can be successful in CPA programs using any combination of traffic sources.
Here are some available options that affiliate marketers can explore in building quality traffic.
Strategies for CPA Marketing
Success in CPA marketing is a product of planning, hard work and timely execution. A well designed and executed strategy will help you build high quality traffic, achieve high conversion rates, and earn recurring income over time.
I’ve put together a few items you should have on your checklist as you run your CPA marketing business.
1. Define Your User Persona – User persona is defined as a clearly designed representation of your ideal audience based on research and data. User persona helps you as a marketer to define your audience using information like demography, description and problems they may want solved.
This is the first step to take even before setting up a blog or social media account because it will determine the kind of message and the time you will use in communicating to your readers.
2. Customize Messages to Suit Different Platforms – Using multiple platforms to build your traffic means that your posts and messages can be customized for the different platforms.
For example, you may decide to create long-form blog posts of 4,000 words using how-to’s or guides to reach your audience. Or you might decide to create shorter and entertaining posts for your much younger audience.
Instance is an image sharing platform that drives posts engagements and so posts will usually contain more graphics or videos.
The user persona created earlier will determine the content to create.
3. Choose Traffic Source – This topic is so important that it deserves a section of its own. Determining traffic sources is covered in detail in the next section.
4. Choosing the Right CPA Network – This is one of the most important factors that will determine the success of your CPA campaigns. Getting it right at this stage requires some considerations on:
- Research reviews and comments online about your choices – Most reviews definitely have something negative to say about any CPA networks. You should be able to filter these reviews and come up with verifiable facts to use.
- Kind of offers available on the CPA network. You want to promote offers that match your traffic. Also ensure that the offers fit with your traffic’s niche.
- Commission structure will show what commissions you earn for your efforts, how and when commissions are paid.
- Available tools provided by the CPA network for marketers to work with – Tools make your work easier and more productive, and companies that provide you with the right tools and resources enable you to achieve higher conversion rates.
Determining Your Traffic Source
CPA networks offer the flexibility for affiliate marketers to choose the traffic sources they like to use for promotions. This flexibility cones with certain terms that are clearly spelt out in their affiliate terms.
Marketers can use any of the under-listed traffic sources or choose to use a mix of them.
- Blogs are one of the most effective traffic sources to use. Building traffic requires significant investment of time and resources but has good pay off over time.
- Email Newsletters are great for sending messages to lots of people at the click of a button. A high quality email subscription list also requires time and resources to build.
- Social Media Marketing has become very important tools for connecting with customers, building relationships with clients and reaching new customers through paid ads.
- Videos on YouTube are great for creating awareness and building subscribers. Videos are the most preferred content type and useful for promoting offers. Marketers can simply post their affiliate links in the section for description or comments.
- Forums are public platforms that allow users to build an audience and relationships with influencers in their niches. Forums can also be used to promote offers through paid ads or posting links in your signature or any sections allowed by the owners.
Conclusion
CPA networks are great for marketers to earn high paying commissions from their traffic. Making a success out of it requires a lot of planning and hard work.
It has a low entry barrier and you can get started right away if only what you have is a social media account.
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