What Is CPA and How To Make Money With It

In uncertain economic times many people are looking for new ways to make some additional cash.  Thus it is not surprising that many people have flocked to internet marketing.  There are a wide variety of ways of profiting online, from selling your own products to selling ad space on a website you own.  One way that may people make significant profits online is through affiliate cost per action (CPA) programs.

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing whereby a contracted sales force of affiliates sell a particular product for a vendor, in return for a commission on the products.  These are often called cost per action programs because affiliates are paid whenever an action is made.  Usually this comes through the purchase of a product or the submission of a lead.  This is in contrast to cost per click (CPC) advertising programs such as Adsense where a person just gets paid for driving traffic to an offer whether the offer converts or not.

Since the person displaying CPA offers is taking some risk in sending traffic, they stand to get paid more over the long term if they are promoting a well designed offer.  It is not uncommon for CPA profits to represent a full 50%-75% of the purchase price for information products, with lower commissions for physical products.  However, one only gets paid if an action is taken.  Therefore one could send 100s or 1000s of clicks to an offer without being paid a dime.

For this reason, it is very important to chose the right CPA offer.  Often affiliate managers can help you chose the right offer for your site on the basis of what offers are selling well at the moment.  Many affiliate platforms will also allow one to sort various offers based on several metrics such as earnings per click or the number of sales made by affiliates over a span of time.  The gravity statistic within the Clickbank information product marketplace is an example of the latter and is often used to scan for great offers to promote.  View each sales page yourself and ask yourself if you would buy the product based on what is being said.  

It can also be useful to presell on offer.  For example you can offer a review of the product highlighting the positives and negatives of the product in an objective tone, concluding that the product is worth purchasing.  This extra validation can help push people towards a product purchase as many people will assume that the actual sales page is biased.  If you can find good customer testimonials to include, that can also help to increase the chances of a specific offer being bought.

CPA marketing is a great way to monetize websites.  While there is a lot more work that goes into selecting the right offer to promote versus a method of monetization such as Adsense, the long term profit potential if done correctly is much greater.

Posted by Inter Lover

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