CPA Marketing Guide For Beginners: How To Get Started?

Are you trying very hard to earn money online? Are you still struggling to make any cent? Then this CPA marketing guide is for you. This article is the ultimate solution to your problem. This is my first article on CPA affiliate marketing and I will try to explain it in as much detail as I can. I recommend you to read and follow all the points mentioned below. You will need to learn a lot here and apply those techniques. It might take some time to show results but eventually, you will get success. I am breaking this article into subparts to understand it in a better way. So, let’s proceed with the article now.

What is CPA Marketing?

CPA stands for Cost Per Action.  CPA, sometimes, also called as PPL which is nothing but Pay Per Lead. CPA marketing means you will be getting paid when any action or lead proposed by the advertiser is completed. This lead can be anything such as – subscribing to their services, filling up a form, submitting the email, watching a video, making a download etc. So, you can make money even when your visitor watches a video or just submitting an email and does not spend anything. How does it sound? Great, right? CPA affiliate marketing is easy than selling any product. (If you do not know much about affiliate marketing, you can read my article on Why Should You Start Affiliate Marketing). The reason why I am saying this is because people are more interested in getting free products rather than spending their hard-earned money. However, I do not deny the fact that the profit you will get for generating any lead (asking the user to complete any action) will be less than what you could have generated by driving any sale (by selling the product/service) for the advertiser.  Generally, you can make $0.20-$10 per CPA offer. There are many other advertisers who are ready to pay you more than $10 for a particular lead by your traffic. Now, you know why I have come up with a CPA Marketing guide for you 😛

PS: I am promoting Grammarly for the same as it is free. Here, the funda is very simple. Your visitors should sign up by giving their email, name, and password. That’s it. It does not ask for a phone number or any credit card information. Once the action is completed, you earn $0.20 per lead. The profit is not high but since it is very simple and Grammarly offers great features, no one minds to sign up for the same. I have generated many leads for Grammarly and earn a few bucks. You can also start promoting Grammarly.

The reason why I am promoting Grammarly is that I am also using this. This is one of the best tools to find grammar mistakes and detect Plagiarism. You can also sign up for the same as it is free.

How CPA Marketing Works?

This works on the very simple model. There are many advertisers/merchants around the globe. They pick different CPA networks to promote their products and services. They create various offers and online marketing campaigns for the same in the CPA networks.  CPA networks promote those campaigns/offers via CPA marketers or CPA affiliates like us. They give us a fixed amount of money for every particular offer depending on how much the vendor or CPA offer creator has invested. All firstly we have to do is to join that CPA network. Once joined, apply for the different campaigns that you think you can promote. Once you are approved, browse their existing offers and publish links (you will have unique links to your campaign or we call it as affiliate links) on your blogs or social media, etc. As soon as anyone performs the action using your affiliate link, you will be paid.

Also Read: Cuelinks Review

Image Source: Backlinko.com

Starting With CPA Marketing

I hope you have got an idea about CPA affiliate marketing by now. Let’s see how to proceed with this.

Choose CPA Networks:

The first and foremost thing to start is to choose a good CPA network. I am using below CPA networks. They are affiliate marketing networks that offer a large number of CPA campaigns with very renowned brands.

• ShareASale (For Worldwide traffic)
• vCommission (Works well for Indian Traffic)
• Cuelinks (Works well for Indian Traffic)

There are many other popular CPA marketing networks such as MaxBounty, PeerFly, ClickBooth, CPAWay etc. You can try these as well based on your requirements and niche.

Also Read: 10 High Paying Affiliate Programs To Join

Apply For CPA Offers

There will be many CPA offers that will not be auto-approved. You will have to request approval. There is no trick to get approved all the time but there are certain things you can do to increase your chances of being accepted.

Some things that might help you get accepted:

• Make sure your profile is complete with all the details. You have to make advertisers realize that you are a legitimate business that can send them leads.
• Have your own website with a domain-specific email address (e.g. admin@catchupdates.com). (Generic emails do not bring credibility so I never recommend) (Email Marketing is an art)
• There will be certain advertisers who will be interested to know what else you will try to promote their products. Explain to them why you are choosing this to promote (such as you have a review article, it is in your niche, you are planning to create a landing page, you have organic traffic source (coming from a search engine) which can result in better CTR, etc etc.)
• Be honest in all your communications.

Embedding CPA Offers Into Your Site

Once you have been approved, you will get your affiliate URLs (unique links exclusively for you). There will be banners, customized text links, videos and widgets, etc for the CPA campaigns which you can embed/integrate into your blog to showcase offer to your readers and proposing them to try it out, thus providing high CTR. In order to get the most out of the CPA fling, I recommend creating review articles/landing pages on them (wherever possible) and then including affiliated URLs with CTA (Call to Action) in the end. This approach tends to bring better results (My personal experience as it worked well for me too 🙂 )

Common Terms Associated with CPA Affiliate Marketing

There are certain common words and terms that you will find on every CPA network. So, I thought to let you know about it. Here are a few terms that are important for you: 

• Affiliate Manager – A dedicated person from an affiliate network who is assigned to help you increase your sales and conversions.

• Advertiser and Publisher/Merchant: Advertisers are the people who pay CPA networks to get conversion of their offers. On the other hand, Publishers are the people like you and me who are promoting the offers of CPA network to make money.

• Commission–The commission amount you will be paid if a certain action is performed. It can be in the money ($$$) or in percentage (%).

• Conversion (in %): This is an important indication of which offer to choose before you start your promotional activities. CPA campaigns with high conversion rates are always preferable.

• EPC –Stands for Earning Per Click. It is a calculated amount that affiliates are earning per click (to offer page) by promoting a particular offer. The formula is for EPC = (Clicks/$ of Commissions Earned)

• Category - It can be sports, photography, education, health, etc.

• Offer Page –The page where the user converts after performing the specified action.

Traffic Requirements For CPA Affiliate Marketing

The first question that comes to the mind of every marketer is that if there are any restrictions on traffic for promoting. The good news is that there are no restrictions. Traffic is everything – you can go for free or paid traffic. Free traffic can be organic traffic via SEO, social media traffic, YouTube, Forums & QA sites (such as Quora etc.). The key point is no matter what tricks you use, it won’t convert unless you send the right targeted traffic to your referral links.

Also Read: How To Drive Traffic From Quora?

Tips On Promote CPA Offers?

There are a number of ways to promote your CPA campaigns in order to make a profit. It is difficult to mention all the ways here. I will write another article soon on CPA affiliate Marketing strategies and will share it. As of now, here are a few important ways for promotion:

• If you have a blog, write a review article and SEO optimize your article. If you are able to rank your article higher in SERPs, you can easily get higher profits. Since you will have targeted traffic (organic traffic), CTR will be high.
• Build an Email list and shoot an email to your subscribers when you find better offers.
• Sharing on relevant groups and communities in various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc.
• Running Twitter ads/Instagram ads/Facebook Ad campaign can help you in earning a few bucks.
• You can write high-quality content and promote your contents via other blogs, Web 2.0 sites, etc
• You can buy banner ads and spread your CPA offers without having your own site.

Quick Important Tips 

• Choose the offers which do not give a spammy vibe. Promote only those products which look genuine and you can use yourself also.
• Do not be over smart and perform a lead yourself on your CPA offers to earn the money. Your CPA offer/CPA Network Account can be suspended also.
• Do not quit after the campaign or offers that could not convert for you. Try alternate and other CPA offers.
• Invest (if you want to) smartly to run an Ad campaign, get paid traffic etc. Do not invest blindly.
• Before joining any CPA network, do research about them. Do not fall for spammy networks. Also, check for their minimum payout threshold. For me, ShareASale has worked like a charm. I recommend you giving it a shot at least.

Also Read: Why ShareASale Affiliate Program Is Best? 

Conclusion

If you want to make money online, CPA is, no doubt, one of the best ways to do so.  If you're considering getting into Affiliate Marketing, then I would suggest the start from today itself! Start now and join CPA network that best suits you. According to me, both Affiliate marketing & CPA are a great source of earning online. You can also use Google AdSense, Media.net, etc contextual networks along with this. It sounds great, right? What are you waiting for now? Go ahead and try CPA marketing.

Also Read:  Why Is Media.Net Best Alternative To Google AdSense

That’s all in this article. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or doubts, do comment in the comment section below. I would be happy to hear from you.

If you have used or already using CPA marketing. Let us know how that worked for you. Also, Do not forget to share this article with your friends on social media.

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Mohit Arora

Founder at CatchUpdates

Hi, I am Mohit Arora, a passionate blogger and addicted reader. You can check my another blog TutorialsJar where I share programming tutorials.

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