CPA marketing is another form of affiliate marketing in which an affiliate earns money each time the visitor that he/she directs to a merchant’s website performs a predefine action which benefits the merchant in form of revenue either in a short term or long term.
What is CPA in marketing
CPA means “Cost Per Action”, that is, a price must be paid by the merchant each time a predefine action is performed by the prospective customer that is directed to the merchant’s website by the CPA marketer. The work of a CPA marketer involves directing target traffic to the merchant’s website where actions like submission of an email, filling of form to subscribe for an offer, signing up with a new website or even making a purchase is performed.
There are companies called CPA networks which register CPA affiliates. These companies act as mediator between the advertisers(merchants) and affiliates. CPA networks provide advertisers or merchants with variety of affiliates from which to choose the ones that will promote their offers for them. List of the top CPA networks include : Epic, Neverblue, MarketLeverage, Clickbooth, Azoogle, Maxbounty, CX Digital Media, Net Margin, Media Trust, Media Whiz, Copeac, Adknowlege, Motive Interactive, Rextopia, Convert2Media, Directleads, Affiliate.com, Panthera Network, Revenue Street, Adperio, PeerFly, RevenueAds, and Tatto Media.
How to get started with CPA marketing
It costs you nothing to become a CPA marketer. There are many CPA networks (few are listed above), all that you have to do is to apply with anyone which you like. However, unlike in normal affiliate marketing, merely applying does not guarantee that you will become their affiliate. After applying, the CPA network will go through your application as they need to know if you meet their requirement and will be able to generate leads for their advertisers before they can approve your application. So, having a website or blog to promote their CPA offer will give you a good chance of having your application accepted. And once your application is accepted, you will be assigned an affiliate manager who will monitor your progress.
How to choose a CPA Offer
CPA networks have different offers for affiliates to promote. Your responsibility is to choose the one that suits your interest, however, you must be wise in making your choice. There is an advantage in choosing a CPA offer that matches your website’s or blog’s niche. Choosing an offer that matches your website or blog content will help you to get the right visitors from your website/blog to your CPA offer which amounts to high conversion rate, and meaning more profit for you and also more customers for the advertiser (merchant). Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that actually become customers(that is,those that perform the action required) out of the total number of visitors that are directed to a CPA offer. So choosing an offer that you will be able to promote effectively using your blog/website and other marketing strategies at your disposal will help.
How to promote a CPA Offer
Your ability to draw quality traffic to your CPA offer determines your success in CPA marketing. The more traffic you draw to your CPA offer, the more money you will make, especially if you are able to direct the right visitors to your CPA offer.You can get targeted visitors to your CPA offer by using Niche Marketing Strategy(marketing in the right niche) which is a strategic marketing technique with the right audience in target. This include the use of articles that belongs to the same niche, blog/website of the same niche, adverts on ezines,and forums/groups that belong to the same niche, and using email campaign with email list obtained from the same niche to promote a product or service.
CPA Marketing: Promoting your CPA Offer
If you intend to use PPC Search Engine Advertisement like Google Adword, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCentre, you must use keywords that are relevant to your CPA offer. To do this, use keyword tools to look for relevant keyword list that are frequently searched on search engines for your ads. Though such frequently search keywords are always highly competitive and it may be very costly to bid for a good ad position as you bid based on keyword popularity and the ad position in PPC search engine advertisement. So, the higher your ad is positioned, the more you pay per click.
When using PPC advert, your goal should be to maximise your profit which can be done by looking for less competitive but frequently searched keywords which have low cost per click and therefore will be very profitable.To know if your keyword will be profitable, you must first consider the Max PPC bid for your CPA offer and how much it costs per click to secure a good position for your Ad using that keyword list.The ‘Max PPC bid’ which is the maximum amount that you should pay per click on your advert can be calculated using this formular:Max PPC bid= CPA x Expected Conversion RateFor instance, if the CPA(Cost Per Action) for the CPA offer that you are promoting is $50 and the conversion rate of the keyword that you want to use for your PPC ad is 5%. Then the ‘Max PPC bid’ is $50 x 5/100 = $2.50.So, if you want to get a good ad position with $2.50, then look for an alternative keyword that is less competitive and that is also frequently searched, for which you can get a good ad position and at the same time having a good cost per click price that is within your Max bid limit.
It is highly advisable that you should not bid above the Max PPC bid of your CPA offer. Instead, try to make use of low-cost keywords that are frequently searched for which will bring you target visitors to generate the predefined action that will earn you money.
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