What is CPA/Affiliate marketing?

First of all, let’s understand that what Affiliate Marketing is:

“Affiliate marketing is a business model based on performance marketing.”

A company will pay commission to affiliates who deliver them leads.

If you’ve heard about affiliate marketing, you’ve heard the stories.

Yes, you can make a lot of money in affiliate marketing…

Why affiliate marketing?

Freedom: This gives you the freedom, which no other work can give. Sure you can earn big money as a CEO, as a consultant, or an investment banker – but what’s the freedom like in those jobs? You can’t pack up and take a trip to Dubai for a month if you feel like it.

BUT, affiliate marketing can give you that kind of freedom.

There are basically three main players in the affiliate marketing:

1. The Customer    

2. An Advertiser (the owner)    

3. You (the affiliate)

What is CPA?

Cost per acquisition (CPA), also known as cost per action, pay per acquisition (PPA) and cost per conversion, is an online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays for a specified acquisition - for example a sale, click, or form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc.)

In this working model, commission is paid when a user takes a specific action. These actions include filling out a form, getting a quote, signing up for a trial, or making a purchase.

How CPA Works?

A user opens a link sent from the affiliate. Then user is sent to the actual landing page of advertiser. Here user have to perform some kind of action like filling out his/her email ID or subscribe to an offer etc. when user completes this action, the CPA affiliate gets paid for that. The amount of payment can vary among different advertisers.

For Instance, a person may be asked to fill out something at the landing page. In following image, the user is asked to provide email to have a chance to win free Apple iPad 2. When user will provide email, the advertiser will pay the affiliate for this action

Here is another example for CPA offer:

As affiliates we create landing pages to help sell the offer we promote.

Your job is to get potential customers to come to the landing pages.

There are two main types of traffic: free and paid traffic.

Free traffic is mostly generated through social media or search engine optimization. That is generating organic traffic through optimizing your blog, content or website for search engines. There are a ton of different methods for getting “free” traffic and here are two of them:

1. Content Marketing

2. Search Engine Optimization

The first most popular type of paid traffic is ad traffic. This means traffic that is generated from users clicking on banners, adverts, pop-ups, and videos. Unlike other forms of paid traffic, such as pay per click, advertisers who use ad traffic are usually charged per one thousand impressions. Also known as CPM or cost per mile, this type of advertising does not guarantee any clicks or traffic to your site but instead offers a much lower rate. some of the characteristics of the paid traffic are following.

There are ads everywhere on the web.

You can buy ad space to promote your affiliate offer.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay money.

The 3 main ways you pay:

Cost Per Click (CPC) – You only pay when someone clicks on the ad. Example: You bid $.25 CPC. The most you’ll pay for each click is $.25

Cost Per Mille (CPM) – You pay for every 1000 views you get. Example: $2 CPM. If you ad is shown 10,000 times, you pay $20.

Flat rate – You pay a set amount regardless of clicks / views. Example: I’ll buy Ad Block B for one week for $500

The Benefits of paid traffic:

1. You can set the budget. If you can only afford $10 for the day, then it’ll only spend $10.

2. You can set the bids.

3. You can pause the campaign anytime. For example, if you wanted to spend $100 today on this campaign BUT after losing $50 you’re not that confident, you can pause it for now

4. You can set up a PPC or paid ad campaign in a matter of minutes and have it running instantly. This means you can start to receive traffic to your website on the same day. Unlike other forms of advertising out there, paid traffic offers much faster turnarounds and results.

1. The biggest advantage of free website traffic is the fact that it is free. You can get it from numerous locations like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, article marketing etc.

2. Free traffic campaigns are not as demanding as paid traffic campaigns and can therefore be left for a couple of days even as you continue to enjoy good traffic flow

3. Traffic flow can continue long after you have stopped the campaign

More customers puts more Greens in your Jeans

1. Free traffic can be time wasting if not well managed. This is because strategies like SEO content generation require a lot of effort.

2. Success is not guaranteed. Sometimes your efforts may not generate any results.

3. It takes time to get a high amount of traffic constantly running on your website

First source of free traffic: YOUTUBE

Why YouTube is?

YouTube is one of the most popular websites on internet, which has millions of visitors every day. You can get some of these visitors as well. YouTube makes it incredibly simple for you and others to promote your video across other social networks. To share a video, just click the “Share” tab underneath the video. ... When promoting yourYouTube channel or videos on your social media sites, consider the best marketing strategy.

How to work with CPA link?

If you have a PC or Laptop, then download any free movie maker. You can make a simple slide video of 1 or 2 minutes with this movie maker by putting some images or text about the CPA offer you are trying to promote. If you use a MAC, I believe they have software called iMovie - you can make your “video” with it

Tips & Tricks:

Make sure that your video is not too long, and it should not be boring at all.

Moreover, you have to make sure that Title of your video is an interesting and compelling one so that a visitor may be attracted towards your video. Give titles like “How to Win Free iPad 2”.

In the end, don’t forget to ask users to visit your website to get this offer.

Discover four tips marketers can use to improve their YouTube marketing.

Identify keywords that are targeted to your core buying group, rather than keywords that are simply relevant to your audience.

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/03/video-content-marketing-effective-strategy/

Second source of free traffic: Facebook

Why Facebook

Facebook is known as the ocean of traffic as it gets more than 1 billion unique visitors daily. Here goes the effective formula to promote CPA offers in Facebook. Remember, in case of Facebook you need to cover up your CPA offer link in the second method or you need to write a post in your blogspot blog.

Implementing Facebook advertising into yourFacebook marketing strategy is one possible technique for increasing likes or driving website clicks.Facebook advertising features include: Demographic targeting by Facebook user data on age, location, education, and interests. The ability to set ad budgets.

Firstly, do research and select some pages that are related to your chosen CPA offer. Make a real, trust worthy comment with CTA (Call to Action) so that people will click on your provided link. To leverage the whole process you can ask your friend to give thumbs up on your comment which will make you more authentic.

Tips & Tricks:

You can get laser targeted traffic by doing a little bit more deep work such as sending private messages. However, you need to keep in mind that in this case you need to be more conscious and strategic. Visit pages that are related to your CPA offer and read comments on each post and find someone who has problem and asking for help (your CPA offer must be able to solve the problem). Make sure you get replay from other side which will decrease your chances to be a spammer on Face book. some of the main tips if increasing the marketing performance of the facebook are the following.

Perfect Your Profile Picture. First impressions count.

Spice Up Your Cover Photo.

Don't Neglect Native Video.

Post More Than Just Links.

Pay Attention to Image Sizes.

Optimize Your Post Timing

Third source of free traffic: Twitter

Why Twitter:

Twitter is also one of the renowned and mostly used social networking website in the world of internet. Twitter is an Internet social medium where users can post brief online messages known as "tweets." Posts can consist of a maximum of 140 characters and are available to other Twitter users around the world. In addition to use in personal communications, Twitter can also be of benefit to businesses. In particular, business owners can use Twitter as an effective marketing tool.

How to work with CPA Link:

Twitter is not as hard as Facebook in case of links. So, you can just cover/shorten your CPA affiliate link using bit.ly and promote on Twitter. Surprisingly, shorten links get more clicks on Twitter according to several researches.

Tips & tricks:

It’s better to start your twitter marketing from hashtag research for the best result. For that, visit hashtag analyzing tool such as hashtags.org and type any keyword that’s related to your CPA offer. For example, I typed “amazon” as there are several CPA offers related to amazon gift cards and deals. After pressing the search button you will get recent tweets that include #amazon and other related tags. Select some tags and get ready for your main work.

Now your job is to make tweets including hashtags that you have selected. Here are some tricks to make your tweets more visible and effective:

Tweet 8-10 times a day

Use 2-3 hashtags in each tweet

Try to use a related picture in the tweet

Fourth source of free traffic: Forums

Why Forums:

The forums can have lots of people with different interest at one place and you can get lots of leads with such forums like Reddit etc. Most of the popular internet marketing forums enjoy high authority, credibility and obviously a decent amount of traffic. So, while posting a reply, if you believe that your link is going to add some true value to the thread, then please do it! By doing this, you are not only creating a quality backlink for your website,

 but at the same time, you are also attracting a highly targeted stream of visitors to your website. That's the best form of traffic that you can ever had for your blog – it converts and it engages!

How to work with CPA link:

Many people misunderstood forum marketing and end up with getting banned. Just posting the link in any forum post or reply is not called forum marketing. First you need to know the ultimate aim of forums. Forums are created to build a community and help each other, not to promote products and services. Signature enabled forums are best to get started. I am not going to provide any list of forums because it depends on your CPA offer niche.  Find out some forums that are related to your selected CPA offer.

Tips & tricks:

Sign up for a signature enabled forum and complete you profile detail.

Make sure the forum has enough members and visitors. Simply look at the number of threads and replies.

Add your blogspot post’s link in the “Home page” or “Website” section of profile.

Write a good looking sentence and include the link in signature section. Some forum do not allow direct affiliate link, in that case link to your blogspot post.

After setting up your profile and signature start engaging and helping other forum members.

Make friends, give replies, ask questions, give thumbs up and position yourself as a dedicated contributor of the forum.