CPA Arbitrage Affiliate Marketing Just Got EASY!
Brought to you by Chris Cobb Automated Income Stream Ltd
1
Table of Contents Introduction
3
What is a CPA Network?
5
The Advantages of CPA
8
CPA Pricing
11
Getting Accepted Into CPA Networks
12
What is an Affiliate Manager?
15
Which CPA Offers to Choose
16
Analyzing Demand
18
Analyzing Competition
24
Landing Pages
25
CPA Conversion Tracking
30
Keyword Research Tools
31
Keyword Strategies 1. The Domain Name Bidding Technique 2. The Misspelled Keywords Technique 3. The Synonym Technique
34 38 38
CPA Promotional Methods 1. Trial Offers 2. Guaranteed Sign-ups 3. The Secret Giveaway 4. Poll Pages 5. Video Marketing 6. Video Games 7. Forums 8. Yahoo! Answers
39 45 48 51 53 57 60 63
Conclusion
71
List of CPA Networks
72
2
Introduction CPA (also known as cost-per-action) is an effective way for online advertisers to select how they want to pay for their advertising… It essentially measures actions that are taken by the website visitor, and includes anything from signing up to a newsletter, providing an email address, filling out a short form or making a purchase (this can be for a trial, the shipping and handling fee or the full price of the product). As Google itself puts it, "you (the affiliate) get paid whenever a site visitor clicks on the ad on your site AND performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product." And with this sentence alone you can clearly see the power of CPA – where advertisers ONLY pay when action is taken by the website visitor (either by subscribing or buying the product). This is vastly different from Cost-Per-Click (CPC), in which advertisers pay each time someone clicks an ad to visit your website. Here’s an example of how people can make money from CPA offers:
3
Quite simply, an affiliate will try to send traffic towards this website, and if the visitor fills out the form and clicks submit, the affiliate is paid a commission (the size of which depends on that particular offer and what CPA network they’re working with). CPA networks (the middlemen) are loaded with offers like this, and all you need to do as the affiliate is get as many people as possible to fill out the form. And that’s it! Because unlike many of the Pay-Per-Click related affiliate programs, you get paid for leads, not actual sales. In fact, most of the time the visitor doesn’t even need to get their credit card out in order for you to get paid! As a result, those who engage in CPA marketing are able to earn very good money, and when you apply some of the PPC strategies discussed in this guide to profitable CPA offers, you’ll be able to do exactly the same very soon! So, are you starting to see why many companies prefer CPA? They only want to pay for advertising with serious results (such as a sale) – not just for dead-end visitors to their website. And the best part is, people like you and I can get paid easily for making sure that “action” takes place! As you’re about to see, the CPA system I’ve outlined below is based around the simple idea of buying traffic at low prices and selling it at higher prices – also known as “Arbitrage”. This guide will show you how you can generate high-quality traffic (people who are mostly likely to make a purchase or perform an action, such as filling out an online form) very inexpensively, and sometimes completely free. And I’ll show you how you can get paid big bucks for generating that traffic and helping those actions take place. If you’re confused already, don’t worry. Over the next few pages, I’m going to give you a crash course on how to make big money through CPA Arbitrage. If you’re new to this, it might take some time to get the hang of it, and that’s perfectly fine. Just follow this guide, step by step. Read it carefully, and take the time to research anything you don’t understand. I’ve laid out everything below, so by the time you’re done reading you’ll have all the tools and tips you need to start making money with your very own CPA ad campaigns!
4
To help you out, you can sign up to a CPA network as a publisher (affiliate), an advertiser, or both if you so wish, and take a look at how they work… What is a CPA Network? As I mentioned earlier, a CPA Network is simply a middleman that’s positioned between an advertiser and a publisher. They have a variety of different CPA offers on their site from a multitude of advertisers. The purpose of the publisher (affiliate) is to generate traffic towards a particular CPA offer, and then earn a commission based on whatever “action” the advertiser has stipulated, i.e. an email address or a zip code being filled in, for instance. The CPA network itself also makes its money via commission. For example, the CPA network and the advertiser might strike a deal whereby the advertiser pays the CPA network $4.00 for every lead that’s generated on the network. The CPA network and the affiliate meanwhile have agreed that the affiliate will be paid $3.00 for every lead they generate, meaning the CPA network takes a $1.00 cut on EVERY LEAD. So, when you’ve signed up to a CPA network yourself, you can take a look through all of the different CPA offers and decide which one(s) you’d like to promote. Below is a list of some of the top performing CPA offers from one of the CPA networks I use:
5
Once you’ve selected one of these offers, the CPA network will provide you with a unique affiliate ID in order to promote that offer. This enables them to track all of your affiliate data, such as impressions, clicks and leads, so that they can work out how much commission you should receive on each offer. In order to get started, you’ll need to first apply to join a CPA network. Your application will then be reviewed and the network will make a decision on whether or not to accept you. Don’t worry about this for now because I’m going to tell you exactly what you need to do, and say, in order to be accepted by most, if not all, of the CPA networks during the course of this guide. As you’ll soon discover, the benefits of the CPA marketing model are numerous… Signing up as a publisher, for instance, allows you to make money from your own website by promoting special offers from the CPA network’s vast array of advertisers… And from an advertiser’s perspective, the CPA networks generate the business that they need, without the usual risks involved in doing it themselves. This is because advertisers pay ONLY for resulting sales and/or leads. So then, let’s give you another example of how a typical CPA offer might work? Let’s say a company is trying to find a large group of potential customers – prospects who might not buy something at first, but might later on. To attract these prospects, the company might come up with a CPA offer that gives something away in exchange for the prospect’s information, such as an email address or a zip code. Here’s an example of what one of these CPA offers might look like:
6
See how easy it is to make conversions with CPA offers? All the user has to do in this instance is fill out the fields and the affiliate would get paid for each person that did. Easy! So let’s learn how to convince people to do this! I know this offer well, because it paid me $2 every time one of my visitors typed in their zip code! Does it get any easier than this to make money?! With today’s economic problems and the high price of gas, people are happily going to type in their zip code to see if they qualify for a $250 gas gift card. There’s no need to purchase anything so no commitment is necessary, and the visitor doesn’t have to input their credit card number or give away any personal information of any real significance. The percentage of people who will type in their zip code and click on the submit button will be huge… I promise you that! And the great thing is, there are hundreds of these offers created every single day. When you get started with a CPA network, you’ll have the choice of many different offers like these, different promotions, different landing pages, and different companies... And you’ll have so many opportunities to make easy money from these offers, quickly and easily! Now, let’s take a look at some of the payouts from these ads… As you’ll see when you join a CPA network, every offer has its own “commission” – the amount of money you earn when an action takes place, such as someone submitting their zip code into the gas card ad I showed you above. In general, you have the option to choose smaller commissions for simpler actions, such as email forms – or larger commissions for actions that are more difficult to produce, such as purchases with a credit card. So, let’s say you want to opt for smaller commissions, but a higher percentage of sign-ups… Well, you could place offers on your website (or “landing page” – the page where your visitors “land” after clicking on an ad) that only require an email or a zip code to be entered, such as the free gas card offer above.
7
This might only pay around $2 for each sign-up, but imagine if you were able to attract hundreds or even thousands of people to your landing page each day! I was able to generate 10,000 leads with that gas card offer – that’s 10,000 people who submitted their information into the ad on my website! And even though it was only $2 per lead, it means the CPA network paid me $20,000 to do it! (I’ll explain how I did this a bit later on). Alternatively, you might want to go for larger profits per “action.” In this case, you could opt for offers which require a full mailing address, and perhaps even ask the prospect to fill out a questionnaire. These offers can pay up to $60 each or more, every time someone fills out this information, and they still don’t even ask anyone to make a purchase! See what’s happening here? Essentially, I’m buying leads at one price, and selling those leads on to big companies at a huge profit… something referred to as arbitrage. Who said the little guy can’t compete with big business?! Now then, let’s explain this concept a little more, and discuss the many advantages of the CPA model… Remember, this is JUST a numbers game! The Advantages of CPA There are many online business models that are highly profitable, but they have existed very much in the background due to the fuss that has surrounded Google AdSense, Google AdWords and traditional affiliate marketing. CPA is certainly one of these “hidden treasures” … Until now, that is! The fact of the matter is: providing leads (potential customers) is much easier than selling products. It is far, far more profitable than other online advertising models. And generally speaking, CPA can be used with the vast majority of websites. In truth, CPA is where the big dollars change hands, because the large companies will spend millions to get new customers, and there are a lot of big players in this game.
8
More and more online marketers are discovering the highly advantageous nature of the CPA system. Indeed, for the direct response advertiser in particular, CPA is now considered to be the optimum method of buying and selling online advertising. Firstly, what makes promoting CPA offers so attractive is that the user generally doesn’t have to buy anything. Instead, they’re just required to enter their personal information, and once they complete the lead, YOU earn commission. Secondly, the advertiser themselves ONLY pays for the ad when an action has occurred, whereas previously they may have been paying for newspaper ads or Google AdWords clicks – both upfront costs to the advertiser... This means that advertising revenue is never wasted. In fact, every cent the advertiser spends achieves the desired result, whether that’s a form being filled in or a visitor signing up for a free newsletter, for example. In essence, the money that an advertiser spends has a guaranteed success rate, and how many marketers get to say that?! I know I can… Ultimately, CPA marketing is beneficial for both of the parties involved – advertisers and publishers. As I mentioned earlier, advertisers can define the action that they want performed – whether it’s clicks, leads, downloads or sales, for example - and they only pay when this particular action takes place. Meanwhile, the payouts are significantly higher for publishers (affiliates) because of the more demanding tasks being performed. As a result, the potential for income that CPA links possess far exceeds that of AdSense. And consider this… There are MANY companies out there prepared to pay YOU an awful lot of money for providing clicks and leads for them! Another significant advantage of CPA over other models is that it drastically reduces the potential for click-fraud. Click fraud occurs in pay-per-click online advertising when a person, or automated computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. In a cost-per-click model, advertisers and traffic partners both have an incentive to engage in click fraud… The advertisers to deplete their competitor’s advertising funds (i.e. someone from ABC Printing clicking an ad for XYZ Printing,
9
just because they know that XYZ will be charged for the click), and publishing partners to increase revenue due to paid clicks (i.e. clicking on an ad that you’ve placed on your own site because you know you’ll make money from the click). However, the CPA model reduces click fraud significantly… As we discussed, payments are based on a user clicking on an ad and then performing a specified action... CPA eliminates click-fraud by removing the incentive to click on listings, since there is no charge to advertisers and no revenue shared with traffic partners for clicks! Instead, in a CPA model, the incentive is for the most relevant and useful results to be presented to users, since the publisher only receives revenue from the advertiser in the event of a successful sale, or other advertiser-defined action taken by the visitor. Therefore, while not impossible to manipulate, the CPA model is harder to abuse than one that pays publishers for clicks alone. And finally, CPA has a few advantages over the staple diet of many an internet entrepreneur: ClickBank.com In case you’re not sure, ClickBank is an affiliate program network that deals predominantly with digital products such as e-books and software. In essence, this means that they’re the middle station between affiliates and the product sellers themselves. As you can imagine, it's quite a lot of hard work to maintain an affiliate program, so affiliate program networks such as ClickBank make things easier for you by handling all the payments, delivering the products, providing statistics, and so on. However, the CPA model has many advantages over ClickBank… Firstly, you can promote offers that don’t require any payment – like free downloads, for example. All products on ClickBank require the customer to pay for them. Secondly, there are no refunds with CPA offers (if you get the action, you get the money). ClickBank will generally refund anyone who asks for it, which can be
10
very annoying for a product owner who’s worked hard to create a product and finds that people are getting it for nothing. Thirdly, you don’t have to put up with 10% of your earnings being held back like they are with ClickBank. If you get leads for the advertiser, you get paid. Period. If cash is a problem you can get paid weekly net zero, compared to ClickBank's bimonthly net 15, and if it’s a credit card offer you can get paid more than the purchase amount. For example, I have seen offers which payout $37.00 on a $6.95 offer with no refunds! A further reason CPA marketing works so well for the affiliate is that the “offer website” (the advertiser, not the CPA network) usually owns a merchant account. This means that they’re generally involved in more aggressive marketing practices than you’ll see at ClickBank or Commission Junction, for example. And ultimately, the more aggressive and attractive the an offer is, the more conversions you will make. CPA Pricing Anyone involved in this industry knows that things aren't simple or clear-cut in the world of online ad prices… Sites and advertisers are always experimenting with a wide range of creative pricing options. We consider CPA pricing to be any formula that has advertisers paying not for viewers, but for those viewers who carry out a defined action upon seeing an ad. Advertisers often favor such pricing strategies because they pay only for measurable results. The problem for publishers is that they carry all the risk. If a poorly designed or badly targeted ad draws low activity levels, the publisher gets no revenue for those impressions served. (Using a CPM model, the publisher would have been paid based on those impressions – the number of times an ad is shown on the website.) CPA pricing can range from cost-per-click to cost for registration forms filled out, contests entered, questionnaires answered, or cost per ultimate product purchase. And this includes lots of other variables along a continuum of steps toward the sale. To counter the risk, most publishers charge much more for CPA arrangements, with the price going up as the action gets more demanding (and moves the
11
customer closer to the sale), i.e. the cost for a completed registration form is many times higher than a simple click or zip-code submit, and the revenue share or cost-per-sale model is considerably higher still. It makes sense doesn’t it? Asking for an e-mail address is much easier than asking for a credit card number in order to achieve a sale! Therefore, it will cost you (as the advertiser) more to make that action happen. What multiples make sense depends upon site performance, and the site's visitors' anticipated actions. The more a publisher knows about how regular visitors react to various calls to action, the better equipped they are to appropriately price CPA arrangements. Like I said, it’s just a BIG numbers game! Getting Accepted into the CPA Networks Over the last 12 months I’ve been able to test out many of the CPA networks, but one of them stands out above the rest in terms of payment, volume and customer service. They’re called TheBizOppNetwork, and I suggest that you sign up with them right away: http://www.thebizoppnetwork.com After TheBizOppNetwork, I’d recommend taking a look at the following CPA networks too: http://www.neverblueads.com http://www.maxbounty.com https://secure.cpaempire.com/signup https://network.hydranetwork.com (A full list of CPA Networks is available at the end of this guide). Now then, how do you get accepted? Well, when applying to any CPA network, you need to avoid looking like a beginner, even if you are one! Generally speaking, CPA networks DO NOT want these sorts of people because their potential for earning money for the network is lower. As a result, you need to look (and sound) like an experienced veteran!
12
Many of the CPA networks require you to enter a website, so I’d recommend setting up your own professional looking ‘business’ website and email address, as this will help you get accepted. The first thing you need in order to create your own website is a host provider. I normally go with www.hostgator.com. A good example for the website itself is an affiliate blog, so I’d suggest that you create a free blog at www.Wordpress.com or www.Blogger.com and write a few posts on affiliate marketing, specifically geared towards the CPA industry if you can. This will help your chances of being accepted by the networks because, in a nutshell, it will make you look like you know what you’re doing! Also, make sure you choose a respectable email address with your business domain. DON’T use one of the free email providers such as Hotmail or Gmail as the CPA networks are unlikely to take you seriously if you don’t even take the time to get the basics right. A good email account would be something like this: affmanager@[emailprovider].com or johndoe@[emailprovider].com Some CPA networks will call you upon registration and enquire as to whether you’re suitable (more on this later). They will want semi-new affiliates, so tell them that your Internet marketing experience is 2 years or more. They don’t want a ‘green’ marketer whose naivety and newbie tactics will reflect badly on the company. They might also ask you what offers you intend to promote… The answer I normally give is “anything that converts!” Then I elaborate on the programs and products that I’ve promoted in the past: Commission Junction, ClickBank, Paydotcom and eBay, for example, as well as any other CPA networks I’ve used. So then, now that you have a professional looking website and email address, don’t let yourself down when it comes to answering the phone! This needs to be done in a professional manner as well, so when (or if) the CPA network calls, make sure you answer it in a professional manner, giving your full name, and business name. Also, record a business-like voicemail message in case you miss the call.
13
Remember, you need to treat this like a business. CPA networks are like your suppliers; at the very least, they want to speak to you before they take you on, so that they can verify your business and your methods. Once you’ve done all of this, be sure to call the CPA network that you applied to the next business day. This will demonstrate that you’re a proactive affiliate who’s eager to get started. Most CPA networks have to sift through many applications and they can be backlogged for weeks. However, calling them up can get your application to the front of the queue and you might even be approved on the spot. If you are not a US resident, make sure you add the following in the description: Your sites are 100% US based and generate 100% US traffic (CPA networks are wary of non-US affiliates). I would also suggest that you avoid mentioning email marketing. Tell them that you intend to use PPC marketing and media buying as your medium. Some CPA networks have had difficulty governing email marketing with affiliates who are outside (and inside) the USA. When trying to gain acceptance with CPA networks, I’d advise that you use the Following pointers, as they will demonstrate experience and knowledge of the field: • You are a professional Pay-Per-Click marketer with 2 or more years of experience, specializing in 1st tier search engine marketing. • You are highly experienced in retail affiliate marketing for cost-per-sale items and have knowledge in the co-registration industry, including path marketing, can-spam compliance, and email drops. • You are currently working with a programmer that specializes in the development of applications for large social networking sites. • You've been involved in media buying in the international email submission categories with companies such as social media and Zohark. If you’re on the phone with the CPA network representative, make sure you rehearse this first, and ideally, research what it all means! Here are some questions that CPA Network representatives may ask you, so prepare some answers beforehand…
14
Q: How many unique visitors do you get per month? A: 50,000 – 10,0000. Q: How do you get traffic? A: I build blogs and web pages and I obtain traffic through PPC on Google. Q: How long have you been doing Internet Marketing? A: A year and a half. Q: What has worked for you in the past? A: Only PPC. Q: What vertical/category/kind of offer do you want to promote, or have promoted in the past? A: Anything that converts. I’ve done gaming, freebies, health, ringtones, email submit, etc… Q: Do you have incentive offers on your website? A: No Q: How much do you spend on advertising? A: $100 per day Q: Are you with any other affiliate companies? A: Yes, name any that you have been accepted on, or name any random ones. Q: How did you hear about us? A: My friend told me, but he doesn’t work with you. Answer all of these questions satisfactorily and follow the guidelines above and you should be accepted into most CPA networks. Once you’ve been accepted into a CPA network, you’ll be assigned a dedicated affiliate manager to your account! Great hey?! What is an Affiliate Manager? The role of your affiliate manager is to work with you in order to bring more traffic to the CPA network. The likelihood is that you’ll be working with your affiliate manager throughout your time with that particular network, so it’s vital that you try to build a good rapport and working relationship with them.
15
Another reason why you should do this is that your affiliate manager will be privy to special deals and better payouts, so you can always negotiate with them for a higher payout on the CPA offers. Also, your affiliate manager can quickly indicate to you what CPA offers are performing well on the network and for what forms of traffic, such as natural SEO, email or pay per click traffic. You also have to remember that your affiliate manager will be keen to make YOU money, because the amount of money they make is ultimately dependant on how successful their clients are, so the better you perform, the higher their commissions. As a result, your affiliate manager will be keen to support you and tell you what CPA offers are performing best on their respective network. Which CPA Offers to Choose As we’ve already discussed, there are many different sorts of CPA offers that you can promote… Some require leads to fill in long forms, entering their name, address, email, and credit card information (if they’re purchasing a product). Others may just require an email address or a zip code. As you can probably appreciate, the longer forms generate more money as they’re obtaining more information from the customer, but the shorter forms (email only) are more easily attainable. (More info is going to convert less, so it costs more and vice versa.) There are also paid/sale offers where you can get the visitors to sign up for trial offers and products, while other offers allow you to incentivize your traffic by offering the lead a free gift or a bonus item in exchange for some of their information. Here are the most common offers: • • • • •
Zip/email submissions (One field) Short forms (3-4 fields) Long forms (More than 4 fields) 2 page (2 pages of fields) Sales based (Surf the site, make a purchase etc)
16
I usually go for zip code or email submissions, as these are the easiest to convert. They will normally pay around $1 - $2, which is very good, when you think how little the lead needs to do in order for you to make money. Here’s an example of a zip code submission offer:
How simple as that?! Think about it for a minute… There will be tons of parents, students and homeowners who will happily enter their zip code to see if they qualify for a free washer and dryer. Imagine having 1,000 people visit this freebie offer, and it coverts at, say, 20% (meaning that 20% of those visitors submitted their information). So a total of 200 visitors have entered their zip code. Let’s say the offer pays you $1.00 per lead. That’s $200 in the bank! (I will explain later some great ways that you can generate those 1,000 visitors.) Now, let’s have a look at the sales based offer… Imagine that you’ve sent the same 1,000 visitors to your offer and the landing page has converted at 20% again, meaning that 200 visitors have entered their email address… The problem now, with a sales-based offer, is that you need some of these visitors to purchase the product in order for you to make money. So let’s say that 1% of that traffic actually buys the product (priced at an average $49.95)… Well this is only 2 sales, which means you only earn $99.90.
17
So which offer would you prefer to promote: the free offer, or the one that requires a purchase? Exactly! The offer that only requires the lead to provide their email address! It’s much easier, and there’s also less competition… When choosing your offer it needs to be targeted towards the traffic you’re getting, as this will obviously aid conversions. So choose your offer wisely and think about the promotion and advertising methods you wish to employ. If you were promoting an email submission offer on an energy drink for example, you could advertise it on sports forums, sports videos and sports related blogs. You could also try college forums and social networking sites, concentrating on the demographic that normally consume drinks such as these. Analyzing Demand When selecting CPA offers, it’s important that you research the market-place and find out what’s in demand before you launch into promoting it. In order to do this you can begin by taking a look at the search volumes for the most relevant keywords related to that offer, and Google’s free keyword tool can help you do this: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal So, let’s say that you wanted to promote a “free golf lesson gift card offer”, for example… You could start by typing in the keyword “golf” and looking to see how many people are searching for that keyword each month:
18
You can see from the screenshot above that the average search volume for the keyword “golf” was 2,740,000, while there were 6,600 searches for “golf lessons”, so it appears that you can get a good amount of traffic in this market. If you find a CPA offer that doesn’t have much search volume for its most relevant keywords, than I suggest you ignore that particular CPA offer and move on. Another very useful tool for analyzing demand is Google Insights. This site enables you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. http://www.google.com/insights/search/
19
In the example above, I’ve typed in the keywords “free ringtones”. As you might remember, ringtone offers were common-place a few years ago, but as you can see from the graph above, they’ve declined in popularity since the end of 2003. So, this tool is very useful in helping you to gauge current trends and popularity, steering you away from dated market segments and towards current ones. Google Trends is another handy tool, and you can use this one to analyse trends over time: http://www.google.com/trends
20
On the graph above, I’ve typed in the keywords “Christmas cards” and you can clearly see that the search volume for this phrase occurs every December. Although this is an obvious example (because the search volume for this phrase would clearly be highest at this time!), it does give you a good indication of how this tool can be used to study trends over a period of time, so that you can work out the best times of the year to promote certain CPA offers. A further tool that I use is eBay, which you can find here: http://www.ebay.com As I’m sure you’re well aware, eBay is one of the largest marketplaces of buyers and sellers on the Internet, and it provides a great way of working out what’s popular at any given time.
21
The best way to do this is to visit http://pulse.ebay.com which, as eBay itself declares, will give you a “daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks and cool stuff on eBay”… As you can see from the results above, the most popular terms at the time of writing are "wii", "ipod" and “xbox 360”. Consequently, if you were to promote a free ipod or wii CPA offer, you’d be able to generate a significant amount of traffic and leads. A further way of researching whether or not there’s enough demand for a particular offer is to look on forums. When people are looking to resolve a problem, find information about a service or get advice prior to purchasing, they will most probably go to a forum and post a question. For example, if you were looking for some insight into the questions that pregnant women want answering, you could browse some of the top online forums by typing “pregnancy” + “forum” into Google. Here is just a selection of results that came up for this search term: www.pregnancyforum.co.uk www.askamum.co.uk www.babyworld.co.uk www.babyandbump.com www.madmums.com/
22
After looking at some of the posts in these forums it becomes apparent that MANY people are looking for information on the following topics: 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9
Trying to conceive Symptoms of pregnancy Miscarriage Sickness What a pregnant woman can and can’t eat Sex during pregnancy Vitamin intake Weight gain Healthy eating Exercise Labour Breast feeding Getting a baby to sleep
This list was very easy to create and could you greatly when deciding on what CPA offers to promote. Yahoo Buzz is another site to check out. As you can see from the list on the right hand side (below), it has a breakdown of top searches performed by users, and this list is updated hourly. As a result, you have a real-time insight into popular topics and personalities and can base your CPA decisions accordingly‌
23
Analyzing the Competition Once you’ve got to the stage where you have some ideas in mind for potential CPA offers, the next step is to analyse the competition in that particular field. And in order to do this you need to find out how many ads are running for certain keywords on Google AdWords, MSN and Yahoo Search Marketing. One clever trick I use to find out how many offers are running for a CPA lead offer that you’re interested in is to simply type in the most relevant keywords for that offer into the above search engines. This will show you how many sponsored ad listings are showing and give you good idea about your level of competition. When typing in the search term “pregnancy”, for example, you can see a sponsored link for free pregnancy products at the top of the search results:
And when you click on this you’re taken through to a landing page where you’re asked to fill out a form giving some personal information:
24
The purpose of this search is to find a highly searched keyword that doesn’t have very many ads running, but is nevertheless competitive enough to generate money for your CPA offer. I’m sure that if you investigated the ‘pregnancy’ market fully, that’s exactly what you’d find. You just need to then work on finding obscure keywords for this market and come up with great ad copy for your offers, and you’re in business! Landing Pages When it comes to choosing a CPA offer, it’s important that you take a look at the landing page that you’ll be sending your traffic to and work out whether it’s worth your while. For instance, if you’re after email or zip code submissions only, there’s no point directing your prospects to offers that require their name, address, date of birth etc. Personally, I opt for the fewest fields on a landing page because this gives me the best chance of converting a prospect into a lead. Indeed, many CPA networks have offers where you can earn up to $2 for nothing more than an email address. Imagine converting 500 of these in a single day!
25
However, some CPA offers will pay you around $4-5 for a name, date of birth AND email address, so it’s well worth having a good look around first. Here’s an example of a real money-making landing page that asks for a full name, email address, telephone number, and even the best time to call!
You can find this particular landing page here: http://www.quadrawealth.com As you can imagine, with a form like this that requires a telephone number and the best time to call, conversion rates won’t be particularly high because people don’t normally like to be called up and sold to… However, many publishers (affiliates) will consider that this offer is well worth promoting because the payout for each lead will be huge! And that’s because telephone numbers are highly sought after leads and companies will pay big money to anyone who can obtain them. When promoting any offer, I always use the following criteria to determine whether or not a landing page will convert… 1. Does it have a solid, captivating headline? This is arguably the most important part of the CPA offer. You only have a few seconds to grab your prospect’s attention so you need to make sure that this 26
time isn’t wasted. Your headline has to be intriguing, enticing and powerful, and it MUST make your prospect want to read further down the page in order to find out more about what’s on offer… One really effective method I’ve found of capturing your visitor’s attention is to ask a question within your headline, as this engages the reader, makes them think, and normally prevents them from clicking away from your offer. Also, try to use emotional and hypnotic triggers. Using “triggers” in your copy has a very powerful effect of putting your visitor in a particular state of mind so they’ll be much more likely to sign-up. To help you out, here’s a list of trigger words that have been proven to produce high conversions when used on CPA landing pages: Cash Results Easy Secret Shocked Sex Profits
New Proven Revealed Ultimate Private Love Incredible
Power Scientific Master Hidden Guaranteed Shocking Discover
You Free Amazing Breakthrough Uncovered Inside Money
Try to include some of these buzz words if you’re producing your own landing page, or look for offers that use a combination of these words if you’re not. You’ll be amazed at how powerful they can be! If you’re interested in crating your own landing page, I’d suggest using Google’s Website Optimizer to assist you. This is a free tool that allows you to split test different pages in order to improve your conversions. You can test any aspects of your landing page such as headlines, sub-headings, call to action, social proof, images, or any other variables you might use. To learn how to use Google Website Optimizer, take a look at their website tutorials, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/websiteoptimizer/tutorials.html 2. Is it clear and relevant? As I’m sure you can appreciate, it’s very important that the landing page you’re sending your prospects to is clear and concise. However, you’ll be surprised at
27
how many I see that are quite simply a complete mess and stand no chance of convincing readers to input their details. Your landing page MUST be easy to read with a clear design, and it must be straightforward for the prospect to type in their details. The landing page also needs to be relevant to the initial advertisement that you placed on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. This way, the prospect will know exactly what to expect when they click on the ad and end up on your landing page. If it’s not relevant to what the ad promised, the prospect will, in all likelihood, click away and you will have lost a lead, and more importantly, your commission. 3. Does it promote a fear of loss? Okay, when I talk about promoting fear, I’m not talking about actually making the visitor feel uncomfortable when they’re looking at your landing page! I’m talking about letting the visitor know that if they don’t fill out the necessary details, they will be missing out on the one thing that could turn their life around or improve it dramatically. You need to make the customer feel that they simply can’t live without your offer, and one very effective way of doing this is to have a time limit on your web page. For example, you could offer a free product to the first 100 people who sign up, then after that, the offer is gone. In essence, they will be losing out on a brilliant (and free) offer by not taking action straight away and filling out the form. Also, try to use a clock counter on your landing page. They create urgency and have the effect of kick-starting customers into taking action as they’ll fear losing out on what you have to offer. Many CPA landing pages use this tactic, incorporating a countdown timer and words such as “offer expires in 15 minutes”, for example. If you’re interested in this method, take a look here: http://www.imtriggers.com 4. Does it have social proof? Social proof is a great way to prove to your visitors that the product advertised on your CPA offer truly works. When people are interested in a product or an
28
offer, they’ll often look for a second opinion because they want to be sure of its worth. I know that when I’m about to buy a book or a DVD, I nearly always take a look at the reviews on Amazon to see what other people have said. I want assurance that the book or DVD is worth the money. Therefore, a positive review in the form of a testimonial will give your CPA offer credibility, which will in turn encourage the customer to fill in their details. You simply can’t market anything without using testimonials anymore. So many people now utilize this method, so if you choose to ignore it, it will look like no one else has any faith in what you’re offering! 5. Does it have a call to action? When promoting any CPA offer, make sure you have a direct “call to action” above the fold. Therefore, when a prospect lands on your web page, they’ll see the form straight away and know exactly what needs to be done. You can also expand upon the call to action by using what I refer to as my “Jedi Mind Trick!” This is named after the technique performed by the character Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, who’s able to convince people to do as he says! This particular strategy is incredibly powerful as it works on a psychological level, convincing the prospect to sign up without them actually thinking about it properly. For example, you could include a statement such as; “YES CHRIS, PLEASE SEND ME A FREE BABY VOUCHER”, which assumes that the prospect has already decided to sign up! You could also include a pre-ticked box to the side of the statement, which further helps to make up the prospect’s mind for them. Basically, you need to think for the prospect, tell them what their answer is, and make their decision… so they don’t have to. And believe it or not, that’s what customers want! They don’t want the chore of having to make a decision. They want you to tell them exactly WHAT they need, WHEN they need it and WHY they need it. Be very straight and to the point and don’t be afraid to coerce your customers into giving you their email address, zip code, name etc. After all, if they’re not interested, all they have to do is click off your website.
29
CPA Conversion Tracking I can’t stress enough just important the concept of tracking is to your CPA campaigns and the amount of commission you’ll ultimately make… Indeed, if you really want to make money via CPA, you must track absolutely everything; the success of your keywords, the source of your traffic, the type of ad you use (text or image), your ad variations (click-through-rate and conversions), your landing pages, the CPA offers themselves… EVERYTHING! When I’m promoting CPA offers, a lot of my traffic comes from Pay-Per-Click search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and in this case, it’s imperative that I track the keywords I’m bidding on. If a keyword is performing well and bringing me lots of prospects, then I’ll scale it up and bid a higher amount of money for that particular keyword. If a keyword is performing poorly, I’ll monitor it for a while and then eventually jettison it if it doesn’t improve. Although this sounds quite complicated, it really isn’t. To begin with, you can use the built-in conversion tracking codes which can be found in your CPA network, Secondly, all the major Pay-Per-Click search engines provide conversion tracking for you, right down to the keywords you’re using. This means that you’re able to pull these conversion tracking codes from your PPC accounts and have the advertiser place the code on their success page (your affiliate manager will make sure this happens). The advertiser’s success page is the same page that fires off a pixel to the CPA network when a lead has been generated. This tells the CPA network exactly who should receive commission for a lead, and by having the code on their success page, you’ll improve your chances of getting more leads. For the more technically minded, you could use two extra methods, depending on how much you want to track… If I am loosely tracking, for example, I will get each ad group with a PHP variable in the URL to track it loosely by ad group. If I want to achieve more thorough tracking, I could use a second method that takes the referrer, IP address and other information and stores it in a database as a number. I’d then use that number as a sub-id, to view even more information.
30
This is a little more complex, so I’d suggest that you get established using the basic tracking methods first and then move onto this, or even pay someone to do it for you with the initial profits that you make! Remember, everything that I am telling you can be scaled up… so start small with a few clicks from your existing list, website, SEO or AdWords campaign and then scale it up once you start to see some success. The beauty of CPA is that it ALWAYS works, so if it isn’t profitable then you need to look at the steps that you’ve set-up – the landing page, the links etc. Keyword Research Tools Once you’ve selected a good CPA offer, you obviously need to get traffic flowing towards it in order to make money. In fact, you want to be bringing as much qualified traffic as possible to the CPA offers you’re promoting, and in order to do this you need to understand the importance of keywords. Keywords are the building blocks of the internet, and it’s absolutely vital that you know how to find the keywords most relevant to your CPA offers, and then start using them to generate large amounts of traffic. Listed below are the most widely used keyword research tools, and because of their importance to your success in the CPA market, I’d highly recommend that you take a look at each one of them and familiarize yourself with how they work. Here’s a brief run-down of each of them: Free Tools Google Keyword Tool As we’ve already discussed, this is a free keyword research tool and probably one of the best as well. With Google being the #1 search engine, there’s no better place to go for keyword data. http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Google Insights Another free tool that we’ve already covered, Google Insights enables users to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. http://www.google.com/insights/search/
31
KWBrowse.com KWBrowse is definitely one of my favourites, and one of its very useful characteristics is that it provides keywords from ‘lateral’ markets that might be related to your CPA offer. http://www.kwbrowse.com Quintura.com Very similar to KWBrowse in that it provides related keywords in lateral markets for you to look into. Quintura is a visual search engine, and if you’re not sure what I mean by that, why not take a look?! http://www.quintura.com AdCenter Labs MSN has put together a nice set of free tools here, and I especially liked the Search Funnel Tool which displayed the keywords typed by users before and after a specific search query. However, AdCenter Labs lacked a keyword popularity tool, which normally gets the most mileage from users. http://adlab.msn.com Spacky.com Spacky.com is another free keyword research tool and searches Google, Yahoo and MSN for the keyword results. A plus point is that it allows you to download your keywords into a text file for easy copying and pasting. http://www.spacky.com Free and Paid Tools Good Keywords The Good Keywords tool has a free and a paid version. I’d suggest starting out with the free version to begin with as it has some useful features, such as a keyword organizer, site popularity gauge and a user-friendly keyword research interface. http://www.goodkeywords.com Traffic Travis Again, both free and paid versions are available here. However, I’d strongly recommend sticking to the free version because it offers pretty much everything you’ll ever need in a keyword research tool. http://www.traffictravis.com WordPot.com WordPot offers the user related search terms with their daily estimated search volumes. It also provides associated keywords and synonyms for any keyword. http://www.wordpot.com
32
WordTracker.com WordTracker has been on the scene for a number of years now. Easy to use and reliable, I’ve been using WordTracker since I started with CPA marketing. http://www.wordtracker.com Paid Tools KeywordDiscovery.com This is an impressive tool with a large number of keywords listed and a variety of features such as historical data, seasonal data, while you can also cross reference with your competitors’ website. However, it’s expensive at just under $50 per month. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com KeywordSpy.com Not many keyword research tools allow you access to all of the keywords that your competitors are bidding on, but KeywordSpy does. They also provide details on the ads that your competitors are running on each particular keyword! For these reasons, you’ll have to pay a hefty $90 per month for the privilege of joining up. http://www.keywordspy.com SpyFu.com SpyFu has a rather limited free option, but you can upgrade to the paid version for an annual sum of $279, which is perhaps a little too expensive for most. One of its plus points is that it enables you to find out what keywords your competitors are using and then take advantage of them yourself. http://www.spyfu.com Nichebot.com If you do any keyword research at all, you must at least try this service, especially when you can have it for 2 weeks at just £1! The advantage of Nichebot is that it closely follows the way in which a typical user will conduct their research, while it has the ability to expand your lists by up to 10,000 words per seed keyword. http://www.nichebot.com KeywordElite.com At $174, this tool seems rather expensive at first, until you realise that this is a one-time fee, unlike many of the other tools that have monthly fees. KeywordElite is an advanced tool that enables you to view your AdWords competition so it’s well worth taking a look at. http://www.keywordelite.com
33
Keyword Strategies I’d highly recommend that you utilize one or more of the following keyword strategies as they’ll quickly bring you a ton of targeted traffic to your CPA offers. 1. The Domain Name Bidding Technique Now, I’m now going to show you a fantastic method for boosting each of your CPA offers. In fact, I’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars in CPA affiliate commissions using this keyword strategy alone. So, what is it? Well, when people are looking for a particular website, instead of typing in the URL address straight into their browser, they will often go to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and type the address in there. They do this because they know that 99 times out a 100, the website that they’re looking for will be the first website that appears in the search results, and they can simply click on that link to reach the site they wanted. But, you’ve probably noticed that I said “99 times out of 100.” And this is the crucial point here. Take the following example:
So, for this example, I’ve taken a skin care product called Neutrogena. Here, the person typing in “Neutrogena.com” will usually be looking to go to that particular website, and they’ll be interested in skin care and related products to do with that niche.
34
So a clever thing to do here would be to use Google AdWords, AdBrite, Yahoo etc, and bid on this domain name as one of your keywords (or any other domain name in fact, if it’s relevant to your CPA offer). This way, when people type in “Neutrogena.com” looking for skin care products, They’ll see your ads show up promoting a related skin care offer! As you can see from the example above, this has already been done. And because these people are already interested in these sorts of products (we know this because they’ve typed Neutrogena.com into the search engine), there is a VERY GOOD chance that they’ll click on this link and go through to the CPA landing page! This method is so powerful because these people are 100% laser targeted. They are already searching for these sorts of products! All you have to do is point these people towards the offers that they’ll be interested in, and you’re GUARANTEED to make money… Okay, now that you know about this method, how can you speed this process up to maximize your traffic levels, and as a result, your profits? Well, if you have a CPA offer all about skin care like our example above, you could go through domain name after domain name, trying to think of companies that are targeted to your offer. This will, of course, take a lot of time. So why not take a short cut and utilize existing marketing data to do the work for you?! And the way to do this is to visit http://www.quantcast.com/ This is a fantastic site, and the best thing is, it’s completely free to use. With this tool, you can type in any domain name that you’re interested in (Neutrogena for this example) and it will give you all the websites that Neutrogena searchers are also looking up! So these domains are SPECIFICALLY RELATED to the domain you’re searching for. And how does this help you? Well, it simply means you have more domain names to bid on and monetize, which ultimately means more money in your pocket! As you can see from the screenshot below, I’ve typed in ‘neutrogena.com’ and
35
listed on the right hand panel (where it says “Audience Also Likes”) is a list of similar domains, such as Olay, Pantene, Dove and Clinique.
These results provide you with the most relevant and targeted domain names that you can bid on. Your CPA skin offer could then show up in the search results when a prospect types in any of these domain names into the search engines. How’s that for targeted traffic?! So remember, whenever you have a CPA offer (or a product for that matter) that you want to promote, one of the first things that you can do to find laser targeted traffic is to think of other domains that are related to your offer. Then, simply go to Quantcast.com, search for these related domains and bid on them! If that’s not good enough for you, you can also use another website called www.alexa.com to perform a similar task for you, and this works brilliantly as well! Here are the results of this search:
36
On this page, the skin care company ‘Loreal’ has shown up under ‘Related Searches’ too, meaning another domain name for you to bid on! On top of that, for each of the domain names that come up, you can then use those to drill down even further and find more related domain names to promote your CPA offer with. Obviously the more you do this, the less relevant the domain names will be to your CPA offer, but nonetheless, you’ll be able to find a variety of great domain names that will help bring you thousands of targeted prospects. Now, just to give you a word of warning, although the domain name bidding technique works well, it’s not as effective as it was when I first started using it. And there are two main reasons for this… To begin with, when previously using this technique on Google you only needed to maintain a CTR rate of 0.5% and Google AdWords would keep displaying your ads for whatever domain names you were bidding on. However, these days the CTR needs to be a lot higher, sometimes as much as 7%. If you can’t maintain this, Google will increase your minimum bid to a point where it becomes unprofitable to bid on that particular domain.
37
I also found out recently that some of the major search engines will take away the “www.” and “.com” from any keywords you’re bidding on, probably to cut down on the practice of bidding on domain names. Nevertheless, it’s still possible to make big CPA commissions using this technique and I’d definitely recommend that you try it out for own campaigns. 2. The Misspelled Keywords Technique One common mistake that internet users make when using search engines is to misspell the keyword they’re searching for. And when they do, an opportunity exists to get more traffic flowing towards your CPA offer! You can do this by placing bids on the most common misspellings for relevant keywords or key phrases that you’re trying to target. According to a recent online study, as much as 20% of all searches performed on the internet are misspelled! I repeat… 20% of ALL internet searches are misspelled! Just think about that for a minute. That’s an incredible opportunity for you to bid on VERY CHEAP keywords that are just as relevant to your CPA offer as the correct spelling! And in order to monitor the conversion rate of these misspelled keywords, you should set up a separate ad group in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter. Here are two useful products that will help you take advantage of a variety of misspelled keywords: Keyword Elite http://www.keywordelite.com Misspelledkeywords.com http://www.mispelledkeywords.com 3. The Synonym Technique Another useful technique for keyword research is to use www.Thesaurus.com to generate a number of synonyms that you can also bid on. For example, if you were promoting a health drink, you could type in the keyword ‘health’ into thesaurus.com, like I’ve done below:
38
As you can from the results, you could then decide to bid on the words ‘energy’, ‘vigor’, or ‘well-being’ etc, which would be relevant to your CPA offer and would bring additional traffic to the landing page. CPA Promotional Methods 1. Trial Offers So then, now that we’ve covered all the elements involved in making money via CPA marketing, I think it’s time that I shared some of my strategies with you! And one of the ways in which I make money is through the promotion of trial offers. That’s right! You’re going to make money on products that don’t cost anyone a cent! And the first step is to find affiliate offers from various sources. As I mentioned before, my personal favorite is www.TheBizOppNetwork.com, but others include: www.clickbank.com www.clickbooth.com www.cj.com www.joebucks.com www.azoogleads.com
39
(You’re really NOT limited to what CPA or affiliate network you choose to use.) The idea is then to find offers that are low cost (preferably free), in order to get the visitor, but pay out high commissions for you. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, it’s not, and here’s why… As you know, there are thousands of companies that will do almost anything to get their foot in the door of as many customers’ homes as they can! In the process, they are often very willing to lose money up front in order to gain a long term customer. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it! So for this reason, a lot of these companies are prepared to literally give away their products on a 30-day free trial. All the customer has to pay is a small shipping and handling fee that ranges from $4.95 to $13.95. However, the commissions for these products can range anywhere from $18 $53! A pretty nice return for a 30-day free trial! Now, put yourself in the customers’ shoes for just a minute… Imagine that you’re online looking for weight loss pills. Would you pay the full price for a 30 or 60 day supply of a product that you have never used? Or would you prefer to opt for a free 30-day sample instead, to take a look yourself, and in the process spend around $10? Which one would you choose? In my eyes, it’s not even a decision… I’d go with the free trial any day of the week! And so would everybody else, which is why this business model works so well. So if you have the chance to make $20 or more in commission per sale and the visitor has a very small out of pocket expense, then you’re more likely to get that $20 to $50 sale. Typically, to get a $20 commission, the product will probably be $40. But if the product is free and the shipping is only $5, then your chances increase greatly and you get a better ratio for the money that’s being spent. Can you see the power of this method yet?
40
If your customers are met with a low out of pocket expense to try your affiliate offers, you will end up converting more of those offers into sales, period! So look out for these sorts of offers in the CPA networks. The other thing I want you to keep in mind is that you can experiment with this method... Yes, the way I have designed it DOES work, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find a better way. I recommend that you try different offers and different ways of implementing those offers in your content. Test, test and re-test. There’s always a better way! And if you think that testing is for losers (as I once did!), imagine this… If you set-up your testing once, it will run for you automatically. If you constantly improve your offers and your conversions then you will be adding more and more money for exactly the same project (and for doing absolutely nothing!). Testing is most definitely NOT for losers and it’s well worth doing. You may even have a site already that matches with the trial offers that you find. That’s great! You are one step ahead of the game and have less work to do than other people who are starting from scratch. My advice to you would be to use the method as I have it outlined below, start making some money, and then experiment with it when you understand how the market is responding to your offers. Lastly, when selecting your trial offers, anything that is health related is always good: Weight loss, stop smoking, get rid of acne, etc… You can’t ever go wrong with these products if you can find a $1 trial or a free trial offer for people. As far as driving traffic goes, it works with any type, so it’s up to you to make a decision that feels right for you. So with that said, are you ready to put my method into action and start making some serious money? Good! Let’s get started then… Note: You will need some knowledge of web editing software such as DreamWeaver, MS Frontpage or XSitePro (or whichever you prefer). There are two ways you can create this site. You can create it from scratch or you can use a Wordpress template with your own domain. Wordpress is a PHP blog that the search engines love: http://wordpress.org
41
It’s very advantageous and your site has a better chance of getting natural search traffic as opposed to a plain .html website. It also eliminates the need to have RSS feeds and an XML sitemap installed on your website from scratch, since Wordpress already has it. If you are going to create a site from scratch, I would suggest you use www.elance.com (where you can hire someone to do this for you), unless you know how to work with XML and PHP… or you fancy learning it. So then, how do you use this method on your website? Firstly, you will need to buy a domain for your website. I normally use http://godaddy.com for this. What you are going to do is build a site around CPA offers from a particular niche of your choice. As I said, the weight loss industry works very well for this as there are a lot of good offers. If you don’t have an account with them already, go to www.clickbooth.com and sign up. This is another CPA network, similar to www.TheBizOppNetwork.com Once inside the Clickbooth site, you can search for great offers to build your site around. What you really want to find are trial offers, because as we’ve already discussed, trial offers are a low out of pocket expense for your visitors, but the commission for you is fantastic! You can get $1 to $10 trials and get paid $18 to $53 in commission! Here’s how to find all the trial offers:
42
Once you’ve logged in, if you click on the “full category listing” tab (shown above), it will take you to the following web address: https://publishers.clickbooth.com/partners/search_program_categories.html This page contains all of your CPA offers. Scroll through the different categories until you find high commission/low payout offers. Begin with the “trial offers” first and scroll down until you see this section:
There are always health related offers here: stop smoking, weight loss, acne, etc… and you only need around 4 or 5 good offers that convert well. Note: These companies are paying per lead – WOW! Do you see the power of this now? There are also offers where you get paid just for the click – just for sending traffic to other people’s websites. If you feel this isn’t enough, you can go to other CPA networks and find more offers. It will take you a little longer though because you’ll need to get your affiliate links and create your ads separately for all of them. I normally use 5 ads throughout my site and just change the order in which they appear on the different pages. If you can’t find 4 or 5 good offers on Clickbooth, remember to take a look at TheBizOppNetwork, Commission Junction, etc. I’m using Clickbooth here just for illustrative purposes. Once you sign up with any of these networks, you’ll see that the process is basically the same as the one below… To get your affiliate link (this is what people will click on to visit your website), just click on the offer and it will give you two choices: 1. A link to advertise on pay-per-click campaigns 2. A link for natural search traffic
43
Make sure you get the proper link! If you don’t, you might not get credit for affiliate sales. They use different links for tracking purposes, so make sure you have the right one before you start advertising. Your link will already be embedded with your affiliate number when you sign up, so once you click on the offer and find the proper links, they are ready to go. When you’ve located and selected all of your offers, you’re now ready to create text ads for each of them. And to do this, you need to turn your affiliate link into a hyperlink when you’re placing them on your web page. A hyperlink is a regular link on a website that visitors can click on. You should then end up with an ad that looks something like this: Weight Loss Breakthrough Amazing Science Melts Pounds Away Start Today & Look Hotter Than Ever! www.weight-loss-story.com Basically, you want to make an ad that looks like a Google AdSense ad, which you’ve probably seen on many sites throughout the Internet. The reason for this is because the ad format that Google uses has been proven to produce clicks and sales. (In case you haven’t noticed, Google’s entire business is centered on AdWords and AdSense. It’s one of the most successful business models in internet marketing history, so don’t try to re-invent the wheel!) The top link in blue will be your hyperlink. When the visitor clicks on that link and subsequently makes a purchase or completes the required action, you receive a commission. Make sure that all of your ads are the same in terms of height, length, font, etc. This looks better on the page and your visitor is more likely to click on nice clean links as opposed to ones that are sloppy and poorly aligned. That’s it! When I first experimented with this method, I ran the website for three months and converted 1 out of every 56 visitors that came to my site. The last month I did the test, I made $954.76. Imagine what your revenue would be if you dedicated one hour a day to your site for a full year?
44
This consistency of action and dedication to improving your site is what separates people who make average amounts of money online from those who make job-ending fortunes! Then, once the money is coming in, do what I do and pay someone else to do the hard work for you… 2. Guaranteed Sign-Ups What I’m about to reveal now is the simplest and by far the most risk-free way of making money with the CPA model. Your first step is to take a look at the offers section at TheBizOppNetwork.com, or in any CPA network you choose to use, and find something that you’d like to promote. For the purposes of the methods I’m going to take you through now, I recommend focusing on those with one page payout forms and high CPAs. So, how does this work? Well, it’s very simple. All you’ll be doing is sending your prospects to a particular Landing Page where they’ll need to fill in their name, address, email address, zip code, and so on. Alternatively, you can choose to promote an offer that requires email submission only (although these don’t payout quite as well). Once you have found an offer that you want to promote, click through to it, select the type of traffic that you’ll be using to promote it, and then acquire the link you need. All of your clicks, impressions, and even acquisitions will be tracked in the same way that ClickBank tracks links so you don’t have to worry about missing out on any income. All you have to do now is get that link out onto the web, and every time someone fills out that form, you get paid. WARNING: Don't try clicking on the link and filling in the form multiple times yourself. If someone signs up for the same offer twice, from the same IP address, it will get noticed. If someone signs up 10 times, they’re history! So now you know how it works, let me show you how to make money with it…
45
Ok, now that you’ve selected an offer and you’re ready to promote it, you need to get people to sign-up to it through your link. Many question the value of guaranteed sign-ups, but this method does provide leads and that’s exactly what we’re after. Firstly, log into your CPA network and find an offer that has a high paying, one page conversion. To make it successful you should have an offer of over $5.00 CPM, a one page web-form completion for payout. The third point here is very important when trying to turn your sign ups into cash as quickly as possible. In many CPA networks, you will find a large percentage of people offering good money to attract people to sign-up to certain highly competitive websites, such as dating sites, for example. However, unless you have some experience of these niche sites yourself (or you have some useful contacts), I’d strongly advise against promoting these kinds of offers with the guaranteed sign-ups method as it will take you months to make any real money. So then, once you’ve found a good offer, you have a good niche and you’re ready to start sending your sign-ups through and raking in the cash, we now need to locate a provider that can send us the kind of volume we want. Now, as far as guaranteed sign-ups go, there are hundreds of providers so a simple search on Google will reveal where you can get started. A lot of the offers on the CPA networks will be US leads only, which means your sign-ups will be a little bit more expensive, but there’s still plenty of room for profit, so don’t worry too much. For example, many of these providers will give you a price of between $0.50 and $1.50 per US sign-up. And, as you will have seen by now, there are many offers that fit the requirements of the sign-ups and will payout anything from $3 - $20, depending on what they are. I will now give you an example of a campaign that a friend of mine ran very successfully with this method… He located a one page offer in the tax niche that paid out $16.50, simply for completing the sign-up page! This was because tax season was coming around and they were looking for leads. Well, he got his affiliate link and then let a few providers get to work on it.
46
By the end of the month they had provided him with 342 sign-ups for this one offer - which, for those of you without a calculator handy, equated to $5,643 through his link - from one campaign. Now, admittedly not all campaigns will go this well, but it shows what can be done. The providers obviously just managed to get through to the prospects on this offer, and as such, created a huge profit for my friend. But, it’s not unreasonable to expect to see 50 sign-ups a month from each company. On a good offer that converts at $5.00, and with a number of orders placed, this can be enough to live very comfortably indeed… and would you stop there? No Way! I’m sure you can already see the advantages of this method. Indeed, you just need to spend a small amount of time looking for a suitable offer. Note: Ensure that the providers you purchase from are reputable, as some of the online sign-up providers can give you poor quality sign-ups, provide incentives, or do other things that you won’t want to be associated with, if of course you ever receive anything for your money. This is one of the ways in which I have built such a HUGE and responsive list, with profits… and effectively for no money at all! However, there is another way of finding a huge number of sign-ups! And that’s to use sites such as Sitepoint Marketplace, Digital Point Marketplace, Elance and Get-A-Freelancer (GAF). The one I normally use is Sitepoint Marketplace because I’ve found their response rate and quality to be the highest. But for this particular method you will also need to post at Elance and GAF. Here is an example of a post you might create:
“Hello GAF providers, I’m looking for someone who can provide me with a large number of US only leads that have to be sent through my web-form using a specific link. It’s a simple one page process and the offer is free to join. I offer a payout of $0.50 for every person that you can send through the link I give you. The link will have a tracking ID so you must use this exact link in order to be paid. I pay only through PayPal, and I will only work with you if you prove you’re
47
able to provide leads. I will expect to see at least 50 leads before you will receive payment. Please PM me if you’re interested. Regards, Your Name” Clearly, the example above is merely a template, but it incorporates a few essential elements that you’ll need if you’re going to have any success with these kinds of sites. Firstly, you have to be very clear about the terms you are offering. Most importantly, I have mentioned that I’m only offering payment via PayPal and that people interested will not receive payment until they have given at least a certain number of leads. This makes scammers think twice before trying to take your money. Don't get me wrong, they will still try, but this makes it a lot less likely that they’ll succeed! You may receive a PM (typically in broken English) in which they’ll claim to be able to provide you with 5000 leads per week if you pay for 200 in advance, for example. Don't let the $ signs in your head affect your common sense. There are people around that can do these kinds of numbers, but most can't. So make sure you don't pay anyone anything until you’ve seen some results. 3. The Secret Giveaway In order to take advantage of this method, you first need to write a back-story explaining why you’re giving away something free, or why the reader should sign up to the offer. Write as if it’s your website and you are speaking to the other person as a friend. This also means that you do not have to promote 100% free offers, which is the one bonus this technique does have over the guaranteed sign-ups method. If you’re promoting an offer that takes some sort of payment, be it credit card details or Tax/SSN from a US citizen, it follows that the offer will payout a lot more.
48
This is a technique that I’ve used with great success. It worked so well because it gave people the impression that they were getting something free. And everyone loves a bargain! If you can convince someone that they’re getting a great deal, or something for nothing, when in reality all they’re doing is giving you more of their money, then you’ll make a fortune. I found an offer that provided a free trial for Blockbuster video. The lead had to pay $9.99 for shipping and could rent as many DVDs as they wanted for a month, with no other charges. So I created a little back story as to why I was giving this great deal away. It went like this:
“How To Get 100% FREE Unlimited Blockbuster Rental Hello all, Recently, I discovered a little secret that I just had to get out in the open for all you movie lovers out there. Within marketing, big companies are making deals everywhere, with one company giving its services to another company for free, to promote something. It’s a “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” kind of relationship. It’s a common marketing move, and you can see it everywhere if you look for it. But the public never gets to actually see these offers. Oh no, they’re far too good to give away without getting something in return. But how would you like to get the website link that allows you to sign up for this special deal, the same link that most people never get to see? Basically, all you have to do is pay $9 shipping, ONCE, and then you get completely unlimited movie rental for a whole month. Shipping, handling, rental all paid for! Then, if you think about it, what’s to stop you signing up again after your free trial is over? Let me answer that... NOTHING! If you want to ask me a question then just drop me an email at [email address]. Regards, Your Name”
49
Can you see what I’m doing there? I’m giving the impression that there is something secret being given away. So, what could I do with this article? Well, just create a simple, easy web page using a web page editor like Nvu or Dreamweaver with nothing but this text on it. Then, make a PPC ad on Adbrite or AdWords and drive traffic towards it. Most people will click through at least, and you will find that quite a few will decide to sign up if you have an effective ad. Then, it just becomes the numbers game that I mentioned earlier! However, if you do try promoting something like this, remember not to over-do it. There may be some copyright violations on your advertising if you are not careful, so always take care. There is something else you could do with this though. I’ll take this method one stage further and take an article like the one above, using OpenOffice to turn it into a PDF file. There is no need to make it fancy, just add a catchy title and describe what you want them to do with the link. It should be written like a promotional email really. Then, find someone with a newsletter in your niche. Like the Blockbuster example, find some people who run entertainment websites or online DVD shops, as they should have a newsletter service. Offer them a cut of the takings if they’re willing to help out. I found a number of websites that offer DVD reviews and huge websites that are movie based. Most of these sites won't overtly show that they advertise, but if you ask, most will have a member base or a newsletter that they send out. What I found to be hugely effective is to upload the PDF to your webhost, and then give them a link so they can download it. Can you imagine the effect if you have a website like some of the ones in the movie niche that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers?!
50
As we’ve discussed during this guide, there are many different methods for getting your CPA offers out there, but I’m going to concentrate on my favorite five now; polls, video marketing, video games, forums and Yahoo! Answers. 4. Poll Pages Let me tell you about a promotional method that one of my friends recently used. This is one of the easiest methods available, and I'm going to show you exactly how he did it. You see, CPA Polls work best when they are themed around a popular topic of the time. It can be a hot celebrity gossip story, a political debate or a hit TV show. In this instance, he chose to use the Olympic superstar Usain Bolt, and the poll went out just after his world record breaking 100m victory. The theme was simple; Does Usain Bolt look like Akon? Then, when the user clicked on either YES or NO to place their vote, they were immediately taken to his email submission offer! For this poll, he worked exclusively on the Google content network and placed bids on the keywords you might expect. Phrases like: Usain Bolt breaks the world record Usain Bolt easily won the 100 meters Usain Bolt youtube Akon assault Akon charged Akon youtube He then moved onto social media promotional tools such as Digg, Stumble, YouTube Videos, forums and Blogs. A week into this campaign he was receiving $0.05 clicks from Google. The YouTube video then went viral and received over 3000 clicks per day. All of this working together was a recipe for success and after only two weeks he’d made over $700.00 in gross profit! And it really hadn’t taken much work at all… So, how do you find out what the current trends are? Well, I use one of my favorite tools that we’ve spoken about previously: http://www.google.com/insights/search/
51
As you can see from the first line on the screenshot, this is where you can find out “what the world is searching for” so essentially, the results you see here are the most popular topics at any given time. Now then, I’ve decided that my CPA offer is going to be based around entertainment. It’s also going to be focusing on topics within the last 30 days and I’m going to keep it confined to the U.S. only. So, as you can see from the ‘Rising Searches’ results below, 10 topics have been listed in order of popularity and I have singled out numbers 2 and 8: Bigfoot and Kim Kardashian! You can then create polls around these topics, asking questions in order to illicit responses from people and get them to sign up for your CPA offers. If you’re not sure how to create polls, I normally use http://www.micropoll.com/ and http://www.misterpoll.com/ to help me with mine. For example, you could pose the question: “Is Bigfoot real?” and include an image of the beast itself! There are so many options as you have 10 topics to choose from and a variety of potential questions, so try brainstorming for the craziest idea you can think of so it has a chance to go viral!
52
You could also produce a video with a photo montage of your images and tell your viewers to go to your poll page to vote!
5. Video Marketing Now I’m going to show you how to create a video marketing campaign using free tools that you can find on the internet. To get you started, this link will show you how to use Windows Movie Maker: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx
You could also create a video on YouTube to start your video marketing campaign, and I’ve included some helpful links at the end of this section that will show you how to do this. But first, what video should you choose? Well, anything that matches up nicely with a particular CPA offer! For example, I found an email submission program on one of the CPA networks that offered baby product vouchers:
53
So my target audience here would be parents with young children. And what do parents with young children need? Exactly, baby products! So I asked a friend of mine if I could film him and his 10 month old baby… They often sit in front of YouTube watching nursery rhyme clips together, so for one of my video campaigns I filmed them playing together and watching the clips. Now it was just a question of incorporating the CPA offer into the video… And how did I do this? Ok, you’ve probably noticed that when you watch TV, there are commercial breaks, right? Well, you can use the same concept in your videos! So I chose a point at the beginning and the end of the video and inserted a “landing page”. For the landing page, I went to the CPA Offer landing page itself (of the baby pictured above) and screen captured the image. I used “Screengrab” for this (a Firefox Add-On): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146 Or you can use the print screen function on your PC or laptop.
54
I then opened Microsoft Paint (alternatively you could use your own image editing tool) and played around with the original image. After a quick 5 minute copy and paste job, I ended up with this:
As I said, I then put this image in the video, so it played for 5 seconds at the start and 5 seconds at the end. I had over 1500 people visit my website in the space of 4 days! And that was it! Now then, if you could manage to do this weekly with about 5-10 videos, your CPA income would sky-rocket. So make sure you look for new offers to promote. Helpful Links
Downloading From YouTube
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-Download.htm This will allow you to download videos from YouTube and Google Video to your computer hard drive with one click of the mouse.
55
Videos from YouTube will be saved as AVI, MP4, 3GP or FLV files, and you'll be able to play AVI with any video player on your computer. The new version also has the batch mode so you can download several video files from YouTube or Google Video during one session. So, how did I use this free tool? • Go to YouTube • Grab 10 video links • Input them into the YouTube download program above • Download them • Open up Windows Movie Maker • Insert the downloaded video • Input the image you created earlier (at the start and end), watermark the video and produce the video.
Uploading to YouTube I use the dvdvideosoft.com YouTube Uploader (which is also free). I like this tool because it allows me to use “batch uploading”. Free YouTube Uploader: http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-Uploader.htm Free YouTube Uploader is the very first PC desktop application to upload video to YouTube without using the original YouTube web interface. It’s a great option if you upload a lot of videos and it also guarantees that your video won’t be rejected by YouTube for incompatibility reasons. It allows you to convert any video to a YouTube friendly video format with optimal size and quality, while the new version has the “batch mode” as I said, so you can upload several video files during one session. Since the Uploader tool doesn’t allow multiple descriptions, I use common descriptions and tags, which you can edit later once the videos have been uploaded. In the description field for the example below, I have started with my URL: http://www.yourdomain.com Claim Your Vouchers! Barney The Big Purple Dinosaur Sings I Love You! Lyrics
56
I love you, you love me We're a happy family With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you Won't you say you love me too?! Note: You should try to include as many relevant keywords as you can in the description box. Also, try using the YouTube Video Annotations, and encourage your viewers to rate, comment, mark as favorite or subscribe to your videos. This will rank your videos higher in the search. As you know though, there are so many duplicate videos on YouTube. So how can you attract viewers to YOUR videos? Well, a good place to start is with the title, so make sure yours stands out above the others by using a key phrase. Example Titles:
Barney – I Love You [High Quality] Barney – I Love You [Sing Along] Barney – I Love You Now then, which one would you click on if you had the choice? Yes, exactly - the description that says ‘High Quality’ (and possibly ‘Sing Along’ after that) because these two stand out above the first one. Other possible titles could use the terms ‘HD Quality’, ‘Karaoke’ or ‘ReMix’, for example. The important thing to remember is not to use generic titles, but be creative instead! Finally, make sure you select the best ‘Thumbnails’ for your video. On YouTube, the thumbnail is the picture that’s displayed in the middle of the video. Pay attention to this, as a bad thumbnail won’t entice people to click on it. Now then, let me show you another technique in a different niche… 6. Video Games To utilize this method, first download around 3-5 minutes of those GTA Game Stunts video compilations which you can find on Google or YouTube… Join them into one video and then watermark it…
57
If you’re not sure how to do this, there are numerous sites on the web which can help you, such as http://forum.videohelp.com/topic248307.html Now, search the CPA networks that you joined and look for a CPA Offer for a free Xbox and copy the landing page. Then repeat the earlier steps I talked about above, produce the video and upload it onto YouTube. Once it’s been uploaded, make sure you use all the available tools from the video page to promote your videos (below). Bookmark it, share it, and then send it!
After that, all you need to do is rinse and repeat!
58
Now then, let’s jump start your video views with the use of Basic AutoRefreshing… This process will give your video more sites, make it appear more popular, and generally help others to find it quicker, improving your chances of getting more leads. To begin with, we can start increasing your view count slowly. This can be done simply by refreshing your video's page, and as a result, the view count will be increased by one view each time. This process can be automated by downloading and installing an add-on for Firefox. The Firefox Add-on is called ReloadEvery 2.0 and it can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115 1.) Follow the link and click the ‘Install Now’ button. Then restart Firefox and you’re ready to go. 2.) Load up the YouTube page of the video that you want to refresh and right click on the background. 3.) Go to ReloadEvery 2.0 on the right click menu and select the time interval you want. Then select ‘enable’. The video will start reloading every few seconds, adding a view each time. 4.) The same video can be reloading concurrently in multiple Firefox tabs. The time interval depends on the number of tabs that you have open. As the loading time for each individual tab increases, the number of tabs open increases. This will allow a maximum of 202 views to accumulate before YouTube analytics are triggered and views from that IP stop being counted. It should take about 10 minutes to do. 5.) Actual view hits are updated in 'bumps' about 3 times a day. The first 200+ will show up immediately. You will sometimes notice that people will have more ‘ratings’ than ‘view’ hits, as those attributes refresh more frequently. You can do this continuously from the same IP address and these “views” will still be counted. BUT, it seems that those hits are put into the 'weekly' views, not the daily views, so it doesn't get you the honors as easily. Here are some YouTube bots and tools that you can buy to increase your results: YouTube account creators YouTube view increasers YouTube commenter/ratings
59
If you are interested in them, please do your research before buying. Now that you’ve created your videos, it’s time to release them all over the internet! Here are some Video sites that you can upload them to: AOL Video Blip.tv Crackle Sclipo Daily Motion Google Video Howcast Metacafe Myspace Revver
StupidVideos Veoh Yahoo Video YouTube Viddler 5min Vimeo Break Imeem Graspr
As you’d expect, uploading one video to each site would take a lot of time and effort, so I’m going to show you a free service that will allow you to blast your videos to all of these sites with just a click of a button! The site can be found here: http://www.tubemogul.com All you need to do is sign up for a free account and you can start sending your videos to multiple sites, quickly and easily. (If you reach the maximum limit of videos that they’ll allow you to load each month, you can simply create a second account)! 7. Forums The fourth method that I use to make money from CPA is to advertise offers on forum boards. There are literally thousands of public discussion forums available online, dedicated to a wide variety of topics. In case you’re not sure, discussion forums are simply places where individuals who share the same interests can discuss aspects of those interests with others online. Typically, forums require that you sign-up and become a member in order to participate in any discussions taking place on the forum and post comments yourself. However, member registration is usually free and it only takes a minute or two to complete.
60
Once you’ve signed up to a forum, you’ll be provided with a username so that you can login to the forum and start posting. You’ll also have a membership account which will allow you to input things such as your name, address, some personal information (if you want to) and, most importantly, your signature. A lot of the time, users will use this facility to list their own personal website address, or include a quote that means something to them. You’re going to include your CPA link! So, for this example, let’s go back to the Baby Voucher offer and use that. To begin with, go to Google.com and search for baby+forum. You’ll find that the search results will bring up a list of all the Baby related forums. (This will work with any keyword, so just type in [keyword] + forum. So if you want to find some forums related to poker, just type in poker + forum). Now, once you’ve had a look around, found a forum that you’d like to join and set up your membership, it’s time to insert your CPA link in your signature box! Make the link say something like: “FREE $500 Baby Vouchers”. Now, once you have your CPA link as your signature, engage in a few high-traffic threads and post one or two helpful comments or interesting news stories so that people will view them and see your CPA link. How should you go about finding ‘interesting news stories?’ Well, what I normally do is go to Google.com, and search for keywords. For the baby forum, you want to find a news story relating babies, fathers or mothers for instance. So how about putting the following into Google: “Mother jailed for” I guarantee that something very ‘interesting’ will show up… Now, grab the article that you think will generate the most responses, post it in the forum, and watch all the concerned parents read and reply to your thread. I mean, if you were a parent, wouldn’t you read something with a title like these?
61
Mother jailed for 12 years after child starved in pub squalor YouTube Video Mother jailed for coaxing her child to smoke Another technique for getting people to view your CPA link is to purchase a ‘Sticky’ Post. For the benefit of those who don’t know what a ‘sticky’ post is, it’s basically a forum post that is "pinned" to the top of the forum index, enhancing its visibility and preventing it from being buried by more recent posts. Sticky posts (or ‘stickies’) generally contain information that a discussion group administrator or moderator believe to be of critical or ongoing value to users of the forum. There is likely to be at least one 'sticky' post at the top of any forum section that you look at. Now then, here’s what you need to do to make use of this function… “PM” or send a message to the forum owner and explain that you’d like to contribute further to the forum by sharing a fantastic freebie offer that you’ve found. You’ll be happy to create a post that includes this Free Voucher offer if the Moderator will agree to “sticky” it! If the moderator/owner doesn’t agree to it straight away, sweeten the deal by telling them that you’ll be willing to buy advertising space on the forum, so instead of putting up your post for nothing, you’ll buy a sticky post for x amount of dollars. I recently bought a sticky post on a Sports forum for $30 per month. I promoted an email submission link on a free energy drink offer, and had 543 leads in the first month. The offer paid me $1.05 per lead which worked out as $570.15. And as I said, the ad only cost me $30… Not bad, eh?! And how come the conversions are so great, you ask? Well, because you’re getting targeted traffic to your offers: parents on baby forums, poker players on poker forums etc. It’s simple, but highly targeted advertising. And it works!
62
8. Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven website that literally aims to answer any questions that people may have about virtually anything. Users are able to submit questions that they want answering, and answer questions themselves from other users. Take a look, and you’ll see what I mean: to http://www.answers.yahoo.com The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage Participation, and virtually any question is allowed, except ones that violate the Yahoo! Answers community guidelines. To encourage good answers, helpful participants are occasionally featured on the Yahoo! 360° blog page. Though the service itself is free, the content of the answers are owned by the respective users, while Yahoo! maintains a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide right to publish the information. Although Yahoo! Answers functions much like a huge forum with multiple categories, there is a “no signature” function so you won’t be able to include your CPA offer link there, as you did with the forums. However, there is a resource section for links that are associated with the question or answers submitted. And this is where you’ll drop your CPA offer link! Get started by going to http://www.answers.yahoo.com and sign up for an account. This will allow you to ask and answer questions on Yahoo! Answers. Then review the CPA offers you want to promote… I found the following offer that paid me $25.20 per lead, and required a short form to be completed:
63
Now go back to Yahoo! Answers and click on ‘Advanced Search’. You will want to filter out all the bad questions (questions that are closed and can't be answered) and target your niche. Now it’s time to search Yahoo! Answers for questions and answers using the keywords or keyword phrases you identified in the actual CPA offers you found.
64
Now select the appropriate categories so you can find related questions, and make sure you select ‘Open Questions’ for the Question Status field. You will now see a set of questions all about ‘Weight Loss Tea’ (ignore the Sponsor Results as they’re not actual questions, and concentrate on the ones beneath):
65
Click on one of the questions to open it up‌ The result will look something like the example below:
66
Now click on ‘Answer this Question’. This will take you through to a page that will allow you to write your own answer, while dropping your CPA Offer link into the relevant resource box at the same time:
67
Once you’ve written your answer and inserted your CPA offer link, click on ‘Preview’ to double check that everything’s ok, and then hit ‘Submit’. Not only will the person posting the question see this answer, but everyone else reading this question will too. You can’t get more targeted traffic then this! Think about it… someone is interested in a particular product (such as Weight Loss Tea) and you just offered them a free trial for the product. Most people are going to click on your offer and take a look! All you need to do now is repeat the exact same steps for the rest of the questions you found in the search results.
68
Note: Occasionally, a community member may flag you as a spammer, and Yahoo! Answer could ban your account. If this happens, simply create another account and repeat the process! Here are some other niche markets that are currently converting very well: • • • •
Debt Car Insurance Mortgage Cash Advance
Due to the current financial climate, many people are asking questions about debt, loans and mortgages at the moment, so have a look at some of the CPA networks that you’re signed up to and try to find some of the best landing pages. It’s not hugely important as to whether they’re long forms, short forms, or if a credit card is required, but it’s a fact that simpler, shorter forms convert better, although the pay-per-lead value is often less. Here are some pointers to remember when promoting via Yahoo! Answers: • Make sure that your CPA offer relates to the question that you are submitting! • Avoid “hard selling” or fantastic claims in the questions or answers you provide, otherwise it becomes obvious what you’re trying to do. • Make sure you include the link to your CPA offer in the resource box. At the very bottom of the page (in the left hand corner), you will see the option to add that search query in an RSS reader, as shown below:
For more information on what an RSS feeder is, and how it can help you, take at a look at Google’s Free RSS feeder for more information: http://www.google.com/reader • Check your Yahoo! Answers account every day. This is important, because once you’ve added the above feed to your RSS reader, you will receive updates concerning new questions relating to your niche market (based on the keywords you just entered). This means that you’ll be one of the first to answer any new questions!
69
• Repeat this process, selecting keywords for each niche market you’re involved in. • View the ‘Open Questions’ from the different categories or use the ‘Advanced Search’ tool to search for more specific questions based on relevant keywords. • Answer the questions that are posted via the feeds. • Build landing pages and include their links in the ‘Source Box’ with every question that you answer. Once you have designed a landing page for each niche market, you will always have a place to refer people to, based on the subject of the question you are answering. • Take the time to create multiple pages for each niche, so if you answer a lot of questions in the same category, you can direct your traffic to various places on your website. Writing articles relating to the niches you’re involved in is the best way to generate traffic and continue to address different topics on your website. • Install a WordPress blog and organize topics into groups. This is an easy way to categorize your articles or create new topics on your website for different questions you answer. • Purchase a generic domain so that you can create a multi-topic blog. This will make it easier to direct people to the same website without having to create multiple blogs or purchase multiple domain names. • Create a Swipe File on your hard-dr0ve – basically just a regular text file or Word document with a list of previously answered questions, even ones that you haven’t answered yourself. This will allow to cut and paste your answers and cover more ground easily. The trick here is to modify your answers whenever required so that the person posting the question believes you have answered it exclusively for them. • Copy and paste answers from Wikipedia! While this is a useful time-saver and a method used by a lot of Yahoo! Answers marketers, be careful not to simply paste the same answer repeatedly. Every question is different and you need to ensure that you modify your answer to fit each one. • Create multiple Yahoo! Answer accounts. If you are involved in multiple niche markets, doing this will help you answer more questions each day under different accounts, while building up levels on all of them. You’ll also be able to create different characters (you can pretend to be a man, woman, parents, single man, divorced man, etc) which will lend credibility when you are
70
answering questions in different categories. Yahoo! Answers allows multiple accounts, so you don’t have to worry about breaking any rules. However, voting for your own answers or point gaming is not allowed. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with the rules, here is a link to the Community Guidelines overview: http://answers.yahoo.com/info/community_guidelines • Try to log into your account every day so that you can build up your levels. The quicker you reach a level where you are able to answer an unlimited number of questions, the more exposure you will receive. • Always “cloak” your CPA link if you are dropping it into public sites. I mean, which link would you choose out of the following two? http://www.cpaclicks.com/contextual.asp?a=xxxx&b=xxx&d=0&l=0&o=&p= http://www.yourdomain.com/babyvoucher The second domain name looks neat and professional, and it will receive many more clicks than the first one... and I can guarantee that! • Don’t just stop at Yahoo! Answers either. There are other communities that provide a similar service. Take a look here: http://www.answerbag.com/ Conclusion Anyway, I’ve now laid out a few techniques that I personally use to make money via CPA marketing, so you should have quite a few ideas in your head now. Try them out and send me your success stories! I’d also recommend that you try all of these methods at least once, because they do work, and I know that for a fact! Remember, start small and build it up over time – this will guarantee your success. If you think too big too soon, mistakes become very costly… so follow my advice and you’ll be making a healthy income with CPA very soon. Best Wishes, Chris Automated Income Streams Ltd
71
List of CPA Networks I’ve highlighted my top 5 first, and then the rest are listed in alphabetical order: TheBizOppNetwork: http://www.thebizoppnetwork.com Maxbounty: http://www.maxbounty.com CPA Empire: https://secure.cpaempire.com/signup Hydra Network: https://network.hydranetwork.com NeverBlueAds: http://www.neverblueads.com acclaimnetwork.com addrive.com adfinity.com adfish.com adplosion.com adreign.com adreporting.com ads4dough.com adsmarket.com advaliant.com advertiseisland.com advertisingrevenueservice.com affiliace.com affiliatebot.com affiliatecrew.com affiliateer.com affiliatefuel.com affiliatefuture.com affiliatenetwork.com affiliatesector.com affiliatewindow.com affiliator.com agamimedia.com aptimus.com aquasismedia.com asseenontvnetwork.com atminteractive.com axill.com azoogle.com bigbrandnetwork.com bigtopnetworks.com bloosky.com bluefn.com bluelithium.com
72
bluephoenixnetwork.com bountycpa.com budsinc.com bulletads.com canadiansponsors.com capitallnetwork.com cashengines.com clickbooth.com clickmegacenter.com clickxchange.com clixgalore.com coldcashpartners.com commissionmonster.com commissionsoup.com commissionxchange.com constantclicks.com copeac.com coprosper.com cpaemarket.com cpaempire.com cpajunction.com cpastorm.com cpauniverse.com credit.com cyberbounty.com dalenetwork.com darkblue.com directleads.com directroi.com dmipartners.com dragonmediaonline.com eadexchange.com eadvertising.com eaffiliatez.com edebitpay.com empiricads.com epicenternetwork.com epicenternetwork.com essociate.com ferbine.com filinet.com financialaffiliatemarketing.com fineclicks.com firelead.com
73
floppybank.com fluxads.com focalex.com go2directads.com hydranetwork.com icommissions.com idealrevenue.com idicampaigns.com incentaclick.com incentivematrix.com incentreward.com innovationads.com instantdollarz.com ironoffers.com jumboaffiliates.com leadermarkets.com leadermarkets.com leadflash.com leadgenetwork.com leadhound.com levelclick.com linkconnector.com linkmo.com linkprofits.net linkrads.com linkshare.com linkvalu.com luckypacific.com marketdraw.com marketleverage.com maxbounty.com metareward.com midtenmedia.com modernclick.com morningfalls.com motiveinteractive.com motiveinteractive.com ncsreporting.com netklix.com netmargin.com nettraction.com neverblueads.com nitroaffiliates.com offerfusion.com
74
offersquest.com offertrack.com offerweb.com offerwise.com offerz.com omguk.com oridian.com ourfreestuff.net paidonresultes.com pantheranetwork.com partnerweekly.com payaff.com perfectpaycheck.com primaryads.com profitcenternetwork.com profitistic.com redmccombsmedia.com responsivedata.com revenuegateway.com revenueloop.com revenuestreet.com rexdirectnet.com rextopia.com rextopia.com rocketprofit.com roimatrix.com roirocket.com search4clicks.com shareasale.com shareresults.com specificmedia.com sprintrade.com stellarads.directtrack.com superaffiliatesoft.net swmark.com synervation.com tarsus-media.com thebizoppnetwork.com theignitenetwork.com theleadstream.com thinkaction.com topnichepartners.com tradedoubler.com trafficmarketplace.com
75
trafficneeds.com trafficsenergy.com trafficsystem.com trafficvenuedirect.com turn.com turn2offers.com valuead.com valueclick.com vayanpays.com vhmnetwork.com webclients.net webgains.com webmasterlife.com websponsors.com xy7.com z-mirage.com zanox.com
76