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What Needs Doing?

by ckboddic
5 replies
The list below is a novices understanding of the CPA business. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I want to get started off on the right foot.

1) Get into an ad network (a number of factors might ease this process)
2) Select a CPA offer (implies knowing how to select a profitable offer)
3) Create a site that promotes your CPA offer (hire people to do this or create them yourself)
4) Get keywords that successfully promote your CPA offer. Start out with as many keywords as possible.
5) Write or create ads.
6) Start sending people to your site with AdWords (implies knowing how to use AdWords) and SEO
7) Pare down your keywords after discovering which are the most profitable
8) Tweak your sites.
9) Move onto the next offer. Repeat cycle.

Questions:

1) What am I leaving out?
2) Which step takes up the most time?
3) What is filling up your time other than everything that goes into the promotion of your next offer? I feel like I might be missing a little bit of knowledge regarding what work goes into promoting old offers. That is to say, I don't see what you guys are doing after you've done most of the legwork setting up your sites and promoting your offer (because I don't know the exact work involved)...what are you doing with your offer after you've set everything up? Shouldn't you move on and try to promote more offers? How do old offers take up your time?
  • Profile picture of the author pikachu
    I'm glad you've put a lot of thought into this and you're on the right tracker. You'll get off on a good foot.

    You need to get started right now

    1) Just fill out those applications. If you aren't sure what networks to be signed up on you can always send me a PM (sorry always have to throw it out there hehe). Definitely read threads on the kind of questions CPA/Affiliate networks will ask. But again, it's never too early to apply to affiliate networks. The application will take time to process, and during that time you won't be able to see the offers.
    2) Always one of the trickiest parts. On a low budget, trying to get CPA offers that only require one form of input (email/zip code submits might be the easiest). If you have any free traffic sources this would be a great place to start. Otherwise read up on different techniques.
    3) Most often you will do this, but you can set up offers to directly link so that you do not need to create a "landing page".
    4) Different tools and ways to do this all depends on which way you want to promote the offer (ie SEO is different than, yahoo search which is different than google content).
    5-9) Spont on. Just pick one way you want to work on - PPC vs. SEO - Content vs. Search - Facebook, really get to know it before moving onto another technique.

    Questions:

    1) Not to sound cliche, but Step 10 - Get started! Take action right now and get yourself on your way. You will never be able to plan you way through an ad, you gotta test test test. Everytime you put up an ad you have a chance to make money. Everytime you simply read you have a 100% chance not to make money during that time.

    2) Everything takes forever in the beginning. Once you can start doing it over and over again you speed up. Things that would have taken me 2 hours to get done I now get do in 20-30 minutes. You just have to get comfortable by doing things.

    3) You tweak your ads running and make new campaigns. Not every campaign can be tweaked to perfection. Some you scrap after testing, some you tweak and some make you money. Again its about testing.

    Just doing things and messing up and trying again will be the fastest ways to results. If you're on a limited budget SEO is a lot cheaper than PPC. Just remember not to be worried about spending some money for information. I lurked for a free IM forums before testing out a paid forum. I definately found more direction and information readily available through the paid forum. I'm not saying you can't get it from the free ones, it's just gives a good structure for starting out when there's so many different avenues to choose. If you can fit it in your budget I'd definately recommend giving it a shot for a month.

    Regardless - get signed up on some affiliate/CPA network and get some ads posted up.

    Good luck
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  • Profile picture of the author ckboddic
    Thanks for the great post pikachu--much appreciated!

    Regarding the creation of landing pages or direct linking, how does on decide over the other? It almost seems as if linking directly would be preferable in a lot of instances since companies that would offer CPA programs would probably already have their own sales material better than the average affiliate would have the time to create cheaply (since that is often the one business they'd be focused on while). So why not always direct link? I can see review sites being one argument against it since review sites would give credibility to the product you're trying to get the user to take action with.

    Just to make sure, would me running a banner ad on Myspace that goes directly to soup.xyz (who paid me each time someone signed up for free soup trial) be an example of direct linking?
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    • Profile picture of the author pikachu
      Originally Posted by ckboddic View Post

      Thanks for the great post pikachu--much appreciated!

      Regarding the creation of landing pages or direct linking, how does on decide over the other? It almost seems as if linking directly would be preferable in a lot of instances since companies that would offer CPA programs would probably already have their own sales material better than the average affiliate would have the time to create cheaply (since that is often the one business they'd be focused on while). So why not always direct link? I can see review sites being one argument against it since review sites would give credibility to the product you're trying to get the user to take action with.

      Just to make sure, would me running a banner ad on Myspace that goes directly to soup.xyz (who paid me each time someone signed up for free soup trial) be an example of direct linking?
      Direct linking is preferable in many cases, but not necessarily always the best. When direct linking, some advertising websites *coughGOOGLEcough* will not let you direct link to certain pages, or depending on the linked to page, they will give you a lower ranking. Also, a landing page affords you the option to presell the person. In some cases you would want to convince someone *why* it's a good idea to create an account/enter their info rather than to simply send them directly to a website with a form to fill out.

      Overall it's mostly personal preference. Personally I've been doing a lot with direct linking lately because I'm lazy. You can make it work as well, but you have to find places that will send you direct traffic. Ultimately it's up to testing and figuring out what works.

      Lastly, your example with MySpace is spot on assuming that soup.xyz is your affiliate link
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  • Profile picture of the author ckboddic
    Also, regarding tweaking or filling up time after you've done a lot of the work that goes into the promotion of an offer...is a lot of your time being spent on just creating additional ads or sources of traffic for your successful CPA campaign? For example, after you have shown a pretty successful campaign on AdWords you might go on and start promoting at Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter. Would you say the majority of time spent after landing page creation and sales materials is spent on simply expanding your advertising/traffic reach, or is more time spent on maintenance chores and very minute, tedious improvements in sales copy and keyword selection?
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    • Profile picture of the author pikachu
      Originally Posted by ckboddic View Post

      Also, regarding tweaking or filling up time after you've done a lot of the work that goes into the promotion of an offer...is a lot of your time being spent on just creating additional ads or sources of traffic for your successful CPA campaign? For example, after you have shown a pretty successful campaign on AdWords you might go on and start promoting at Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter. Would you say the majority of time spent after landing page creation and sales materials is spent on simply expanding your advertising/traffic reach, or is more time spent on maintenance chores and very minute, tedious improvements in sales copy and keyword selection?
      There's so many ways to fill up your time after you've created the campaign lol. Most of it will be somewhat tedious improvements to the ad or sales copy and grooming keywords/adgroups. After you really get familiar with your tools, you can cruise through these tedious improvements much faster than you ever thought. Things that used to take 2 hours I can get done in 20-30 mins because I've gotten so much practice.

      The idea is you're going to improve these ads where they're currently running before branching out to other forms of traffic for the campaign. Also once you got one campaign up and running waiting to get clicked - it's just about that time to create the next one!

      I'll do my best to respond to further questions - good luck >
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