Why I Hate CPA Companies!

The CPA industry changes as rapidly as a woman's emotional state, which is why if you are going to do CPA, you would be better off using paid advertising such as PPV. SEO takes way too long, as as you have found out, the offer's can expire very quickly, if not over night.

Also, what kind of offers were you promoting? You would be best promoting lead generation offers such as credit repair.

The thing with Clickbank is you really need to have a list in order to make the most sales, otherwise you will find it very difficult to survive.

Chris

This has happened to me numerous times, pushing 50 articles to 10 different offers and I was faced with two problems:
- They pulled some offers, some of which weren't offered by any other company
- One of the CPA companies I was pushing leads to were a scam - GREAT

use a domain to redirect

pay per view is the best way to promote cpa

That's often the merchant not the network pulling the offer

make sure you blog or write article on long lasting niches such as health . diet / Free Samples. These niches often gets new offers if not one goes another comes by

There are some guys making big bucks with SEO and CPA, but it's not easy, because CPA changes very fast and it's a problem for people investing on long term campaigns.

However, I think that there are a few things that you can do to prevent it from happening very often.

1. Have a close relationship with your affiliate manager. Keep always in touch and never start a campaign without talking to him. He will let you know if the offers you are intending to promote are worth your time and money.

2. Don't promote exclusive offers or uncommon things. If choose offers that are similar to many others you can just start pointing your domains to other offers once they stop running (assuming that you use domain redirection or landing pages).

It's sad to see you giving up of CPA. Think again, reconsider. I have experience with both CPA and CPS models and the first one is much better in my opinion. If you let just one problem remove CPA from your business you will be making a big mistake.


William

Hi JR -

Its a very fair complaint and there isnt much that can be done about it, its one of the downsides of the CPA model.

With that said, the CPA model as a whole is awesome and I personally think you should reconsider switching...although that is just my biased opinion.


A good way to approach CPA is to always approach your campaign around the basis of the CPA offer, not necessarily the offer itself. If you are doing a long term strategy (like article marketing) travel campaign, make your campaign (copy, etc) about the niche, not about the specific offer. If the offer is for a specific travel company, make your campaign more broad so it doesnt mention the travel companys name.

Example, you are doing an article to promote an XYZ Travel Company email submit offer. In the article, dont mention that people can get a $500 voucher for XYZ Travel Co if they fill in their email submit...just mention people can get a $500 voucher for travel.

This way, if XYZ Company drops their offer, you can find another travel company email submit offer, put in that affiliate link in your redirected domain, and voila...you didnt lose any traffic and your offer is still applicable.

Does that make sense?



There is normally a way to make long term plays with your CPA offers, instead of short term plays like those based around one specific offer.

Ken

To address the problem here is what I would do:

Send visitors to a squeeze page where you can capture their name/e-mail for that niche by offering something of value for free which they would be interested in (information does the trick most of the time). This way you now have a list of subscribers that might be in the (for example) insurance niche. You can e-mail them offers and if one happens to expire you have time to find another offer and tell them about it rather then losing valuable (and potential) leads.

So this would help because:

1) If the offer expires the reader is not sent to a 'new' offer that may not be targeted enough for the article you wrote; which runs the risk of a potential lead moving on to competitors.

2) You can build up trust and be seen a guru by that list which will allow you to push more (RELEVANT!) offers and products to them

Hi jrrich814

it can even get worse if the CP network doesnt tell you they ceased the offer.

That happend to me more then often.


The soultion for me is:

NEVER use a cpa or cps link directly
but always use a landingpage where you have full controll.

The advantage is you can change the offer
without changing the ( approved ) landing page.

I personally use TrafficSplitter3 for redirection
and managing offers ( and tracking).

offermonitor.com was ment to check the existance
of the promoted offer.


lots success
Frank
germany

Talk to your affiliate manager, ask them some questions.

How is your relationship with this advertiser?

What is the status of these campaigns? Are they new? Been tested?

Questions like this not only will help you and your manager build a better relationship but it help you understand the status of their relationship with the advertiser.

The last thing anyone wants is to waste time on setting anything up, just to have it pulled away from you after a few successful days.

With that being said I can say that it still happens.

Also, if you are doing decent numbers, try and find the actual advertiser or merchant to bypass the network. Then you just have to worry about the merchant dropping the offer, not the network and/or the merchant

The CPA industry is not really for article marketers, unfortunately. You need to buy traffic to actually make any real money.

You should always control your destination URL with a redirect, so you can 'redirect' to a different offer at the drop of a hat.