CPA: Experience vs Knowledge

Hey ajensen, it's an excellent start for you to be asking this question.

CPA is simple, yet difficult. You can strike it rich with one campaign, but you can also go broke with one campaign. In my opinion, your best bet would be to read up on the basics of CPA marketing, learn where the best places to advertise which products/offers are. Learn the basics of how to promote using various platforms such as PPC networks (Adwords, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), Social Media (Facebook, Plenty of Fish, MySpace Ads, etc.), learn how to purchase banners on targeted sites, you might even want to try some PPV at places like DirectCPV (where the minimum deposit is only $100 -- to get the idea of what it's like to run a PPV campaign).

Basically, you should learn, and then gain some experience with different marketing techniques. I always prefer paid marketing, especially if you're comfortable with investing some money into learning how to use these methods. If you're not comfortable with that, then I'd say yes, stick with free organic traffic until you make some money with it to invest, however organic methods such as SEO take loads of time to see any ROI.

To start, I'd recommend you stick with something like Facebook Ads, promoting simple to complete several field (single page) submits. They convert well, and you can still get some relatively cheap clicks from FB.

Check out my blog at Affiliate Marketing Info. I'll be adding more content, but you can learn the basics of CPA marketing, FB marketing, and PoF marketing to start.

Yes, the devil is in the detail. Here is a thread that I created a few weeks ago talking about it:

http://www.warriorforum.com/ad-netwo...money-2-a.html

You can learn a lot on this forum, reading blogs, buying reports, watching videos, etc... This knowledge is very important and you need it. But at the end of the day, all this knowledge won't be enough for you to make serious money online. There are many subjective factors that won't be explained in reports or video series, things that are not the same for all the campaigns, niches and offers. Things that you need to learn by yourself.

For this reason, I trully believe that our experience is our best teacher. One failure will teach you more than 10 courses.

So if you have money, don't do what most people do and start buying hundreds of courses. Buy just 1 or 2 that you consider necessary, learn as much as you can on this forum and reading blogs and then take action! Start learning from your own experiences. You will lose money in the beginning, maybe lot's of it, but in few months you will be making enough money online to get a good return on your investment.

If I had to start everything again today and had a good budget here is what I would do:

1. Get accepted by a few good CPA networks (e.g. Neverblue, Clickbooth, Tatto Media, COPEAC, etc)

2. Buy one or 2 good courses about PPC. I recommend Chad's WSO, but there are other good ones.

3. Choose a traffic source (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc)

4. Contact my affiliate managers and ask for suggestions

5. Take action!!

The last step is the most important one, there is where you actually learn the most important lessons.

So if you are trying to decide between buying tons of courses or spending your money on testing campaigns, I can guarantee to you that the second option is much, much better.


William

Yes,

Take action . Try every method that pops in your head. It's like having a bunch of keys and a locked door in front of you. The fastest way to open the door is to start trying out the keys. If you just sit around wondering what key will open the door do you ever think you're going to get in?

Well, you're certainly not gonna gain any experience without taking action and experimenting.:p

Good luck and I hope you will have a success story to share with us soon.
________
Mazda Mazdago History

Experience is the best teacher, I know a bunch of bloggers that can write about it all day but don't make a dime. Get in there, pull your credit card out, and lose some money. That'll teach you more than anything.

Thanks all. I'm off to go loose money... I mean invest my money. I'll give some feedback when I get somewhere. Cheers.

I'm in the same boat as you Jensen. Good luck to you sir!

You too AffMack. Best of luck! I'll let you know if I learn anything revolutionary. Sometimes it's easiest to learn from those at your same level. Maybe we can share our success stories over a drink someday in the distant future. Be well.

I just starting IM just like you Jensen.
Still strugling to get my first sale.
Well, wish you luck in your IM journey.