CPA Journey to $50 per day

PPC to CPA Journal


Hey guys,

I am new around here. I like the CPA section of WF and decided to start a journey thread which will help me stay motivate and help me and others to get successful in CPA.

Let me tell a bit about myself first. I have been in to IM a few years but never too seriously. I made a bit of money with websites and then providing SEO services but post penguin, I have found it very difficult to sustain a business. I am back to square one and started with CPA last month.

I have been reading around and experimenting a bit and going to share what I learnt.

I don't have profitable campaign yet and infact lost a few hundred dollars. But, I have learnt a lot and my campaigns are almost breaking even on a few days.




Lessons that I have learnt.

1. CPA is not easy. You have to do the hard yards. There is no secret book that will enable to make you profitable campaigns. All they can teach you is strategy and you need to use your brain to implement it.

2. I beg to differ with the strategy of adding hundreds of thousands of keywords. Most gurus seem to belong to this mindset but I incur losses when I try to go this route. I seem to do well with a small set of keywords and optimizing and moving on to the next set. Add the most related keywords that are likely to convert and add more as you go along. It can take a few weeks to a month or so to make a campaign profitable.

3. Be ready to blow up money. You got to lose some to win some. But, blowing your money without any strategy is stupid. Also, some people immediately stop a campaign before doing a proper test. Some people continue a campaign even after its established it cant make money.

4. Important Factors that determine your success in CPA are Traffic Source, Traffic quality, Adcopy and Landing Page.

5. Email/Zip submits are not easy. Every one who starts CPA thinks that it would be pretty easy to get simple email submits. It's not easy and I'll tell you why. People have caught on to that now. So, Unless you are presenting it in a creative way, your conversions will be low. Even Cheap PPC traffic sources cost around 5 to 10 cents, and if your conversions are low, you will be losing money each day. If you have targeted traffic, I think its worthwhile to go for short form/long form registrations.

6. I cannot stress enough the importance of optimization. It's the most boring job but you have to optimize to succeed. If you think you are gonna simply run a campaign, forget about it and bring in dollars you couldnt be more wrong.

7. Each PPC platform has different quality traffic. Find out what niche gets lot of traffic and then find an offer for that.



These are the tips at the top of my head. I'll add more as I go along and share some tips and some unsuccessful campaigns(so that you don't repeat my mistakes). After venturing in to CPA, I have developed utmost respect for people who are successful in CPA because I realize now it takes a lot of creativity, hard work, dedication, perseverance and money to succeed in CPA.


So,What I have been doing

I have been trying out email submits with 2nd tier networks. I hopped on the 7 search bandwagon and my experiences have been mainly negative. I have got conversions but not enough.

I have also tried buysellads for buying ads directly on website. That is not working out for me at all and I tried around 5 websites. You have to be really smart to do mediabuys. Infolinks seem a little costly to me.

I have been trying a mix of other 2nd tier networks and my best campaign is breaking even these days.It's a registration campaign.

The reason I am posting this journal is to motivate myself and others as well as to learn from you guys. Understandably, I won't be giving out my niches, offers or other details. So, Please don't ask for those.