What I've learned on CPA so far - please confirm

I thought I'd start a thread about what I've learned so far on CPA and looking for your thoughts guys - and give you a wall of text to read, lol.

Finally, I have my Prosper202 setup up and running on a Ubuntu VPS in Dallas, with 512M RAM. Yeah, it's nothing fancy really, I guess for the first couple campaigns that would do it, and I can upgrade to better specs if it's necessary. A good friend of mine helped me to throw this up (kudos to him), it's currently on an IP address, but tomorrow we are going to assing a more tracking-ish domain to it (something like PeerFly using). I've tried a test campaign, and using a VPN the redirect was pretty quick from my tracking URL to the LP, maybe 1 second or so. All I can say is it's a really nifty tool, and now I understand the importance of it.

Currently I have $200 on my LeadImpact account with no campaigns, about $70 on 7search with no campaigns, and burnt $25 with POF in a blink, with a really bad campaign, oops. That's the price of greed people. What was I thinking, really? Throwing up a fancy banner and make money, lol. Will not do this again (you knew, you idiot, you knew it will fail - knocking on my head).

Okay, so. The plan (aka specualtion, what to do next and stop struggling finally?) is the following; I think I'll start with POF first, it's really easy to understand and pick a niche; probably dating - that's why ppl on POF afterall.

Than, I'm gonna make two ads on POF and with proper tracking, I try send traffic to a CPA offer.

Both creatives must met the following criterias:

• Targeting the pain the surfers might have, I have to try being mutual with their problem/pain/issue - I call this the "I'm just like you" approach
• My ad has to sell hope/solutions for their problem/pain
• Most importantly, a call to action to encourage them to click through

On creative A, I'm gonna use Headline A with some sales text. On creative B, my plan is to change the headline only to something else, and than run both ads simultaneously. So, the two ads will look almost the same, except the headline.

I'd set 0.40 bid for both ads, so yeah, exactly the same and if the CPA offer pays $1.60 on a lead, I'd spend at least 3x more money to promote it / ad, than the payout. It's about ~$5 per ad, since I have two ads, I'll pay $10 on POF advertising to gather data. Sure, I have to target my audience well, that's when the good old common sense takes place - "Would I click on this ad if I were...?"

Once I have both ads up and running (that's the split testing part, right?) I'm gonna fire up my PS3 and play some games, do the laundry, make something to eat, go out for a walk, grab a beer, whatever.

After a while, I'd check back on Prosper to see what is happening with my ads. I'd stop promoting the one that produced worse results, and start tweaking the better one, and do antother split test, with an even better ad copy based on the better performing one.

Right now, the cash I can throw into POF/7srch/LI maybe around $300, max $500. I have no idea if it's enough for starting out with these platforms, or not. Maybe a couple thousands would be better, but I'm not there yet. And it's a tough decision, you have to know I used to earn about $600 as my monthly(!) salary for years, it would be frustrating as fck to flush it down the toilet in minutes - just sayin'

So, I'd appreciate your input on this folks, it's really exhausting to me to put together such posts like this (since I'm not native english) but I'd like to know if I'm on the right track, or not. Looking forward to hearing your opinions!

Gedeon