Where should I start in CPA marketing?

I've been promoting affiliate / CPA offers for over 16 years.

However, I do it quite differently than most.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get caught up solely on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same and possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Bottom line: it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic by acquiring 3rd party email data, which is data that the users have shown an interest in a specific vertical(niche) and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for every user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

By acquiring data, I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at very low cost. So I control and can drive traffic on-demand to the offers I'm promoting. Which is key to CPA / affiliate marketing success.

However, 3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter because it is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to convention list building.

So the initial data that is acquired isn't the most import part of the process. The real key to making it work is to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting, and removing unresponsive users. That way over time you are building smaller, but more responsive lists that you should eventually be able to send less and make more with each mailing. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.

In the end, I have consistently been able to produce leads / clicks at a fraction of the price of mainstream list building / marketing. Which is why so many fail...they can't generate cost effective traffic.

Important note: 3rd party data combined with PPL offers (no purchase required), the long-term profit potential is significantly larger than just promoting offers that require a sale to be made. Which I also do, but very limited on the back-end.

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions and converting the data into cash producing assets.

Obviously, there is far more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.