Struggling to choose a profitable CPA offer? - My Personal Strategy Revealed.

I frequently see newcomers to CPA question how to choose an offer to promote; the vast array of offers available can be extremely confusing. Should you choose an email/zip submit offer? A rebill offer? An offer with a high EPC? Unfortunately a definite answer on what offer is best to promote isn't really available as each affiliate develops their own unique strategies. I hope in this post to give you some ideas for choosing your own offers by sharing the process that I go through when choosing a new offer to promote.

When looking to launch a new campaign I first evaluate what I want to achieve from this campaign. Do I want to bring in some quick cash to boost my income or invest time into building a long term income stream? Based on my initial goal I will then choose an offer from one of two categories which I use to differentiate CPA offers.

Fast Cash on Hot Trends!

The first category is short-term CPA offers, these will bring in big traffic and quick cash but tend to dry up within a couple of weeks/months, so I choose these offer to give my income a nice boost. These offers consist of hot trends and offers which other affiliates are currently banking hard from.

If you don't know what I mean by a hot trend, think back to 2010 and the major events that took place. We had the World Cup, the launch of the new iPhone4, iPad and many other news events that all had CPA offers directly related to them. These events were peaking thousands of searches a day and so long as you can harness the huge amounts of traffic and drive it to your landing page these offers can make you some big money very quickly.

So if you're looking bring in some quick cash then you will need to know what's hot in the media right now. What new stories have gripped the nation? Which product launches are receiving mainstream attention? Keep your finger on the pulse and after running a few successful short term campaigns you will be able to use your own intuition and pick up on key information to base campaigns around.

Here are a few resources to get you started on tracking what the hot trends are right now so you can start banking now!

Google Trends: Jul 25, 2011
http://www.google.co.uk/trends/hottrends
TrendsBuzz.com - Trends from Google, Yahoo and Twitter
TweetMeme - search and retweet hottest stories on Twitter
AOL Search

As another strategy to bring in quick cash I also check out what offers other affiliates are promoting successfully. One of the best way to find out this information is simple, pick a niche and start researching, visit blogs, forums and other interest pages. What adverts or banners are you seeing regularly? If you're into PPC or media buying there are tools out there that will allow you to "SPY" on your competition. Likewise with PPV there are useful spying tools, or you can simply download one of the browser plugins/toolbars that ad servers use and start browsing. Notice any themes or trends??

Another simple method is to simply check out which campaigns have the highest EPC and earnings within your network; as this gives a good indication that they have been performing well for others. Also if you have a specific traffic source in mind then you can always ask your AM for tips. He/she will be able to guide you to offers currently converting through your desired traffic source.

Sustain a Long Term Income Stream!

If I am looking to build long term income source then I focus on offers in the long term CPA category. Although short term offers are great for a cash boost, the traffic on a hot trend will ultimately subside and without any consistent streams of income you're back to square one. So I always aim to have several campaigns focusing on long term offers.

Long term offers are aimed toward evergreen niches, which consistently receive a steady stream of traffic; this includes niches such as dating, debt and weight loss. These are all niches that 5 years from now will still be advertised and still remain a solid source of income. By choosing an evergreen niche to work in you will always have something to offer, even if the offer you are currently promoting suddenly gets pulled then there are hundreds of similar offers you can simply switch to take its place.

Choosing an offer is all dependent on your personal strategy right now. What do you want to get out of this campaign? By asking yourself that question every time you are about to launch a new campaign it will help you determine and focus in on the types of offers you can promote.

Here are a few guidelines for choosing your own offers to promote.

• Do you want to make quick cash or set up a sustained income stream?

• What are your hobbies/interests? Do you have a particular knowledge or expertise you can leverage? Choosing an offer in your area of knowledge will immediately be ahead of the game as you will know the demographics this niche appeals to and what influences and emotionally hooks them. My advice would be to try not to jump into a niche you know nothing about, let's limit the variables as much as we can at this point.

• What else is being marketed consistently right now? Are you seeing a particular trend for a certain diet or product online and in the media right now? If something is being advertised within the media or consistently by other affiliates then you can bet someone somewhere is making good money from it. Use these as a source of inspiration to build your own campaigns.

Overall, remember the more campaigns you launch the more experience you'll gain and the easier it will become to know exactly what works for you and what doesn't. At the end of the day you could spend a week or 2 deciding what to promote but by the time you get round to launching your campaign you may have missed the boat altogether. The key to success is to take the bull by the horns and start getting campaigns out there. You will create campaigns that will fail and you may have the odd surprise campaign that takes off and never tails off. It's important to keep working, keep pushing and keep testing your offers and yourself.

Good luck.