CPA Newbie with lots of questions...please help

Hi,

I will try to help you
1. This depends on how much you want to earn. THe more time you dedicate to learning and working the better.
2. Don't understand the question
3. If you are going with paid traffic, you could do some split-testing for 100-200$ to find a winner. Also depends on your traffic source. Some are more expensive than others.
4. Yes
5. Sometimes it works better to use a landing page, sometimes not. That's why you have to test. With a LP you can "warm-up" your audience before sending them to the offer. But if you work in the MMO Niche you can send traffic to a squeeze page, where you would collect e-mails.
6. You are at the best place

Tracking is most important in CPA. Delete which ever that are not performing and expand the one that are performing.

1) How much time do you need to dedicate to CPA per day?
4 hour, but I have many other IM related projects.

2) Is it possible to do alongside setting up websites for traditional aff marketing?
Yes.

3) What is a reasonable budget to start off with?
For a total newbies around $1,000 if not more. Depends on your skill level and traffic source.

4) Do (can) you direct link to campaigns?
Yes, but most of the time a landing page will convert much better.

5) Is it more beneficial to send them to a landing page? If so, why? Do you collect details there?
Yes, if you know what you are doing you can pitch/hype-up the offer a lot more.

6) Where is the best place to learn? Any products/forums etc you can recommend?
Start with free forums, and free blogs online. Once you start building a few campaigns, and start hitting sticking points look for assistance in your niche.

1) How much time do you need to dedicate to CPA per day?

I guess it depends on how you are promoting offers.

If you are doing PPC/PPV/Media Buys like some of us it's fairly hands-off once you set things up and wait for the data to appear. All you really need to do is setup new creatives and landing pages which is fairly minimal work once you get into it.

If you are doing email marketing, seo, or other activities there's a lot more grunt work involved because you have to touch your marketing efforts more frequently, setup new email blasts, etc.

2) Is it possible to do alongside setting up websites for traditional aff marketing?

Absolutely. I make most of my money via traditional affiliate marketing, CPA only makes up like 5% of my profit right now (if even).

3) What is a reasonable budget to start off with?

Assuming you are referring to media buying/ppc/ppv you will probably want $500 to do some preliminary testing. $500 - $1000 is about the minimum to do ppv or media buying, so if you have less than that you are limited to small media buying on sites like buysellads.com and ppc marketing.

4) Do (can) you direct link to campaigns?

Yes, but I don't recommend it.

5) Is it more beneficial to send them to a landing page? If so, why? Do you collect details there?

For CPA I always send traffic to a landing page because:

a) it hides the referrer from the network
b) it lets me filter the junk traffic out before sending it to the network
c) it lets me split test various landing page combos
d) it lets me grab email address if I were so inclined (which I'm not lol)

6) Where is the best place to learn? Any products/forums etc you can recommend?

To be honest, trial and error are the best ways to learn online marketing. There are so many junk products out there promising you the world if you spend $20 on their ebook which is full of crap.

Testing everything yourself is the only true way to really learn this stuff.

Coming to a place like WF and posting what you are doing and asking for help is a good way to get some positive feedback too. That happens pretty frequently here.

Greedy & Christian,

Thanks so much for the replys and assistance.

In relation to the landing pages, how do you design them? Or do you outsourse this? I have NO design skills whatsoever, so this part of the equation is making me somewhat nervous.

I have the money to invest, I just don't want to invest it blindly and lose it all because I don't know what I am doing. Is there anywhere I can see good examples of landing pages and ads etc?

Cheers

Gav

Learn design you have to learn to do them on your own. Or get someone to teach you. You can't outsource LPs, it rarely works out.

Yes, what is running on your traffic source.