Building A List

I don't know what you are promoting.

I have personally promoted a lot of weight loss products and done well with it. However, I have always promoted dietary supplements that were sold on a free trial basis + S/H, rather than an offer that was a straight sale.

The user would get a $50-$60+ product and just pay like $5-$9 for shipping and handling.

Even though the user only pays S/H, the payouts would typically be $30-$40.

After the trial ends, the user gets put on a continuity program and is auto-billed each month. The companies know their numbers. How many will typically cancel before the trial ends and those that don't, how many months they will stay in the continuity program before canceling.

So they know what each trial user is worth to them long-term and is why you get such a high payout even though the user only paid S/H.

I have always gotten my offer through CPA networks. You also get paid regardless if the user cancels during the free trial and you don't get debited for returns.

This is why I always promoted free trials + S/H.

You ideally want to promote what is hot...what is Dr. Oz talking about, etc...

I also always saw higher conversions when a pre-sale page was used.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents

* In full disclosure, I have not promoted much weight loss in a while, as there are easier ways to make money. But the above still holds true.

I get almost all offers from CPA networks.

As to what is easier...

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 PPL 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 too caught up 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 or 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.

I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers, as I mentioned (weight loss). I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight sales. However, mass appeal needs to exist for any straight sale and I also look for one of the following...

1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once something similar shows up in Walmart.

2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.

3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.

Most all straight sales I promote on the back-end.

Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form (PPL offer) 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 and build responsive email lists using fresh / targeted 3rd party email data and generating real-time, co-reg leads.

3rd party data is email leads of users that have shown an interest in a specific PPL niche or offer and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record of each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

Co-reg is simply where I place an ad for a specific PPL offer on a co-registration network and their publishers display it at the time a user is signing up with them and can request more info about my offer. When a user requests more info their contact info is then automatically imported into my ESP account and they are sent a message regarding the offer. Which I pay on a per lead basis.

So with the above, I am getting fresh / targeted leads specifically for the PPL offers I'm promoting. However, they are not typically as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list that you build yourself. So to compensate for this you need to work with higher volume. This is not a big deal since the cost is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to traditional list building methods.

When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.

So basically I promote PPL offers because they provide the path of least resistance to generating conversions/$$$ and converting the data into cash producing assets.

There's actually more to it than it sounds, 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

I AGREE with the ppl offers. i use markethealth.com and maxbounty for health offers that pay out for free trials. i also run bing ppc traffic to it.

Maxbounty always worked for me regarding health and finance offers...