List Building in 2018

I've been promoting affiliate / CPA offers for over 17 years.

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. I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight up purchase offers. However, mass appeal needs to exist 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.

However, I mainly promote non-PPL offers on the backend.

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 and build responsive email lists using fresh / targeted 3rd party email data and generating real-time, targeted 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 placing 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 backend.

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 do not advice to start with paid advertising, it can be very frustrating not getting results ... instead i highly recommend investing in hight quality content and tools.

Diablo gave a really detailed answer on how to use 3rd party data.
It's something we practice here at Clickback as well; we see great results from our cold email campaigns.
Purchasing data is an investment but definitely one that pays off as you're able to reach more of your target audience - quickly.
Good luck!

I would recommend you follow some authorities on the topic such as Charles Ngo or PPC Mode who are actual affiliates making money as affiliates and cover tons of methods of doing it

Try Solo Ads to build your list for fast results.