Is CPA Marketing Better Than Affiliate Marketing?

CPA and affiliate marketing are basically the same.

In either case, you are promoting someone else's offer.

The difference in what you asking about is the type of offer.

Email submit VS sales offer. It is obviously much easier to get someone to just enter their email than to get them to make a purchase.

I'm not a big fan of either. Email submits tend to perform poorly / don't pay much (I haven't run them in years) and it's far more work to make a sale "in most cases" than I want to deal with.

What I do (past 18 years) and recommend are PPL (pay per lead ... lead generation) offers.

I heavily promote PPL 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 sales. For them, mass appeal is still the number one thing I look for 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.

Something to think about.

CPA marketing is great if you can get VOLUME traffic because many of them have a low payout per email collected

Also, high paying CPA offers usually require 2 step forms - this cuts down on conversions

If you set up your system right, CPA can pay-especially if you have a solid mailing list.

You pull traffic from the list and filter it through a 2 page process

I consider it the same thing. The only possible difference might be the backend offer.

In my opinion, there is no need to give high importance to one of them. None of them is more profitable than the other. Any of them can be remunerative if it is done rightly.
Basically, both marketings are the same.

I haven't done a lot of CPA because the issue I've always had with it is that is seems as soon as I put up a CPA offer it ends and I have to go back and change everything. For me, things changed too much.


With that said, it seems many affiliate offers (especially in the IM niche) are using the launch formula, which means the best prices are only offered for a short time and there are fewer evergreen offers than before, so they have become a lot like CPA offers in that they don't seem to last.


Launch affiliate offers are good for people with lists and a social media presence, but not so good for people that do content marketing and/or SEO.

It depends on the traffic source. I prefer (multi-tier) affiliate marketing.

I think the affiliate marketing is better in the long-term. And also you can make more money.

In my opinion cpa marketing its better as from 100 people 90 would prefer to complete a form instead of taking their credit card

Affiliate Marketing... You promote products and services for a commission


CPA....You promote products and services for a commission


you tell me which is better

al

CPA may or may not be sales, and hence might be easier in some sense. You need to tackle each CPA as a thing of its own

Affliate marketing is usually paid by sales generated, which means you need to be more niche focused and longer term.

CPA=cost per action
Action maybe sales = CPS
Affiliate = CPS

As you can see, both also have the advantages and disadvantages. The key is to choose the offer that can convert well. If you have the email list, why not promote both?

CPA is a form of affiliate marketing. You are acting as a affiliate for whatever company you advertise it. Both work either way so go for it.

If your focus is on the quickest way to make money, you are likely going to struggle. Instead, shift your focus to helping people. Whether you are promoting affiliate products and services, or you are doing CPA, you will always to much better by providing real value to people. So you are correct about earning trust.

It is true that there are some CPA offers that can sort of bypass the trust phase, especially those that pay out just for a sign up, but there are also affiliate offers that can bypass the trust phase. Marketing that way does not give you the ability to build a list or a loyal following.

I Prefer Affiliate Marketing over CPA

CPA marketing is a subcategory of affiliate marketing. If you're looking for quick money, you're not getting it in either. Building a business takes effort and dedication.

Also, would you do business with me if you don't trust me? Exactly.

Stop being so short-sighted and focus on the long-term.

For me, both offers are similar. It boils down to what kind of offer works well for you. There are some who find more success in CPA offers, while some find success in per sale offers.

It's all CPA.

You get paid when a visitor completes an action. Sometimes that action is filling in a form, sometimes it's making a payment.

Brent

One of the usual errors people make with CPA is to focus on the ones with the biggest payout. Payout is irrelevant, what matters is EPC (earnings per click). Think it through and make sure you understand this point.

Another point most people get wrong, even course-creators on the subject, is that if you do focus on big payouts (either CPA, affiliate marketing or anything else), the cost of your testing goes up too. To make a real test of a specific funnel, you need to spend 3 times as much on traffic as the payout (because real random events are much more clustered than people assume). So if you're promoting something that pays you $1,000, that's $3,000 you spend on EACH test . . . change one word, and that's a new test, and the experts might have to do 10 or 20 tests before they find one that's profitable or not. So make sure you understand that too !

Hope this helps

Chris

I personally like and do Affiliate marketing. The basic different is, in CPA you can make money for any action of a visitor take like free email or zip submit or survey form fill up etc but in affiliate marketing, you have to sale that product to make money.

Though it seems CPA is easier to make money but with affiliate marketing you can make more because of the upsells or OTO options. Only a single sale can make you $100, $200 or even $500+ (Front end + Upsells => Big $$$$)

Hope this helps you my friend

Regards,
Abhijit

Where you give your most attention and energy Ry, that is what yields the best results. Not the niche, but your commitment to the niche.