So you wanna’ get into CPA huh? Magicman’s CPA Ramblings
(if you rather read this in pdf form, I've attached the link at the bottom. 
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The Bad news: You are going to lose some money for a little while if you are new to this.
The Good news: You now have the answer to beat Penguin, Polar Bear, Sharks with Lasers Attached to their Heads, and whatever else Google wants to throw at SEO’ers. Once you understand how to make CPA profitable, you’ve got the ticket to paying nickels for dimes. I cant promise you that this thread will have all of the information you need, but I think it'll be a good place to start.
Pre-Preface
This isn’t a guide but I think many who are new to CPA will find this information to be useful. You’ll notice that I have left out certain bits of information about certain things but as you begin to dive in to CPA you begin to fill in the blanks pretty quickly. Also, I tend to ramble on and repeat things. Sorry about that!
Preface
CPA is Cost Per Action which is a blanket term referring to when a user goes to an offer website and does whatever is asked of them! For example, when you go to an ‘auto insurance’ offer site site and fill it out, you’ve just become a "lead" for that company because more than likely they have also taken down your email, address, and phone number despite not actually needing any of those things to give you a quote! Now they will continue to solicit you for products and services related to auto quotes/ auto loans and the like. When you join a CPA network, and start running their ads you are soliciting other people to go to those websites and fill out their information for an auto loan...health insurance, play an online game, buy a product, take out a payday loan, anything. Once a surfer does any of those things, that you are enticing them to do, you get paid a few dollars by the network. It sounds simple, and it really is. Simple? Yes. Easy? Yes, but only if you are savvy and have some starting cash as well as the patience to learn the ins and outs which will take some time. If you are on the IMS forum there’s a very good chance you are a savvy marketer and I think you know what I mean *wink*. Also, you’ll find that I am going to use the word “savvy” many times but eventually you’ll begin to understand why.
What do I need to get started?
-You need to be accepted into just a couple ofCPA Networks. You should start with ones that are friendly to noobies such as MaxBounty and Peerfly. Then, you can use your acceptance into those to get into some of the others that tend to be just a bit more exclusive. Personally, I am a publisher for both of these networks as well as CPA Tank, Neverblue, A4D, Adworks Media, and a few others.
-You need some starting money. Start with at least 200$ as a minimum to pay for your ads but this is an absolutely minimum in my opinion. Depending on how psychologically-savvy you are, you may need more or less before you begin to see profits. None of your ads will be very successful on day one. You WILL lose money on day 1 with any new offer most of the time.
[A side note about why you will probably not be profitable on day one.]
You have to "optimize" and "target" the proper audience before you can become profitable. Are most people surfing the net interested in toilets? No. But someone out there needs to take a s**t! And you have to get them to your toilet ads! Optimizing through targeting is complex, but actually quite simple to understand in theory. Either way, I won’t go into that here, just head over to quantcast.com and search for “bestbuy.com”. Look at all of the statistics that are provided for bestbuy.com surfers. It provides you with not only the demographics of the people who use that site the most but also what other sites they frequent! Using this information you can get into the psyche of a bestbuy.com shopper and figure out what appeals to them, their fears, and even weaknesses in their character that are common to their demographic. Ok ok ok , that’s taking it a bit far. But a great example of this would be the “Brazilian Butt Lift” offer which is doing ridiculously well at the time of this writing. How would you optimize your targeting for this kind of offer? FAT WOMEN would be a great place to start! What kinds of websites do fat women go to? What other sites are they interested in? Where do they shop? What kind of things do they shop for and how can you get them to it faster while making money in the process? Head over to quantcast and find out! The whole idea behind CPA (and marketing in general) is to connect the consumer to a product that he or she is already looking for whether they know it or not.
[End side note]
-You need "tracking". I use Prosper202 which is free and I have it hosted on a beyond hosting package. This is used to track how many people have seen your ads, versus how many people clicked your ad and showed interest, versus how many people actually signed up for [toilets, auto insurance, whatever] versus how much you have spent versus how much you have lost. I made that sound pretty complicated, and in my opinion it is. Tracking is the key to your success in cpa and it’s not exactly an easy concept to understand. Tracking is the reason most people leave CPA behind after throwing a few bucks at it because they didn’t see any returns.
Once you fully understand tracking, and have it set up properly, you will profit eventually, that’s damn near a guarantee. I won’t explain the specifics of tracking because it’s too intricate for text. Just look it up on YouTube "how to setup prosper202 tracking" and you can see every step. Eventually, you’ll learn how to rotate offers from only one landing page, and how to iframe/meta refresh offers etc. (if your networks allow it). And once you do, you’re golden.
Here’s the basic idea of tracking in a nutshell:
· You setup links from your affiliate network in your tracking >
· Your tracking spits out a tracking link that you send actual traffic to >
· Your tracking logs every time that your link is called by another site and where it came from as well as the keywords that person was searching for when they were “served” your ad >
· Your tracking waits for notification from your cpa network to know if a surfer has used your link to sign up to an offer, if so prosper records your income as well as your money spent ultimately resulting in a clear understanding of your ROI (return on investment).
Tracking with Prosper202 is free but the hosting will cost you monthly, depending on where you get your hosting from. It has to be dedicated, and not shared because you’ll be sending thousands of views through it every day. Shared hosting packages can only handle about 100-ish views per day before they will begin to slow you down. Your landingpages need to be able to load up fast because surfers lose interest quickly. I personally use Beyond Hosting, and they actually install prosper to the vps for you if you’d like.
How Do I get into CPA Networks?
Much easier than you might think! They key with getting into CPA networks is concentrating on what you know and speak openly about it while letting them also know that you aren’t into false traffic methods like spamming facebook, or twitter with a link to their offers. Tell them everything you know about internet marketing and be prepared to tell them a small bit over the phone!
Do you need an example website to get in to different networks? Nope. I sure as hell didn’t even though I have many attractive seo sites I COULD have sent them. The problem with letting networks know about your own sites is that they will look and copy you for their own gains as well as give other noobys a link to your site or landing page to show them what they should be doing. In the end, most affiliate managers only want to generate income for their company and could really care less about outing your method, niche, sites, or landingpages. Also, most affiliate managers run their own personal campaigns as well so keep all of that in mind. If you have to give them a site in the application process just put down “HTTP://www.I-USE-PAID-TRAFFIC.COM” or something to that effect.
Here are a few questions I have been asked over the phone and in the application:
-“What kind of traffic do you use?” Do you plan to pay for traffic, put up banners on your own blog sites, or contextual links on a website or blog? Both are just fine, there is no wrong answer. If you have done either previously, tell them a short story about your experience in it, but don’t make it too long.
Some of most popular kinds of traffic and a few example ad networks:
CPM-Cost Per thousand impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000): for example Facebook Ads, though FB offers both CPM and PPC. Airpush, for mobile traffic.
PPV-Pay Per View: for example LeadImpact, and TrafficVance popup traffic
PPC-Pay Per Click- Microsoft AdCenter and Google Adwords
Media Buying - This is a scary term for many but it only refers to paying for ad space on a website. It is however an advanced method and I don’t recommend it for anyone new. For example, worldstarhiphop.com is a super raunchy site that I have used a few times for my personal media buys. The picture below was sent to me by Ed over at worldstarhiphop when I started buying with them.
They offer packages starting at around 1k$ per 24/hours depending on the location on the site but the amount of impressions you’ll get is insanely ridiculous, around 1-3 million per day and more on weekends when the price goes up. Most CPA networks are fine with all of these traffic methods; just let them know which of them your specialty is or which that you plan to make your specialty. No wrong answer here.
If you haven’t done any of this, you can go to fiverr.com and search for “Microsoft AdCenter promo codes” or “Adwords Promo Codes”. You can around 75$ in promo codes to be redeemed on a new account and BOOM you’ve got yourself about 175$($75 for adcenter and $100 for adwords) worth of PPC advertising money for the cost of two fivers (10$)!!! “Is this really possible?” you might be asking. Is it really that easy? Yup. As long as it is for a new account that hasn’t spent any money or used any codes yet.
-“What Verticals are you interested in?” Verticals are simply offer categories such as Finance, Business, Games, and Dating etc. Don’t let the big word scare you, they use this terminology purely to weed out the total green-horns. Pick two and let them know why your past marketing experience goes along well with it. While we are on the subject of big words, do you know what a creative is? Very simply, a creative is an image/ or landing page that you are using to send traffic to the network’s offers. You can create and edit images with Photoshop or Pixelr and you can build or edit landingpages with Dreamweaver or Notepadd++ and a bevy of other tools on the net.
-“What are your traffic generation methods? Please be very specific”. This is the absolute most important questions to answer correctly. Do just that! Tell them EXACTLY how you plan to get traffic to them, and tell them what you hope to learn. No one is perfect and no one knows everything and make sure that they know you are on the journey to learn and be successful and that you have the drive to do so.
Tell them about your experience with Bing Ads, Adsense, Adwords, Clickbank, and Commission Junction. Don’t have any experience with that stuff? Tell them about your SEO experience. The one thing that you want to tell ALL of the networks is that you are “very careful to follow traffic restriction guidelines in terms of what kinds of traffic are allowed and what kinds of traffic are not allowed depending on the offer, because I never want to upset the relationship between our network and our advertisers” Networks care more about quality people than they do big money makers. They’ll take hundreds of $100/day income people over whales with big pockets and sneaky methods. I wouldn’t copy and paste that quote either, because most networks weed out applications that are too similar, and they will call you out on it too sometimes. But you should talk as if you are already a part of the network, people like that! And it makes them feel as though you are already a part of their team because you have qualified yourself before they had the chance to.
This is a pic of the Brazilian Butt Lift offer at peerfly. Take a look at the “Restricted Marketing” section. If you are wondering “What the hell is INCENT? Sounds like incest!”, it means incentivized traffic. In other words, you have told a surfer that they will get something for completing the offer for you. Most networks are against this because Advertisers want people to have a genuine interest in their offers so that they can solicit products to them later without hitting a brick wall.
Make it extremely clear that you are interested in following the rules, and that you don’t engage in dodgy traffic methods. Some offers don’t want traffic from banners on your seo blogs. Some offers don’t want traffic from adwords(“Search PCC”) and so on. It completely depends on the offer. The one kind of traffic that they all frown upon is spam traffic. You can never spam links on twitter, facebook, Pinterest, or xgram. However some offers do allow you to use facebook and twitter for paid traffic on their ad platform, but NEVER spam unless you find a network that is willing to take social traffic and not to be confused with social ad traffic. In the good old days we use to spam our links directly to twitter and we made a lot of money that way, but its low quality traffic and these days it’ll get you banned so stay away from that at all costs! Hell, networks even like adult (porn) publishers LIKE ME, who pay for adult traffic on some of the smuttiest sites on the internet. But NEVER spam traffic. I can’t stress this part enough.
Here’s a screeny from my trafficjunky account to show you how the bidding works.
Ive drawn grey squares over the fun parts to make it just a tad bit more browse-able.
Lastly, be friendly over the phone! The person calling you is most likely your affiliate manager even though he/she hasn’t told you yet! They decide directly whether or not you will get in and if they trust you enough to run offers from their network.
A quick note about landing pages.
You don’t know how to code landingpages?!?! Me neither and most of us don’t. But don’t stress! And don’t let this deter you. The name of the game is to steal and innovate from the pros until you learn and earn enough to make your own. Realistically, your ownlandingpages will more than likely be a heavily modified version of a different page you saw while spying. A great way to start borrowing landingpages, would be to turn off your adblock, and popup blocker, then start surfing! This is especially prevalent with porn sites that will pop the heck outta you! Look around you at the ads on different sites, and click on them! See where they go! Then consider whether or not you could make affiliate commissions with them. Eventually, you’ll begin to just scroll to the bottom of every webpage you see and search for the “Affiliates” link LOL!
Want to steal someone else’s lander? Sure! Google HTTrack and download it. It’s a free website copying software. I have used it for many (read: all) of my landers which are doing very well right now on different platforms. In some cases you’ll be able to also download their style sheets (.css) which make the process even easier! If you have Dreamweaver for example as I do. If you have no experience in copy and pasting snippets of code, well you should try to learn a bit. You don’t need much to get by and be successful though.
Here are some landing page creators and generators favored by the guys over at CPA Tank:
http://www.google.co...pages/mlpb.html
http://landr.co/
http://www.jaemobi.com/
http://atmio.com/
http://www.ionintera...e-landing-pages
Enjoy & good luck !
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