Choosing CPA Offers

When you join CPA networks, you will often be given the opportunity to choose between a CPA or Revenue Share model.

With CPA, since you are paid one lump sum for each completed action, you must consistently work at generating new leads and prospects. For example, if you are promoting a gambling website, such as a poker gaming company, you may be paid out each time someone you refer to the poker website signs up for a free account or takes advantage of a free trial offer. Once that prospect has completed the required action, and you are paid accordingly, you will no longer earn money from that particular person and must go on to recruit and refer others in order to continue to receive payment.

With Revenue Share, you are offered a percentage or an ongoing payment plan for each prospects activity. In the example of a poker website, if you referred a user who joined the website you may be paid out a percentage of their account funding when playing the games, or a flat rate for specific amounts that your prospects spend while a member of these websites.

When you are new to CPA offers, choosing whether to join the CPA offer or the Revenue Share model can be a difficult decision to make. Many new CPA affiliates typically go with the CPA offers because they are unable to effectively gauge how valuable each referred prospect may be, and how much more money they are given the opportunity of earning from each person rather than consistently scouting our new referrals.

If you are unsure what will work best for you, start off by promoting a handful of CPA programs, and accept an equal number of Revenue Share offers. Then, spend a couple of months promoting both equally and determine which ones are yielding better results.

From that information collected, you will be able to focus primarily on the ones that generate maximum profits while weeding out any inactive or poorly converting campaigns that you are struggling to profit from. You also want to choose the highest converting landing pages that are provided to you by the CPA networks.

Being successful with CPA or related marketing campaigns often takes time, and only through personal experience can you really determine what programs will produce the best results for you, so spend some time thoroughly evaluating a handful of potentially profitable programs. Here is one way of doing this:

Just like you would conduct keyword research on a potential pay per click campaign that you were considering running, or in an article marketing or SEO campaign, researching keywords for CPA offers is just as important.

For our example, let's say that we were considering promoting an offer that enticed subscribers into giving out their email address for a chance at winning a free iPod touch. Now, for this example it's obvious that there is most likely a lot of people searching for and interested in ipod's, but here is how we would quickly investigate a keyword phrase to determine profitability and demand.

Visit Google Keyword Tool External to bring up the keyword search window. Enter in your keyword phrase (in quotations) like "free iphone" and click on the keyword generation button to load up the search results.

This is Google's keyword tool that merchants and advertisers use when creating campaigns for Adwords, and it's a handy resource for any keyword research that you need to do. Once you have determined whether specific keywords relating to a CPA offer that you are considering are popular ones, you know you have a winner.

One great way of finding out what is currently hot is by searching Google Trend. With Google Trends, you can change the date to search results from the past, and by clicking on "More Hot Trends", you can load a lengthy page showing all recent searches. Clicking on those individual links will show the search results in a graph form over the last few days, months or even years.

What you are looking for is consistent trends and patterns in both demand and in buying behavior.

With Google Insights, you are able to determine patterns in traffic and what people are searching for. By entering in the primary keywords relating to specific CPA offers, you will be able to quickly gauge how popular an opportunity is, based on current and past keyword searches. Finding profitable CPA offers is extremely easy, but there is yet another thing to consider before simply choosing the most popular opportunities.

You need to consider competition. In an industry as competitive as CPA is, you want to choose high converting CPA offers, but not necessarily the ones that are being promoted by every Tim, Dick and Harry.

One quick way of determining how competitive a CPA offer may be is by visiting Google and typing in keywords relating to your CPA offer. Then, check whether or not there are a lot of Adwords sponsors running ads for these offers. What you are looking for is a CPA offer with high search volume (using the Google Keyword tool) that doesn't have a lot of sponsor ads running on pay per click marketplaces, like Adwords.

While this may take some time to find, once you do, you can rest assured that you are likely to make a lot of money with these opportunities, so take some time to do your research, compiling a list of potential offers.

Once you have chosen a handful of CPA offers to promote, simply log into your CPA network accounts, make sure that your profile is up to date and includes accurate contact information, and grab your affiliate link from your account profile center.

I suggest copy and pasting your affiliate link into a browser window to ensure that it goes to the right landing page prior to launching any campaigns. You want to make sure everything is working properly so that you are credited for all of your efforts.