If you are an affiliate marketer, you’ll most probably know about CPA marketing. Cost per action (CPA) is the leading marketing method and a way to make money (as an affiliate or blogger). But what is CPA marketing and why you should care?
Why don’t just stick with affiliate marketing and keep making money by generating sales?
Well, there are a lot of features that make CPA marketing a great way to make money. This article explores the basics of CPA marketing, how it works, and why it matters.
What is CPA Marketing?
CPA or cost per action marketing is a type of affiliate marketing where you (as a marketer) get paid a certain commission when a visitor completes a specific action. So, instead of generating sales, you’ll be persuading visitors to complete an action that could include:
- A form submission
- Downloading a file
- Using a coupon code
- Watching a video.
You’ll still be sending traffic to the merchant’s landing page and it still has to complete an action but you don’t have to push hard to generate sales to get paid. And this is the beauty of CPA marketing. As an affiliate, you have to try really hard to generate sales to get paid.
This isn’t the case with CPA marketing.
When you are promoting a CPA offer, converting visitors (even cold traffic) is a whole lot easier because people don’t have to pay anything.
For example, visitors might have to fill a short registration form. You get your commission for every successful form submission. That’s it.
The commission, in this case, is low as compared to affiliate marketing. You won’t earn a certain percentage of the sale price rather you’ll make a fixed amount per successful conversion.
Here is an example of a CPA offer:
And here are offer details:
So, you’ll be paid $1.10 for every successful form submission. Pretty easy, right?
This is what makes CPA marketing an ideal choice for affiliates as it is so easy to earn money because you don’t have to put in a lot of effort to generate sales.
How CPA Marketing Works
If you know how affiliate marketing works, you already know how CPA marketing works. Nothing fancy. It is a subset of affiliate marketing and works in the same way.
The entities involved in CPA marketing are:
- Merchant
- Affiliate or publisher
- Customer
- CPA network.
Here is how it works:
- You’ll have to join CPA networks or affiliate networks that have enough CPA offers to choose from.
- Select and promote CPA offers.
- Potential customers will click your affiliate link and visit the merchant’s landing page.
- You’ll get paid whenever a visitor completes the action (and converts).
So, it works just like affiliate marketing. You’ll have to join a CPA network specifically that has CPA offers. Here is a list of the best CPA networks to choose from:
- MaxBounty
- CPA Lead
- PerformCB
- Click Dealer
- CPAMatica.
MaxBounty is the leading CPA network that has lots of CPA offers to choose from. Join it and you’ll love using it.
Besides, you can use Offer Vault to search CPA offers and affiliate networks. It is an aggregation platform that finds and lists all the CPA and affiliate offers from hundreds of affiliate networks. This is a great starting point for beginners.
Why CPA Marketing?
So, why do you need to go for CPA marketing? Why do you need to use CPA marketing to make money and why not go for affiliate marketing right away?
There are several reasons (and benefits) that make CPA ideal for making money:
- No selling. What is the most difficult part of running and managing a business? Generating sales, right? It is indeed one heck of a task to get money from someone’s pocket. When you are promoting a CPA offer, you aren’t involved in selling rather mostly lead generation. It is still difficult but easier than selling. This makes it the best way to make money.
- CPA marketing is easy. It doesn’t require any training. You can get started immediately as soon as you join a CPA network.
- Low marketing cost. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on promoting CPA offers. Convincing someone to fill a form doesn’t require special marketing effort as compared to asking someone to buy a product.
- Works best for cold traffic. CPA offers convert with cold traffic. Affiliate offers don’t. So, all you have to do is put up a CPA offer and it is most likely to convert with cold traffic.
- Easy to switch between offers. Imagine you have created a niche blog to promote an affiliate offer, and by the time you finish setting it up, the affiliate product isn’t offered anymore. You’ll be left with no option. This isn’t the case with CPA offers. You can easily switch between offers and you can promote hundreds of CPA offers on a single blog.
- Ideal for social media. If you are an influencer and want to monetize your social media account, CPA offers work best. Your followers don’t have to buy anything and they’ll happily convert.
These are some of the many reasons why you must take CPA marketing seriously.
Conclusion
If you ask me, I’ll go with CPA offers any day. The number one reason why CPA marketing works is that it involves no selling at all.
This is why I always recommend CPA offers to beginners. All you have to do is choose a niche, sign up with a CPA network, create a blog, and add relevant CPA offers. You don’t have to write reviews, you don’t have to promote any products, and you don’t even have to fill your blog with ugly-looking banners.
Simply add CPA offers naturally and focus on traffic generation.
If you have hooked your content with CPA offers, you’ll see conversions. Start counting the money.
Featured Image: Pexels
