Becoming a CPA advertiser can be one of the most lucrative methods of marketing online.
There are literally marketers earning upwards of a million dollars a month selling everything from spyware removal to diet pills to dating site subscriptions using CPA advertising.
Becoming a CPA advertiser is tough. It’s not for everyone. You need to really understand the arena you’re getting into before you jump in, or you could lose a lot of money.
So how do you become a CPA advertiser? What are the requirements?
A Rock Solid Understanding of Your Sales Funnel
The term CPA refers to “Cost Per Action.” That means that instead of paying for a sale, you’re paying for leads.
In order to make sure you don’t lose your shirt over these leads, you need to know exactly what a lead is worth to you.
Let’s say you’re in the seminar business. You teach $10,000 seminars about real estate investing and have several products, priced between $200 and $2,000 on DVDs and CDs.
The all-important question you need to be able to answer is: what’s a lead worth to you?
A lead can be as simple as a name and an email address. Or it could include a phone number and an address as well.
If you paid $5 a lead, could you turn that into a profit? What about $10 a lead?
At Least $50,000 in Start-Up Capital
Getting into an affiliate advertising network isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have a reputation in the industry yet.
First, you need to set up all your technical systems. You need to make sure you can track all your traffic, all your sales and all your leads. You need to have systems in place to identify profitable and unprofitable affiliates.
To get listed in an affiliate network, you’ll usually need to put down a deposit – around $10,000. This is money they’ll essentially hold in escrow and use to pay out to affiliates. For established advertisers this often isn’t necessary, but for new advertisers it usually is.
Starting out, you want to be in at least two or three affiliate networks to test the quality of the traffic.
You’ll also need enough cash on hand to pay affiliates while you wait for your sales funnel to come through and turn those leads into money.
A Relentless Staff
Finally, you need a staff that’s relentlessly dedicated to incremental improvements. CPA is all about slowly making small improvements that add up at the end of the day.
This means split testing your landing pages every day. It means going through your affiliate traffic source IDs and kicking out affiliates who’re sending bad traffic. It means constantly refining your sales funnel to eke out every percentage of improved ROI you can.
If you match all these criteria, becoming a CPA advertiser can be very lucrative. If you can get on the networks and profitably buy leads, you can get millions of dollars’ worth of business through your door – on the affiliate’s dime, rather than your own.