CPA Ninja Marketing - tips - tricks - review

For several years now there has been this industry secret for the "big players". It wasn't really a secret, but while most people in Internet Marketing were busy promoting Clickbank and other affiliate programs, the big kahunas were playing on a whole different level - CPA.

For those that don't know, CPA is "Cost Per Action". CPA is pretty straight forward; you get paid for the "actions" that your users take. As an example, let's say a cosmetic company wants to gauge the feedback to a new product line that they are thinking of introducing. They create an "offer" where they agree to pay $1.50 for each person that submits their email address and zip code into a capture page. Your job is merely to promote and direct traffic to that site and then collect $1.50 for each person that opts in. This type of email or zip submit offer is very commonplace and so is the $1.50 payout. Others might pay as much as $37 for an optin (though it might require much more detail or that the person pay for shipping and handling on a free trial) and some long form or multi-page registrations (such as you would fill out for car insurance or a home mortgage) may pay even more.

Being a CPA marketer, you could really describe yourself as a traffic broker. You purchase or acquire traffic at your expense and try to get it to convert on the offer page and get paid based on the results. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? Sometimes it is, but usually it's not quite that easy. It is extremely competitive and there are many people out there that are just huge - making $100k a day and more - hard to compete with those guys. Many, many more are making $500 to $1000 a day running CPA campaigns. When you try to get started, you're going to be up against all of that competition - and it can be very challenging. What many don't tell you is that to make $300 on a campaign, many times they are spending $1000. I know that doesn't sound like such a bad deal - and it's not. Sure, you'd do it all day long if you could. But the issues are complex. For example, how much cash do you have at hand and for how long can you float it? If you run up a $1000 a day on Google PPC just to make $300 and it takes you 30 days before you collect your payouts, you would have run up $30,000 in Google PPC before you ever see that $9,000 net. Those numbers may seem farfetched, but they are actually on the low end of the super-affiliate scale. So, it becomes a process that you "grow" into at a pace that you can afford.

Furthermore, they may have had to lose money on that campaign for a week or two before getting it profitable and refined enough to make that $300 a day. You can make a very large amount of money in CPA marketing, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. As said earlier, CPA is not for the faint of heart and to take it seriously you should be prepared to commit to serious training as well - while potentially expensive, it will pay for itself many times over. So do yourself a favor and invest in the beginning so that you are prepared for the challenges that will come your way with CPA marketing. It may take you a while to get to $500 a day profits, but the effort will well be worth it, and befoe you know it you will be a CPA Ninja.

CPA marketing has taken the Internet by storm lately, surging into the marketplace with a seemingly unlimited number of new products out there promoting it. So you have completed your cpa ninja course - So how do you get started?

If you were to draw a pyramid representing all of the skillsets that comprise Internet Marketing, CPA marketing would sit at the top. By that I mean, that to be ultra successful in CPA marketing (like some of those guys making insane amounts of money - some over $100k a day net), you really have to have the prerequisite knowledge of all of the bag of tricks you can manage to drive traffic - the single biggest lesson to learn in Internet Marketing. But does that mean it is not doable for the average affiliate marketer? No, not at all, but you do have to be realistic about how you approach it.

The first thing that you have to realize is that while you may get to that "super affiliate" status some day, you need to start small and make your first goals realistic goals. Start out with a goal of making $50 a day, then $100 a day, then $500 a day - and keep growing your goals as you achieve them. But taking this approach, you can also focus your efforts on one form of traffic acquisition at a time - you don't have to master them all right out of the gate. Don't allow yourself to get paralyzed in all of the "learning" surrounding CPA. Focus on one method, and continue to refine it before you move onto another.

The key to really making this leap into CPA marketing, however, is recognizing that it is a learning process and that you have to invest in that process. Spending money up front on a solid training course in CPA marketing will be money well spent. You will like save many times over the cost of that course in money that you won't "waste" making the same mistakes that others make. Worse yet, what is the cost of a lost opportunity? By that I mean, that if you just try to wing it and you end up giving up because you've lost your shirt on PPC, well then you have lost the entire future earnings you could have been generating had you invested in the training upfront to be successful. Be realistic - this is not a get rich quick game, though some to make big money quickly. Approach it as an investment in a long-term solid plan and you will be very pleased with the results.

So, you've done your homework you bought the courses and you're ready to make the leap into CPA marketing, but now you realize that you will be "interviewed" to even get accepted by the various networks - how do you do it?

This can be a bit daunting at first for the average affiliate marketer, because we are all "rebels" by our very nature. We don't have day jobs, we don't have bosses and we certainly don't want to have to "apply" to a network or be "interviewed" for acceptance. Don't worry, it's not as hard as it seems, but there are some definite guidelines you want to follow.

First and foremost, you have to realize that these networks don't want low quality, newbie marketers causing them a bunch of extra work. You need to position yourself professionally so that your aren't viewed as a rookie - many of the big networks will not want to work with you as a rookie. So, how do you do it?

Here are a few basic guidelines. Make sure you have a real email address - don't use a freebie service, have a business domain and create an email firstname@mydomain.com or something to that effect. Next, make sure that you have a professional message on your voicemail and it is much better to give a business phone number than a cell phone. Most of the sites that you apply to will require you to list a website as a "reference" of your work. So it is advised that you create a free blog site that gives free advice on affiliate marketing and put a few posts up there. Stuff relating to CPA marketing is even better. Make sure it looks professional and has ample content. It's all about the impression you leave that you have "been around the affiliate marketing block" before. The next thing you will definitely want to do is make sure you have a business messenger account - best to have them in the big three systems, AIM, Yahoo and Skype, just to cover your basis. Make sure you use a business type name - not your personal name or catchy social media name.

Now, here's the biggest tip of all that will skyrocket your acceptance rate. Once you send in your application, don't just sit on your haunches, wait a day, and then call the affiliate manager directly. Take the initiative. Remember, you're positioning yourself as a pro - a pro is not going to sick back with his fingers crossed and "hope" they call. So, pick up the phone, take the initiative and be confident. Don't lie, but don't tell them you're a rookie either. Keep your answers short and sweet and tell them the truth that you've done a lot of internet marketing and affiliate marketing and are now expanding into CPA as well. Remember, you're not going to get accepted into all of the networks you apply to - but that's okay. There are lots of them out there, just choose a bunch of them and keep applying, you will get in to several of them and if you follow the advice above you'll get accepted to about twice as many as if you don't.