CPA Monetization: What Content Marketers Should Know

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Most content marketers are familiar with ClickBank and AdSense. Most are also familiar with creating and selling their own product.

One lesser known technique of monetizing a content website is using CPA (Cost-per-Action) lead generation.

CPA can help you make more money from your traffic while getting paid in less time. But there are many, many pitfalls in using CPA.

Here’s a brief overview of everything you need to know to get started in using CPA leads to monetize content sites.

What is CPA?

CPA is getting paid for leads rather than sales.

If a car insurance company knows that on average a customer is worth $1,000 to them, they may very well be willing to pay $2.00 for an email address of a potential customer.

They’ll pay that $2.00 to an affiliate network, then the affiliate network might pay you something like $1.70.

If you run a website about cars, it’d be very difficult to sell cars, to sell a ClickBank product about cars or even to sell your own product about cars.

It’s just much, much harder to get someone to pull out their credit card than it is to get someone to fill out a lead.

If instead you send someone to a lead gen form, you may very well get a lot of conversions.

Let’s say you have a .5% conversion rate on a $40 infoproduct with a $20 payout. You’re earning $.10 cents per click.

On the other hand, you have a 20% opt-in rate (not unusual) to a $1.75 lead generation program. You’re earning $.20 cents per click.

More Benefits to Using CPA Lead Gen

There are a few more big differences between CPA and ClickBank or selling your own product.

First of all is payout time. ClickBank generally pays out once a month, sometimes twice a month. AdSense pays out once a month. Sometimes it can take a couple weeks to get your payments process and mailed, so it may take as long as 40 days to get paid.

Successful affiliates on good affiliate networks can get paid by direct wire as often as once a week. That means you can instantly get cash to recycle back into your business.

Furthermore, unlike ClickBank or most affiliate programs, you have an affiliate manager. This is a real person you can call whose whole job is to help you make money.

You can call them to ask what offers are doing well, to place tracking pixels on the Thank You page, you name it.

The Major Pitfalls of Monetizing with CPA

There are quite a few big pitfalls to avoid when you’re using CPA.

The first is the mistake of crafting your site around promoting CPA offers. Don’t do it. Craft your site around making a high quality website that people want to come back to and link to. Use CPA offers only as an auxiliary way of making money, if you can find offers that work well with your content.

Which ties nicely into the second mistake: Promoting shady offers. The CPA space has a much higher percentage of shady offers than other industries. I’d venture to say that a good 50% to 70% of all the offers you’ll find are shady in some way shape or form.

These offers will burn out your readership very quickly. If people get scammed as a result of an ad they clicked on your site, they probably won’t want to come back.

Make no mistake: CPA isn’t easy or even always safe to navigate. But if you figure the system out, there’s a lot of money to be made.

Getting Started 101

So if you’re interested in testing CPA for your site, how do you get started?

First, you need to find some offers. Head over to offervault.com, a CPA program search engine, and do a search for a few products you can promote.

In general, the fewer fields the higher conversion. The higher the payout the better. Look at the landing page and use your intuition to figure out what will and won’t convert.

Once you find a few offers you want to promote, apply to the affiliate networks with those offers. Let them know what site you have and how you intend to promote your offer.

Call the network right after you apply to introduce yourself. Be proactive about getting approved.

Log into the system after you’re approved, find your affiliate link and link to the offer from your site.

It’s that simple! Well, it is and it isn’t. Once you get into it, you’ll have to learn about things like testing between networks, iFraming offers on your own page instead of linking to them, expiring offers and a lot more complicated stuff.

But the most important first step is to just try it out, the simple way. See if you can make money. See if you can do it ethically. See if you like the style of promotion. If so, dive in and learn more. If not, you’ve spent a few hours and $0 to learn something new about internet marketing.

- Derek

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About the Author

Derek Pankaew has been building internet businesses for over 5 years. He’s helped businesses go from startup to over $1 million per year, has built successful marketing campaigns in 4 different countries and has gotten new sites to over 30,000 visitors a month in under 60 days. His specialties include SEO, content marketing and increasing conversions.