What Is CPA?
CPA marketing is a slightly mysterious branch of Internet Marketing that can make paupers into millionaires and millionaires into paupers. Sure that was a little melodramatic, but I don’t want to be too dull. So, what is CPA?
CPA stands for Cost Per Action and it refers to a type of marketing where you get paid, not necessarily for a sale, but for some other action that a customer may take.
In essence, it’s a form of lead generation, that you yourself can get involved in from an advertiser perspective as well as the publisher, but enough of that, let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
What is CPA?
You know when you’re checking out Facebook and you see those ads for a free iPad or cell phone? Well, those are often CPA offers. You fill in a bunch of offers and surveys in the hope of getting some free stuff and a whole lot of marketing companies get your details and market to you until the cows come home. That’s the way of the marketing world I’m afraid, so don’t get depressed about it. So that’s one type of CPA offer.
The email submit. You get paid an amount of money. Often not too much, $1.25 or so, for getting a potential customer to fill in his or her email address. You can even find offers for ZIP submits in which a lead gives his or her (you guessed it) ZIP code. It’s all about the demographics.
ZIP and email submits are just 2 of the types of CPA offers you can get. There are offers with longer forms to fill in all the way to credit card submits and even full on payments (generally for shipping and handling so it’s not truly a sale) with the greater the effort on the behalf of the lead the greater the payment to the publisher (you).
There are as many ways to promote CPA offers as there are any other type of offer, but often you are restricted by the provider as to which you can use. Often they don’t like email marketing or social marketing (Facebook etc) but you will find this out on the offer itself.
You’re probably asking now, where do I find these wonderful sounding offers? There are dozens of companies that you can join to get offers such as these. Excellent ones for newbies are:
And I’ve always found Offervault to be a super helpful resource where you can search for specific offers and it will point to the company who’ll provide them.
A bugbear that people often face is that these companies don’t just accept everyone who applies. You’ve got to sound like you have a bit of a clue and it’s often a good idea to have a website or other means of promotion ready to display as evidence of your suitability. Following your application with a phone call often does the trick.
Once you’ve been accepted you’ll be able to browse the offers and choose one that you like or which suits your niche. My advice at this stage would be to speak with your affiliate manager to get some advice.
CPA isn’t for everyone and I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but with the right traffic you can make an absolute fortune. It can be a little confusing, so I’ve teamed up with the guys from Dirty CPA to bring you this awesome deal. You can sign up for their membership site for 1 month for a mere $5 and start exploding your earnings like you wouldn’t believe.
Try Dirty CPA now. You’ll thank me later.
What Is Email Marketing
Hi folks,
Another in my series of “What Is”, this time, what is email marketing.
You may have heard the phrase and you may have a completely incorrect view of what it is, how it’s done and what benefits it may bring.
Let me say first of all that email marketing has nothing to do with spamming. I’ve heard that the average spammer has a conversion rate of something like 0.001%. With figures like that, why would you possibly want to spam anyone? Apart from the ethical angle, you’d have to be rather silly to partake in an activity that nets such a small return. All the while, risking prosecution.
Email marketing is pretty much the same as any other type of marketing. Put your offer in front of potential buyers and use your marketing skills to convert the sale.
You’ve been the target in email marketing, for sure. If you’ve bought something from an online retailer and they’ve sent you a follow up email. No company worth its salt would miss an opportunity to market further to you. Just remember:
Every customer touchpoint should be seen as an opportunity.
AWeber proves it to thousands of businesses every day.
Learn how email marketing software
can get you more sales, too.
So, as this isn’t an in depth guide on how to market with email, I’m going to give you a quick rundown.
What Is Email Marketing?
In order to enter the highly lucrative email marketing arena, you need to follow these basic steps:
List Building
In the internet marketing field, we generally build a list by having customers ‘opt-in’ by entering their email address, and then (for the double opt-in) confirm that they wish to receive communication from us. This is the main thing that separates us from spammers, who just mail any email address they can scrape from anywhere at all.
Using an auto-responder, like Aweber, the most trusted auto-responder in the business, to collect the names, email addresses, etc, we entice the potential customers to opt-in by offering them something of value. Often a free e-book, course, video or anything else that they may find useful.
Trust Building
Once the target has opted-in your best bet is to then deliver further value by convincing them that
1. You’re worth listening to
2. You’re trustworthy
By sending them regular content relating to your niche, that will be helpful for them.
So for example, if you’re in the mountain biking niche, you could entice the reader to opt-in by offering a guide to the best trails in Nova Scotia and when they’ve signed up, periodically send them:
- More trails
- Reviews on awesome new kit
- Tips on maintaining and repairing mountain bikes
etc
The list is endless. And the more valuable your list find your content, the more likely they will be to trust you and pay attention to your recommendations.
Fortune Building
It’s often bandied about that good marketer can make $1 per month per subscriber. I would personally say that it depends on the niche, but a great marketer CAN make more than that. In fact if you’re making 50 cents per subscriber per month, it’s a relatively easy road to the $100 per day milestone. A good way to get there is obviously a massive list and what really helped me add dozens of subscribers a week is James Penn’s 100 per day.
Remember what I said before about using every customer touchpoint as a sales opportunity? Well, you have to use your discretion. Plastering every email with constant promotions will only annoy (and shrink) your list. A one line recommendation can be unobtrusive and if you’re providing value (like you should be) giving an option to purchase a really relevant product IS good customer service.
A couple of harder sells in a month is normally ok, but you’ll learn to judge your list and you’ll get the hang of reading the unsubscribe behaviour.
Now that I’ve answered the question, what is email marketing, I seriously suggest you start. Sooner rather than later.
Should You Use Black Hat SEO?
There’s always a lot of talk about black hat SEO and white hat link building etc, but what do these terms really mean?
Well, to me, white hat represents:
- Links from normal and reasonable promotion methods
while black hat SEO is trying to game the system and fool the search engines.
My personal belief, which I have proved correct time and time again, that the most effective method of SEO is great content and plenty of it, is becoming more widely held, but people still think that they can create a crap site, backlink the hell out of it and make a million.
And then they complain when their rankings hit bottom, well before they’ve made a penny.
There’s always some doofus who believes that ANY linkbuilding at all is black hat, but this is plainly ridiculous. No search engine, no matter how tyrannical, would expect someone to create a business online and not promote it. It’s the methods of promotion you use, that Google doesn’t like. Normal (and with any SEO discussion, this is opinion borne out by experience) link building includes:
- Article Directory Marketing
- Article Syndication
- Video Marketing
- Social Bookmarking
- Social Media Promotion
This list is by no means exhaustive, it’s just giving you a taste of the difference between normal and unethical marketing, which would consist of things like:
- Blog commenting where the comments are spam
- Forum profile links (many will deny this, but it makes forum owners’ lives hell)
- Playing on people’s loneliness or compassion to convince them to fill in CPA offers
The list is endless. Pretty much anything that can disadvantage someone else will be considered ‘black hat’.
While all is fair in love and war (and business) there’s a very good reason to not indulge in black hat SEO and only use ‘white hat’ techniques.
Longevity.
You’re building a business here. You wouldn’t start a company in the real world and only put enough infrastructure in place for it to last 18 months. Well, you don’t want to make websites that will plummet in the rankings once your links have been devalued or your site has been found out to be terrible or your method has a short shelf-life.
Please note this well. The vast majority of the time when people complain that Google has slapped their sites, it’s not true. It’s merely a combination of:
- A poor site
- The QDF (quality demands freshness) paradigm that gives new sites and pages a temporary boost. Once this ends your rankings may fall, especially if your site/page doesn’t offer value.
Sometimes it’s because of a new algorithm, but Google will NEVER punish quality. That would be stupid and it’s against everything they stand for.
Publish quality sites, write great and helpful content and promote yourself ethically and within Google’s guidelines and you’ll find that your sites maintain their high rankings.
