Your success with CPA will have a lot to do with your ability to quickly and effectively select offers that have a good chance of making money. In time and with experience, you will begin to develop and eye for them, but keep in mind it will always be an experimentation process. You will be able to quickly determine which ones don’t have a good chance to succeed and which ones do – but whether or not they actually pan out will still be a trial and error. The point is to begin to get better at improving your odds.

In the beginning of every campaign, you are likely to lose money for a little bit until you are able to refine your PPC campaigns and tailor the results of your conversions and sales pages. Also, as your CTR and quality score remain strong you will be able to gradually lower your bid amounts in Google and still retain your position. Meaning, you will start to turn a losing campaign into a profitable one because you’re spending less to get those customers to convert.

Here are some of the general rules of thumb for selecting campaigns that can help you reduce some of your initial startup costs and get profitable quicker:

• Free Offers – Everyone likes getting free gifts, trials and subscriptions – free is good. So focus more on these types of offers as they are easier to convert. Many of the objections are already handled in the free nature of the offer and that makes conversions and profits soar.
• Zip and Email Submits – The very simple offers that require only a zip code or email in order for you to get paid (typically paying you from $1 to $1.50 for each generated lead) are some of the easiest offers to get to convert. Everyone nowadays has multiple email address (and one that they generally use for just this type of thing) and very few people are scared away by simply requesting their zip code and email address. The only real challenge with this type of offer is getting cheap enough traffic to make it worthwhile.
• 5 Second Test – Simply put, when you just glance at the offer page, does it draw you in? Is there a clear call to action that is very easy to find? Is the page design clean and concise? Or cluttered and confusing? Is the optin box above the fold? Is it prominently featured? Or tucked away? All of these factors can greatly impact the conversion rates of the offer, so examine them closely.

CPA Marketing is all about finding offers that convert and then ramping up the traffic to them. Keep in mind that while you can improve your odds by learning good techniques to evaluate offers and choosing offer types that are easier to convert, you still will likely have only about 1 in 5 offers or so that is a “winner”. And keep in mind, that you may lose money for several days even on that winner as well before you are able to refine it down enough to become profitable. Therefore, if you’re going to lose money on 80% of the offers to test out, it is important that when you find a winner you ramp up the traffic to it as much as you can and make everything you can from it.