For several years now there has been this industry secret for the “big players”. It wasn’t so much that it was a secret, but they were bringing in so much money that they really didn’t want it leaking out that while everyone else in Internet Marketing was playing around with Clickbank they were making 10x that much or more in 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 pay for each lead that you acquire for them, generally about $1.50 for a simple zip code and email lead – very straightforward. The only responsibility you have is to drive traffic to their lead capture page at your own expense. This is a fairly standard promotion type. There are other more complicated and higher paying offers that may require a credit card for a free trial plus shipping and handling, or a multi-page registration form for insurance, for example.
So, in essence, as a CPA marketer you are really a traffic broker. You buy traffic on one end, send it to an offer page and get paid based on how well it converts. 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. While those huge numbers are impressive, what is more impressive is that many, many more people are making $500 to $1000 a day in CPA campaigns. In the beginning you’ve got a lot of hurdles to overcome dealing with all that competition as well as the learning curve. The profits may seem high, but the costs are as well – don’t be surprised to spend $1000 to net $300. Sounds okay, right – spend $1000 and make back $1300 to net $300. Sure, you’d do it all day long if you could. But cash management and cash flow can become a big problem at first. For example, how much cash do you have at hand and for how long can you float it? Google charges you daily so you’ll be paying $1000 a day, but that $300 net (or $1300 gross) won’t be coming for perhaps 30 and sometimes even 60 days out. 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. CPA marketing can be very lucrative, but it is also not for the faint of heart. If you’re going to take this seriously, then you need to seriously commit to a training program such as CPA Ninja School that can teach you the ins and outs and save you the learning curve – that learning curve can be several times the cost of a good training course. The wise choice is to invest upfront in good training so that you don’t make costly mistakes along the way. It may take you a while to get to $500 a day profits, but the effort will well be worth it.
If you are considering a course, have a look at the first part of our CPA Ninja School Review
