Cost Per Action Explained

Hi

Well it's been a busy few months what with work and other internet projects but as an addition to all that I want to share with you the ins and outs of all the little techniques within the internet marketing sphere. As I said previously I want to cover CPA in a little more detail to show you what to use, where to use it and when to use it.

CPA can be a great little income stream on the side or you can go the whole hog and apply most of your efforts to implementing a successful CPA project. Remember there are no rules on what you choose to do, it is more about how you do it.

So what is CPA, well CPA is where you have an advert, either a glossy clickable image ad or a plain text ad. These can be run on various Websites and when someone clicks on the ad and registers for the product (usually enticed by a free product trial), you get a payment.

You get paid when the person registers so you have no pay per click fees, unless of course you combine it as a pay-per-click ad as well on Google or Yahoo. If you do not have it as pay per click you will then have to pay advertising costs and in order to strike a balance you need to find a website that markets the product your are promoting. If you are selling a lose weight product you will of course want to target it at a weight loss type of site.

For instance a weight-watching section in a womans magazine or a general lose-weight online forum or ezine is a good place to start. A word on weight loss products though, this market is quite lucrative so the prices are usually a bit higher for advertising and competition is usually a bit tougher, in other words you will find most of the Google toppers are well catered for.

One of the places I use for health-related products is Joe Bucks or markethealth.com...it is free to join and you get most of the promotional material you need such as banner links and landing pages, you do not need to do anything other than find somewhere to put the ad.

I will go through the whole process of using this with helpful screenshots, at a later date, but lets keep to the basic mechancis of CPA just now.

So how do you know if you are going to make a profit? Well you don't but if you choose the product and advertising medium carefully you can increase your chances of turning a profit. You should not give in if it does not work first time as you need to experiment and learn what works and what doesn't but you can limit any learning cycles down to the bare minimum with some simple research i.e.

What product are you going to use?

And

Where are you going to market it?

And Most Importantly

Is there a market for it?

A very important factor in this is to get contacting site marketing departments and asking specific questions about advertising, page hits on a certain page, suitability of your ad on their site, their marketing plans for the site. If you choose sites at the top of Google expect to pay a bit more than ones down the list but always ask anyway, the difference may only be a few pounds.

Always ask for an introductory trial advertising fee for a month to see how it goes. Say you are advertising on other sites and this will make them more inclined to try and offer you a better rate. Remember they want your business and you want to make money so it is in their interest to attract you to their site.

Look at the site and see if other brands are advertising about the site and see how long it has been up. If it has been up for a while you can bet that advertising works well on this site. This is another 'Green Light' for you to get advertising on that site.

Ok I have not finished with CPA, not by a long shot but I like to stop early so you can digest what you have read, and so you don't get info overload. Info overload to internet marketing is something that can easily put you off and have you very confused in a very short time. I know I have done it many times! Learn from what I am saying and take a break from it.

I would take a bit of time to digest this info, and then read it over again before continuing.

Thanks

Andrew