You might have heard that CPA affiliate marketing is a very easy business and also might have told that everyone can make money with it. The truth is very far from this, I can guarantee. There are obviously some “big earners” who managed to master one or two traffic generation methods and like media buys, PPC or SEO and applied these tactics successfully on CPA campaigns. But many people struggle with CPA marketing when they are just starting up, and the reason for that is that they make a couple of mistakes in the beginning that is very hard to correct once you are in the daily routine.
The first most common mistake people make when starting up CPA affiliate marketing is that they handle it as a one-off cash machine instead of a long term business. Therefore they do not spend enough time on planning campaigns, targeting and choosing their most profitable niches. It is imperative that you will do your research, and also know your target market. Otherwise you are doomed to fail. You need to consider that competition in CPA marketing is getting harsher every single day because of the low start up costs. And you will also have to compete with people who have been doing this affiliate business for years and have discovered easy and painful methods to bring in a sustainable affiliate revenue.
You need to create your image within your niche, as there are loads of other people promoting the same offers as you, so you need to diversify yourself and give your visitors a reason why to buy/ sign up from your site. You need to provide info others do not on your website, have to compete with exclusive sites, bonus offers and people who already have a huge list of subscribers to market to.
So if you have already accepted the fact that affiliate marketing is just another home based business that needs to be built strong from the ground up, you are going to make the preparations essential to your long term success. I have seen CPA affiliate marketing sites that only contain one landing page for a selected product, and do not offer anything for signing up. This is the worst you can do with your affiliate site. You need to first position yourself as an expert and gain visitors’ trust. You also need to start building your own list.
Let’s imagine that you are promoting family freebie offers. You are using direct linking to the merchant’s affiliate landing page. That means although you managed to get Mrs Neil sign up for the free diapers offer once, you need to work again to get her to sign up for the baby care vouchers too, if you will be lucky enough to get her visiting one of your sites again. Although if you had a blog about baby care and offered her a free e-book on how to treat diaper rash in exchange for her email address, she would be more than happy to click on the link in your next email about baby care product, wouldn’t she?
Therefore the most important thing you have to remember when starting up a CPA affiliate business is consistency and building a long term business. If you bear these two things in mind, you will succeed no matter which niche you choose to target.
