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Karim Pearson is a writer, blogger and entrepreneur based in New York City. If you’d like to learn how to make money from affiliate marketing, just go to his blog at SuperAffiliatePayday.com

Not long ago, Charles gave you a rundown on how you could start making money from affiliate marketing. As he explained, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make a substantial income online. Today I’m going to talk to you about a specific form of affiliate marketing that can be VERY lucrative. You can make money without storing inventory, without having to provide any customer service, and without ever actually selling anything to anyone.

What Is CPA Affiliate Marketing?

CPA (Cost Per Action) affiliate marketing is where an affiliate/publisher is paid each time a customer performs a specific action on the affiliate’s page. For example, you’ve probably seen offers online where you can win a free iPod or laptop for filling in your email address. What you may not beaware of is that each time someone lands on that offer page and submits their email address, the affiliate who promoted that particular offer makes a commission.

In other words, someone got paid simply for driving traffic to an affiliate website where people submit their email address in exchange for a reward or prize. Because the customer doesn’t have to “buy” anything, the conversions on these types of offers can be much higher than other types of affiliate marketing offers.

Depending on the type of offer, the commission you make from CPA affiliate marketing can range from just a few cents to $40-$50 or more. Typically, the less action the customer is required to take, the smaller the commission. So for an email submit similar to the one in the example above, the affiliate might make $1.50 for each email address submitted through their site. On the other hand, an offer that required the customer to fill out a longer, more involved form might pay $40 or more for each “lead” you generate for them.

By the way, if you’re wondering why anyone would pay you just for a person’s email address, the answer is that as a CPA affiliate marketer, you’re acting as a “lead generator” for advertisers. They’re willing
to pay you for driving traffic to their offer because once they have the customer’s information, they make money on the back end through follow-up promotions. The advertiser might be paying you $40 per lead generated, but they know that they can make several times that amount per customer over the course of months or years once they have the person’s information, so it’s worth it to them.

Like with other types of affiliate marketing, CPA affiliate marketing involves three players:

1. Publishers/Affiliates - The people who drive traffic to affiliate offers in exchange for a commission paid per action taken.

2. Advertisers - The companies that create the affiliate offers and receive the leads generated by CPA marketing campaigns.

3. Affiliate Networks - The “middlemen” between the advertisers and the affiliates. Affiliate networks are responsible for tracking sales and sending commission payments to affiliates.

How Much Can You Earn With CPA Affiliate Marketing?

The name of the game in CPA affiliate marketing is TRAFFIC. The more targeted traffic you can drive to your affiliate offers, the more money you can make.

Like I said earlier, because customers aren’t required to “buy” anything upfront, conversions can be extremely high compared to standard affiliate offers. Whereas a digital ebook from Clickbank might convert at around 1-2 percent, a CPA email submit offer might convert at 30-50 percent.

So your job as a CPA affiliate is to send as much traffic to your offers as possible through Pay-Per-Click advertising, Search Engine Optimized websites and blogs, and any other means permitted by your CPA offers (always check out your CPA offer’s affiliate terms and conditions or check with your affiliate mangager once you sign up in order to determine what kinds of traffic are permitted).

It’s not uncommon for some more established affiliates with lots of traffic to earn 5 or 6 figures per month. Granted, they didn’t get there overnight, but it shows you what’s possible.

How Can You Get Started With CPA Affiliate Marketing?

You can get started making money with CPA affiliate marketing by finding CPA affiliate networks and signing up as a publisher. Here is a list of over 140 affiliate networks to choose from.

In addition, you can check out a list of available offers to promote and their payouts at Offer Vault.

One downside to working with CPA networks is that it can be more difficult to get accepted initially. The two things you should definitely have before you apply are a website or blog, and a plan for getting traffic to your site. If you’re not accepted into the CPA network at first, feel free to call them up and let them know what you’re planning to do to drive traffic to their offers.

Also, if you’ve worked with other non-CPA affiliate networks such as Clickbank and had success, let the CPA network representative know that. As long as they think that you’ll be making money for them, many CPA networks will be more than happy to work with you. Also, be sure to apply to multiple CPA networks as not only will this increase your chances of being accepted by one of them, but it also gives you a wider range of offers to promote.

So now you’ve got a potentially very lucrative way to make money online without even selling anything. If CPA affiliate marketing sounds right for you, take action on it today, and be sure to let me know any questions that you have in the comments section below.

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