Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Today I thought I’d write about something different from the usual traffic generation/marketing strategy stuff. I thought I’d write about online business models and walk you through the process of making money with CPA.
For the past 5 years, combining Adsense with SEO has been extremely popular. The formula was just so simple, it was mathematically impossible for it not to work. All you had to do was find a keyword that was getting enough searches and buy an exact match domain.
For example, you might have found “lawn mowers for sale” getting 3600 searches a month and the domain “lawnmowersforsale.org” available.
That would have been an excellent domain to purchase. So you would buy the domain, install WordPress, and set up a little site. Next, you would find 5-10 other related keywords and have some dude in India write an article targeting each one. Once written, you’d publish the articles and plaster Google Ads all over the place.
Once complete, you’d begin SEO. This was back when SEO was so frigging simple. All you’d do was write a few articles, spin them, and distribute them via a few blog networks. That’s it. The site would be live, and it would dominate the search engines for its keywords and make a cool $2-$10/day in Adsense revenue.
Not bad whatsoever considering you could build these sites in a day.
I know of so many marketers who solely relied on this business model. A few months back, the entire model suddenly came crashing down after a few Google updates. Ever since the Penguin update (a recent update), I’ve been telling people to start paying for traffic. SEO isn’t as simple as it once was, and the risks are higher now. If you’re only depending on free traffic—you’re headed toward bankruptcy.
…And with Adsense, you need to do SEO. You can’t really build an Adsense business on anything other than free traffic via SEO & content marketing. Unless you want to build a massive website or brand, which takes years anyway; you’re going to struggle.
So now is the time to use paid traffic, and if you’re looking for an alternative business model to the old SEO & Adsense—this is it.
CPA and PPC!
As you probably already know, PPC stands for pay per click marketing. It means you pay for every single visitor you receive. Most people assume they need thousands of dollars to get started with PPC and that they “have to” blow $500+ before they see a single penny in return.
The truth is most people do lose money their first time paying for traffic. You might lose $50, you might lose $2oo, heck you might even lose $2000. But the reality is you’ll probably only lose a few hundred at the maximum.
That is if you’ve done the work before hand and know what you’re doing in theory. If you really know what you’re doing and you know the niches, there’s no reason for you to lose any money at all. You can start making profits from day one.
CPA stands for cost per action. It’s where you get paid to generate big companies and small businesses leads. You get paid for every lead you generate. That usually means a name, email address and a phone number. The more information required, the higher the payout of the CPA offer. Here’s an example of a basic zip submit CPA offer:
It’s an offer that requires the user to enter his/her zip code to get a $500 free giftcard. Anyway, by combing CPA with PPC; you stand to make a lot of money.
The strategy is simple: choose high converting CPA offers and use PPC to drive traffic to them. I mean direct linking, sending pay per click traffic directly to CPA offers.
1. Signup To A CPA Network (Peerfly for example)
The first step is to join an actual CPA network. CPA networks are like marketplaces for CPA offers. Just like Clickbank or any other online marketplace for affiliates. CPA networks connect advertisers with publishers. You can join them and browse through thousands of different offers.
2. Find A High Converting Offer In A Good Niche
Once you’re inside a network, browse through the list until you find a high converting offer in a good niche. Basically, you just need to find a CPA offer that you believe will have a large audience.
I and most other marketers usually stick to health, wealth and relationships. But with CPA; you can use any offer in any niche that has a lot of traffic. Giveaways are great, simple email/zip submits like the one above.
They are basic 1 page squeeze pages that only require a visitor to enter their email or zip code for you to get paid. For example, let’s use the gift card example. There are plenty of CPA offers giving away gift cards.
In the image above, the CPA offer is giving away a $500 gift card to either Sears or Best Buy. Those kind of CPA offers usually pay out $1-3 per submit.
3. Make Sure The Niche Has A Lot Of Traffic
Really important, use the Google Keyword Tool to search a few terms related to the CPA offer of your choosing to make sure there is enough traffic in the niche. For this example offer, you would search “best buy coupons”, “best buy giftcards”, “best buy” and the same for Sears. If there are a few dozen keywords or more getting 500-2000+ searches a month; it’s good.
4. Select 30 Keywords That Are Likely To Convert With The Offer
Next just select 30 of the keywords that you think are likely to convert with the offer. Meaning you should believe the searchers of the keywords would be likely to opt-in to the CPA offer.
5. Break Keywords Into 3 Ad Groups
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Now break your 30 keywords into 3 ad groups. By ad groups, I mean categories. Ad groups are the PPC term. They could be; sears giftcards, best buy giftcards and sears coupons. They are just groups of keywords. You should always be able to categorize your 30 keywords into at least 3 groups. To make it easier to understand, here’s another example.
Let’s say your niche is laptops and you’re promoting a free laptop giveaway CPA offer. You could have 3 ad groups; toshiba laptops, dell laptops and hp laptops. In each ad group, you could have a set of keywords for each brand. It’s simple categorization.
Comments
Neil Patt, May 19, 2012, 14:30:
With the recent EMD update, it has been a lot more difficult to rank as before. Google has changed many SEO rules in ranking.
Mark Andrews, May 20, 2012, 09:45:
This is a great post! I’ve been considering moving away from Adsense and this might just be the push I needed. Thanks for the insights!
Angela Simmons, May 21, 2012, 16:20:
Interesting read! I’ve been trying to find alternatives to SEO and this CPA strategy seems promising. Any suggestions on where to start?
Jason Turner, May 22, 2012, 18:10:
I’m a bit skeptical about moving away from free traffic. Does anyone have actual proof that CPA and PPC work as well as claimed?
Sophie Rivera, May 23, 2012, 10:45:
Great article! I have been using Adsense for years, but it feels like it’s time to shift strategies. Your explanation of CPA and PPC has given me a lot to think about. Definitely going to give it a try.
Juan Delgado, May 23, 2012, 12:30:
I can’t believe that something as big as Adsense is now considered outdated. Do you have any concrete examples or case studies that show CPA and PPC outperforming the old model?
Emily Greene, May 23, 2012, 14:15:
I’m curious about the initial investment needed for PPC. How much should one be prepared to spend before seeing any returns? Any advice for beginners?
Michael Ross, May 23, 2012, 15:50:
I think the post is great, but it feels a bit too dismissive of SEO. There’s still value in organic traffic, though I agree that diversification is key. What do you think about balancing both strategies?
Yasmin Patel, May 23, 2012, 17:30:
Hey David, it’s been a while! Thanks for this insightful post. Let’s catch up soon, maybe over a call? I’d love to hear more about your experience with PPC.
Oliver Wu, May 23, 2012, 19:00:
I had a similar experience where my SEO-driven Adsense sites took a hit after the updates. Shifting to CPA has been challenging but also rewarding. Thanks for the encouragement!
Priya Kumar, May 23, 2012, 20:45:
For anyone still interested in SEO, I’ve found that focusing on local SEO can still yield results. Also, tools like Ahrefs and Moz are invaluable in staying ahead. But yes, CPA and PPC are where the money is now!
Lucas Brennan, May 23, 2012, 22:20:
This post really opened my eyes to the potential of CPA and PPC. I used to think Adsense was the only way to monetize, but this is a game changer. Thanks for sharing!
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Twenty-two years in insurance and I never once heard ‘zip submit CPA offer’ used as a serious business model, and yet here we are, and it makes a strange kind of sense. Swap ‘ad groups’ for ‘business units’ and ‘keyword categorization’ for ‘market segmentation’ and this is just a smaller, cheaper version of a corporate marketing department, minus the eighteen-month sign-off process to change a headline.
“No reason to lose money at all if you know what you’re doing.” Known relative to what benchmark?
Raj’s question matters more with forty-five minutes a night. I need the odds before I start, not after I’ve already spent the week.
The framing is ‘SEO’s dead, so pay for traffic instead,’ but that’s just moving the risk from your time to your wallet. Free traffic risk is wasted hours. Paid traffic risk is real money spent before you know if the offer converts. Neither one is really solved here, just relabeled.
Marla’s onto something, though I’d push it further than ‘risk moved.’ Every ‘X is dead, try Y’ post in this space is really just describing wherever the herd hasn’t arrived yet. Adsense died the moment enough people found the lawnmower-domain trick, and CPA will die the exact same way, the day this post gets shared enough times. The obituary just writes itself early.
I think what’s being missed here is that Declan’s right about the herd eventually arriving, but that doesn’t make the underlying step-by-step useless in the meantime. Selecting thirty keywords and checking search volume before spending a cent isn’t a hype claim, it’s just due diligence, and Raj’s objection about missing base rates is fair but applies to almost any new skill before you’ve done it fifty times. The process described here is more careful than the ‘find a keyword, buy the domain’ version from a page earlier, and that’s worth crediting even while you’re skeptical of the bigger sales pitch underneath it.
Small point: what’s described here as a basic CPA offer, a zip submit for a gift card, is usually filed under CPL, cost per lead, in most networks’ own categorization. Genuine CPA generally implies a purchase or a trial further down the funnel. Doesn’t change the strategy being described, but worth knowing the label before you’re comparing offers across networks.