Work At Home Information

Everyone is strapped for cash these days and that can make it a little tough for affiliate marketers to make money.  However, there are ways that you can make money by giving away free stuff.

There is a type of affiliate marketing out there known as cost per action, or CPA affiliate marketing.  In this type of affiliate marketing, you are not actually required to make a sale in order to get paid.  The way this type of affiliate program works is that you are paid for certain actions that occur as a result of your advertising efforts. You can be paid for someone simply inputting their email address in a form. You can be paid for someone signing up for a free trial of a product.  This  compensation model is known as pay-per-lead, since you are paid for every prospect you generate rather than paying customer.

The catch is that this type of affiliate marketing is not as easy to get into as the pay-per-sale model.  You can’t just sign up at a CPA network and be instantly approved like you can with Clickbank, Paydotcom,  or Plimus. You must apply and the network will then approve your application if you meet their criteria.

What are the criteria? Well, the different networks have different standards, but the main thing they’re looking for is to see that you’re a real person with contact information and who isn’t likely to scam them. This is because the CPA model of paying for leads rather than sales is very open to fraud.  Scammers have been known to use proxies to sign up for their own offers and have their friends do the same. Such sign ups are fraudulent as they don’t represent true leads that the company that is paying the CPA network for can use to make money from later.

To get accepted by a CPA network the first thing you need to have is a website or a blog. Neither of these has to cost money. You can get a free blog at blogger.com or for a few dollars, you can buy a domain name and get free hosting at namecheap.com.  For a little more money, not much, maybe $6 a month, you can get your own hosting package that will let you create multiple websites. Hostmonster.com is a great option for this.

Next, you should apply to as many CPA networks as you can. You won’t get accepted by all of them, so you should cast as wide a net as you can.  Here is a large list of CPA networks.

Once you have applied, wait a day or so, and phone up the gatekeeper.  The gatekeeper will most likely phone you up, anyway, if you pass initial screening, so calling them first immediately puts them at ease by proving that you are a real person with some initiative. The gatekeeper will be much more likely to approve you.  If you get lots of rejections, don’t take it to heart, just move on to the next one.

Once you are approved, then you will have access to all of the offers on that network. Some will be your garden variety, pay-per-sale offers, but along side these, you will find the offers you want: the pay-per-lead offers where all the prospect has to do is submit a valid email, zipcode, or sign up for a free product trial. For each of these offers, there will be a special code that you need to input in the html of your blog or website. It’s as simple as copy and paste.

Once you have your offers set up on your website or blog, you’ll want to drive traffic there.  There are many ways to drive traffic, some free, some paid, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

For the completely uninitiated, I recommend a product such as Zero Friction Marketing.     Zero Friction Marketing is a program that teaches you all about the world of CPA affiliates, including how to get accepted into the networks, how to drive traffic, and how to optimize your campaigns to get the most out of them.