How to Make Money Fast With CPA Marketing & Paid Ads [UPDATED]

CPA Marketing
CPA Marketing

If you´ve been trying to make money online, there´s a good chance you´ve heard of CPA marketing.

As the people who read this blog and are part of our elite affiliate training are well aware, you can make a lot of money with this type of affiliate marketing.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and that’s exactly how I built my business online and made a living out of this.

In this post, I´ll give you a full CPA affiliate marketing tutorial, explain the truth about CPA Marketing, and show you how I generated thousands of dollars a day with it.

If you´ve been looking for the best ways to make money online, stick to the end.

Let’s dive in!

What is CPA Marketing?

For the purpose of this post, CPA marketing, or cost-per-acquisition marketing, is a type of affiliate marketing in which you get paid whenever a website visitor you´ve brought in takes an online action, like getting a quote or signing up for a free trial, installing an app, or making a purchase.

With CPA marketing, you can receive a commission even if your leads haven´t actually bought anything. In some cases, you could earn up to $50 just by getting somebody to fill in an online form.

Many affiliate marketers focus their time on CPA, especially media buyers like myself.

There are several different types of CPA offers available. You can find them on CPA affiliate networks or by working directly with advertisers.

CPA Marketing – Before we begin

Just so you know that I’m not blowing smoke, here´s a screenshot from one of my affiliate accounts showing my earnings from one specific day.

cpa marketing day 1
CPA Marketing

As you can see, I´ve made $2,452 that day alone.

And to show you that this wasn´t just one-day luck, here´s my data from that entire month.

CPA Marketing

I’ve made $92,442 that month, or roughly $3,000 a day.

Obviously, not all of that is profit. As CPA marketing affiliates, we’re usually using paid traffic.

But if you use the right tactics and strategies, as we’ll cover here, you can sometimes get 50% or higher profit margins. That means that for every $100 you spend to generate traffic, you could make $200 in return. 

I also did a video on how I made my first $100,000 profit on CPA Marketing: 

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: 

Understand that CPA marketing is not a “get rich quick” scheme. Success in CPA marketing requires significant effort, strategy, testing, money to lose, and time investment.

While CPA marketing can make you rich, it’s important to know that many people do not make substantial income or fail to make any profit at all. The ability to earn profits through CPA marketing requires expertise in creating high-quality ad campaigns, and the ability to analyze data around your marketing efforts. You must know who your customer avatar is and understand the market needs.

There is no guarantee of profit in CPA marketing. The figures and success stories you may come across are exceptional and are not typical of what the average marketer may achieve.

So with this in mind, as you become more experienced and optimize your strategies, you can potentially earn a high return on investment (ROI).

It’s crazy to think you can earn 50% ROI in a day, when some investors try to get that investment return in years.

That´s the beauty of CPA marketing.

With that out of the way, let me show you where you can find good CPA offers, how to set this up, and how to become a really profitable CPA marketing affiliate.

CPA Marketing – What´s a CPA Affiliate Network?

CPA affiliate networks, or performance marketing networks (their fancy name), are platforms that bring together advertisers, (also known as product owners) and affiliates (also called publishers).

As I said, when working with CPA offers, you can work directly with brands or through those networks.

I highly recommend working with a network first if you´re a beginner. That’ll give you more variety and ease in finding offers and their relevant info.

To learn more, check out this video I´ve made about the pros and cons of working with CPA affiliate networks: (sorry for the archaic editing style this was when I first started Youtube! 😂)

CPA Marketing

CPA Marketing – How to join a CPA network

If you’re a complete newbie with absolutely no experience, doing some initial groundwork before joining a network is essential. That includes stuff like creating a niche website, studying traffic sources, and learning about the industries you plan to work with.

Make sure to check out Powerhouse Affiliate, where you can find a ton of free and valuable advice on those things.

To join a network, you must fill in an application and go through an admission process that usually takes two to five days.

Here is a great network to start with Maxbounty

CPA Marketing

You´ll typically be asked to provide some information about yourself, your marketing channels, the types of products you want to promote, and traffic sources. They’ll also ask you to agree to their terms of service and comply with any legal requirements.

Always try to be transparent when answering their questions.

For instance, if you’re not making a ton of money with CPA marketing, be honest and say that you’re just starting in a professional way. If they ask you what traffic sources you plan to use, you could say that you’re looking to learn how to buy Google Ads, but don’t lie about your experience.

Many people try to trick the networks into accepting them, and this doesn’t work. I used to own a private CPA affiliate network myself; believe me; it’s extremely easy to detect when somebody’s lying to you.

Other important advice includes not using a VPN or private network and using an email address linked to your site rather than Gmail or Outlook. So, for instance, if I had a site called dietingcalm.com, I’d sign up with [email protected], as that’d prove that I’m related to that site.

All those things will put you a step ahead in proving that you´re a real person looking to work with them actively.

The reason they’re so tight is that there are a lot of affiliate marketing scams in this industry. There are many affiliates out there that think they can come into these networks, start filling out forms and submitting emails, and start getting paid.

There are a lot of detection software programs and compliance teams these days that are watching you every second to make sure you have legit traffic.

So, sign up, get your account, and you´ll be ready to start marketing.

CPA Marketing – What CPA affiliate networks look like

Let´s use MaxBounty as an example. This is a very popular CPA network, especially among new affiliates, as it’s more likely to accept them and provides training.

Once you get your account, this is what it´s going to look like:

CPA Marketing

As you can see, there are tons of offers ranging from $3.50 up to $185 per lead. Rule of thumb, the lower the payout, the easier it is to convert.

Many of these offers have rules that you need to follow when running traffic to them, and you can see all of that after clicking on them.

The first thing we need to look at is the allowed traffic types.

CPA Marketing

This offer, in particular, forbids affiliates from generating traffic through email or incentives, which is when an affiliate offers a user a reward of some kind to sign up to an advertiser through their affiliate link.

Often, the ones that are blocked out are either because the product owners are having so much success with them and don’t want to compete with their affiliates or because they consider that source too risky.

Next, we´ll see the countries we´re allowed to generate traffic from.

So, if an offer only allows Hong Kong and we don´t know how to get Hong Kong traffic, this isn´t an offer for us.

Coming down, we´ll see the Network EPC.

EPC stands for earnings per click. It represents the average that affiliates in that network are making per click on that offer, and it´s an excellent indicator of whether or not it´s converting.

A higher EPC means it´s a better offer, while a lower one means nobody´s running it or it´s not converting.

On MaxBounty, if we click on search campaigns, we can see all the offers and rank them from the highest to lowest EPC.

CPA Marketing

In our case, the highest EPC offer shown is a male enhancement offer, which is doing really well at $5.75 per click.

We can also filter offers by vertical to see the ones with the highest EPCs in a specific niche.

From my experience, some examples of great niches for CPA marketing in terms of the number of offers and payout include fitness, skincare, finance, and e-commerce.

CPA Marketing – Creating your campaign

So, you´ve found your network, got accepted, and found an offer you think will convert like crazy.

What´s the next step?

If you follow this blog and my YouTube channel, you´ll see affiliate marketing case studies using different tactics and traffic sources for affiliate marketing, especially CPA marketing.

But generally speaking, the best way to begin is by building a landing page, setting up tracking, and sending traffic to it.

The other option is to link directly to the offers. I don’t recommend this approach, as many networks and traffic sources like Google don’t allow that anyway.

With that covered, let’s review the steps to build a sales funnel for your CPA marketing offers.

Step #1: Build a landing page

There are many different types of landing pages you can create.

One of the best is the lead capture page, where we collect leads into our funnel before sending people to our affiliate offers.

By doing this, we can grow an email list to which we can send other affiliate offers as well, creating a snowball effect and eventually making it extremely profitable.

To build your landing page, I recommend using OptimizePress, a landing page builder that allows you to create decent, mobile-optimized landing pages very quickly.

Here is a guide on how to create a website for affiliate marketing. 

Here´s an example:

CPA Marketing

While this isn´t the most beautiful landing page in the world, it gets the job done and is very easy to create.

Step #2: Track and split test

The next step is integrating a third-party tool to track your outcomes and test different landing page variations.

I use CPV Lab Pro. I would recommend signing up to their new CPV One option which allows them to host it for you and speeds things up.

That allows you to run a ton of traffic right away and see if this will work for you without investing anything into a self hosted tracking solution.

Step #3: Generate traffic

The two most popular traffic sources for CPA marketing are Facebook and Google Ads.

However, there´s a lot of stuff regarding them that you need to know to get your ads approved and avoid getting banned, so I don´t recommend using them unless you´re familiar with how they work. Here is a complete course on how to run Google Ads for Affiliates. 

Instead, I advise you to use Native and Push ads, which most new affiliates (and many experienced ones) focus on.

Ad networks such as RichPush and PropellerAds allow you to get extremely cheap clicks to your affiliate links or email submit offers.

You can learn more about that in this tutorial I´ve made:

The last thing I want to cover here is a tool that I absolutely recommend checking out if you want to learn how other affiliates are generating thousands of dollars every single day.

It´s called AdPlexity, and it´s one of the best spy tools for push and native ads:

CPA Marketing

It allows you to see every single affiliate´s ads running on various traffic networks, as well as their landing pages. It also provides information on where they´re publishing their ads and their placements.

You can then reverse engineer the most successful ads to see what those affiliates are doing.

While you shouldn´t just copy everyone left and right, this tool can give you ideas on how to create your own ads and landing pages based on what´s working and start generating revenue for yourself.

CPA Marketing – Final thoughts

While there´s a lot that comes with CPA marketing, this should be enough to get you started.

Follow all the steps I´ve shared with you and remain consistent, and you can eventually make thousands of dollars per day from CPA marketing.

If you want to see some actual live paid traffic campaigns and case studies, don´t forget to check out Powerhouse Affiliate, where we go in-depth on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, native & push ads, and so much more.

Last but not least, make sure to comment with any questions you have about CPA marketing, and I´ll do my best to answer them.

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