CPA Marketing Or Affiliate Marketing?
It's not uncommon for those who are novices in the world of Internet marketing to confuse CPA marketing with general affiliate marketing. This is understandable as the two have a lot in common. However, there are also key differences which are worth noting when making a decision about whether or not to choose CPA. In this article, we will discuss the key benefits of choosing CPA marketing, and how CPA differs from standard affiliate marketing programs.
One key difference between CPA and affiliate marketing is what you are paid for. In standard affiliate marketing, you sign up to be an affiliate of a particular program and you are given a unique link. You put this link on your website or blog and then promote the link. When a person clicks through your link and decide to purchase the product, you get paid a percentage of the sale. In short, with affiliate marketing, you are paid when the sale is made.
There are some CPA programs that pay out for sales, but most work differently. Instead of being paid when a sale is made, most CPA offers pay for a particular action that may or may not be monetarily based. This action could be simply having somebody click through your link and submit their e-mail or sign up for a free trial offer.
In the same way as with an affiliate marketing program, with a CPA program, you also get a unique link or affiliate code. The CPA program will use this to determine who it was that performed a particular action. Also, you'll promote your link and through the link drive traffic to the site. The major benefit of this is that it is much easier for people surfing the Internet to perform an action that does not require they pay money as opposed to buying a product. This makes it easier for you to make money.
Especially with so many people online being concerned about identity theft, it is critically important to make a person feel comfortable before they will decide to spend their money. CPA offers allow you to get paid while the customer is able to try a product or learn more about it before spending their money.
The CPA program is interested in gaining potential customers, and then once they have established a relationship with that potential customer they know that customer is much more likely to buy. What they are counting on you to do is to bring potential customers to their site. Once the customer is at their site, your work is done. This is what separates additional affiliate marketing from CPA offers or CPA affiliate programs.
With that being said, you want to note that CPA offers are often more difficult in regards to understanding them then standard affiliate offers. This will require a lot of attention to detail on your part in order to understand what the offer is promoting, what your role in promoting the offer is, and what the potential customer needs to do so that you can get paid.
Standard affiliate marketing programs and CPA offers both present opportunities to make money online. It is worth thinking about what you are looking for and how your current Internet marketing strategy is constructed when determining which combination of affiliate marketing and the CPA affiliate marketing you wish to pursue.
There are great training courses out there who are showing you how to start making money with CPA Marketing as well as showing you some more advanced techniques. Below you can find links to products I own my self and have written an honest review:
Zero Friction Marketing Review
August 9, 2009 by Daniel under 
CPA Marketing
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, cpa, CPA Marketing, Internet Marketing, make money online, marketing, online business, SEO
This article clears my confusion with the standard affiliate marketing and CPA marketing. Thanks for dissecting the differences between the two programs
I have a question though, can you give example of sites that offer CPA marketing?
Cheers
Here are some examples of sites that have a CPA offer:
http://www.kardashiansmile.com/
http://www.resveratrolselect.com/
http://www.acaiberryselect.com/
Cheers,
Daniel
Hi Daniel
Thank you for enlightening me on CPA offers, your article is certainly very informative and clearly shows me that there are some major benefits relating to CPA offers and the drawbacks if the offer is not looked into detail. I have just got started and have started to make money online through affiliate marketing first time in 2 years since I started in 2007. I am putting some time aside to look at what you have mentioned "There are great training courses out there who are showing you how to start making money with CPA Marketing as well as showing you some more advanced techniques. Below you can find links to products I own my self and have written an honest review"
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Great Article Daniel. After reading several articles similar to yours I decided to get into CPA Affiliate Network Marketing. This week I signed up for 4 Networks. One refused me, two of them gave me accounts, and I am still waiting on the third one.
I plan on signing up for several more.this week.
.-= Kirk @ Affiliate Network Marketing´s last blog ..Secret CPA Affiliate Network Marketing Formula Transforms Lives =-.
We get this question alot on our blog. Great explanation. I guess I will point them to your answer now. Thanks.
CPA marketing overall is a better way to go if you want to make more money and faster rather than going with affiliate marketing. Although, you should stay away from the smaller CPA networks because fairly often, they will use unethical business practices such as not paying out and even going to the extreme of bribing their affiliates. Remember to stick with the bigger networks.
.-= Will @ Aymen Arbitrage Conspiracy´s last blog ..List Of CPA Networks =-.
Hi Daniel,
I just want to add, maybe you forget about this. There are residual income affiliate program. It means we can get paid forever as long as the buying is still member of merchant program. I am not sure if CPA also residual income offer.
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CPA program ensures you are equipped with an understanding of the dynamic issues facing organizations in a global market.
I like to look at an affiliate being a middle man in a transaction, regardless of the action required for payout.
The term "affiliate marketer" paints a broad brush.
I have a definite attraction to CPA marketing though, I love the feeling of being payed for someone filling in 1 or 2 fields of a first page submit offer.
.-= Boris@Arbitrage Conspiracy Unleashed´s last blog ..Different Types of Affiliate Marketing =-.
I have just started to earn a little from CPA and cannot agree more... one CPA conversion could be equal to several Adsense clicks and although it could take a little more testing to hit the right formula, in the long run your earnings could be much higher.
The problem is most CPA offers are fussy about international traffic. Finding one that pays is troublesome..
.-= Anand@Dofollow Q&A Portal´s last blog ..3 + 1 Things A Niche Blogger Needs To Be Successful =-.
I think a key thing is choosing good quality products to promote.
A lot of products on the smaller affiliate networks you wouldn't buy yourself or recommend to friends, ever.
Yes, that's a good point. You never should promote a product which you wouldn't buy your self. Sadly it has become normal, that people are promoting products just for the money and they wouldn't buy it them self!
@Anand, this depends on what kind of product you wanna promote. If you are promoting health related products, then you should join Market Health. They offer a lot of products and accept international traffic.
Daniel,
Thanks for clearing up the difference between an affiliate marketer and CPA is. I have not ventured into CPA yet, but after reading your blog I think I might give it a shot
We get this question alot on our blog. Great explanation. I guess I will point them to your answer now. Thanks.
Market health is really good and you get paid from $20.00 and up for CPAs, if you try and sell their products you can make up to $120.00 per sale and trust me it sells!
hi nice article daniel, do you think a site like goldsneakers.com would be more suited to CPA or affiliate marketing?
Thanks for the article. One of the downsides to CPA marketing is that CPA offers expire rather frequently. So that means more management of your campaigns (rotating in and out offers when they expire, etc.). Another important point is that commissions from one CPA network to another vary greatly. You can promote the same offer from two different networks and have different payouts. But sometimes, the lower paying network will give you a better ROI due to scrubbing.
Thanks again for the article.
-G
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Hallo, I am Chris from Germany -
I randomly ended up here and find the super post
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Thanks for clearing up the difference between an affiliate marketer and CPA is. I have not ventured into CPA yet, but after reading your blog I think I might give it a shot
I have been working online for just over a year now and I haven't tried any CPA marketing yet. It's definitely something I want to try out, but just too many things going on. I've worked with MarketHealth too and they do pay good commissions.
Thanks - Heidi Passey
.-= Website Traffic Promotion´s last blog ..7 Simple Website Traffic Promotion Methods =-.
It is sometimes confusing for a newbie to differentiate between cpa & affiliate marketing.most of the internet marketer prefer affiliate marketing(eg click bank,amazon) rather then cost per action(cpa) because one can earn good money quite easily from the first option then the last one.but if someone looking to build a long term relationship with his/her clients & determining potential customers for certain products,then cpa is the best
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You can expect to spend a good couple of weeks before you get your first clients. I would recommend not trying affiliate marketing part time if you just start out. Great information in the article, thank you. Do you have any free CPA programs we can use to test?
Hey,
Thanks for the info on this... I do CPA marketing and I find its better then CPS. It converts better coz the visit has no need to actually pay for something...
Thanks again!
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Thank you i read your previous post on C.P.A and had no idea what it was and how it was different to affiliate marketing once again good post.
Thank you
.-= jason´s last blog ..My Online Home Business Opportunity =-.
CPA marketing is a great concept. I enjoy doing it because its a lot easier.. in my opinion... to convert your visitor!
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This was a great post. I've been online for a few years; mainly focused on affiliate marketing and didn't even know CPA marketing existed. I really like the idea of adding this to my marketing funnel in the future. Thanks for the tips.
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away” You have definitely thrown the worst away! Thanks for CPA marketing explanation!
On few of my blogs I tried to combine CPA with AM and on the others only CPA and only AM, got very interesting result. On CPA blogs I got nice Income but no so good as AM blogs, but the combination of the two is just a big Ad's Pile Up - don't advise to do so.
I recently once in a while join your blog to learn something about cpa and affiliate marketing, And first thing I see - AD - a big'o pop-up that I just can't stand off, and it's a BIG problem to close your page cause of BIG AD - which not giving you way to leave the page - get rid of it, cause people will forget about your blog - you have too much interesting information and this ads just kill the enthusiasm. Good luck, will join soon!
As you said there are many valid reasons to be an affiliate marketer! It is like working with different companies and offers without having employment contracts with them, the internet has made affiliate marketing very liberal in the sense that affiliate marketing has international reach; it doesn’t matter in which country you are, just sign up to an affiliate program, promote and make money. Simple!
In my experience, CPA is most beneficial for beginners that are looking to make quick cash using the methods that they are able to apply to their sites and/or business. Often times this is due to the fact that there is far less pre-selling to involve yourself with and less convincing the user to purchase anything as most CPA offers are free trials. or information submit options and so on.
I have also had trouble using CPA stuff, but this post has helped with some of my confusion, and I might e able to fix it. Thanks a lot!
It is sometimes confusing for a newbie to differentiate between cpa & affiliate marketing.most of the internet marketer prefer affiliate marketing(eg click bank,amazon) rather then cost per action(cpa) because one can earn good money quite easily from the first option then the last one.but if someone looking to build a long term relationship with his/her clients & determining potential customers for certain products,then cpa is the best
There are some major benefits relating to CPA offers and the drawbacks if the offer is not looked into detail. I really like the idea of adding this to my marketing funnel in the future. the internet has made affiliate marketing very liberal in the sense that affiliate marketing has international reach
Affiliate marketing's compensation can be Pay per sale, pay per action, and pay per click. Pay per sale being the most lucrative with most of the affiliates.
On one hand where affiliates prefer clickbank or Amazon that pays for a sale. On the other hand many publishers/affiliate make a great money with pay per click like Google Adsense, and kontera. Textual link ads or contextual ads that doesn't matter, pay per click works.
Similarly, pay per action or acquisition is the CPA marketing, which is becoming more and more popular with so many successful networks being formed with good regulation.
This is all a part of affiliate marketing industry, where CPA marketing is a part of it.
If I were to choose the model, I would go with CPA marketing, just because there are lot of options to choose from, like Risk Free Trial Offers, One Field Form Offers, Multiple Field Form offers, and Downloadable Offers. As I observed, people click on Ads more, and even more take actions like filling up a form or downloading a Zwinky. They also love to try a popular product for like $5 which can get you $30 that is a 600% Return on Investment right away! Its hard to expect that kind of returns with Adsense or Kontera or Clickbank.
So, I am happy that I made my decision much earlier in my career to go with the CPA model.
Cheers,
Esh
I really like the idea of CPA marketing and am currently looking into using this method and have learned a lot just from this post and the comments. I'm looking into purchasing a training now.