Today I would like to detail the greatest obstacles of succeeding in CPA affiliate marketing. You can usually read articles on how to make money with CPA and how great the system is but indeed it does have loads of pitfalls you need to be careful to avoid in order to achieve affiliate marketing success in CPA.
CPA Marketing Pitfalls
Your first obstacle you need to overcome is that CPA affiliate companies (especially the bigger ones with good reputation) have become quiet picky with regards to accepting new applicants. So if you want to get in you need to get yourself prepared for an interview with an affiliate manager, and being asked questions about your website, traffic sources and traffic generation methods. So your best bet is to have a niche website (preferably blog) on the topic you would like to set your promotions around. There are different free WordPress templates you can use, and you need to get to work to get traffic to your site before you apply to maximize your chances.
Affiliate Marketing Training
Obviously every home based business has pitfalls, and CPA affiliate marketing is not an exception. First of all you will need to consider that you need to have a good basic knowledge of affiliate marketing before you get started with CPA. You have to study and understand the earning potentials, the different types of offers and payouts. So you need to get prepared to work hard in the beginning, and even more that single affiliate marketing you will need to set up a strict plan and use your time wisely.
Choosing CPA Offers
As there are going to be various types of offers and you might want to give more than one a try to measure conversion rates, it is very important that you keep records of your campaigns, links and affiliate earnings, otherwise you can easily get lost or distracted. You are likely to get new offers into your inbox from various affiliate managers to promote, and unless you are a PRO it is going to take a lot of time to scan through them and choose the ones you would like to promote and you might still make the wrong decision.
Setting up an Affiliate Sales Funnel
You need to be vigilant, and you need to set up a system that is going to do the statistics painfully and quickly for you, otherwise you might end up working on your statistics instead of being able to set up maintain and fine tune your CPA affiliate marketing campaigns. You need to have a reliable tracking system and spreadsheet that will track your visitors / conversions / costs.
Traffic Generation Methods for CPA Marketing
Many people make the mistake of relying plainly on paid traffic in the beginning. The problem is that paid traffic ( PPC and Media buys ) are at the moment are ruled by PRO marketers, who will know which keywords to target, where to advertise, and all the other aspects of affiliate marketing. So you are more than likely if not sue to lose money on paid ads in the beginning. Therefore you should first concentrate on free traffic, like SEO and building your own list to be able to create newsletters.