CPA Affiliate Marketing – Why Is It Better?
Carlton T. Driver | October 27, 2010The first question that might come to mind is: What is CPA Affiliate Marketing? Its a pretty straightforward concept. CPA Advertising is the abbreviation for “Cost Per Action Advertising”. In this form of advertising, a publisher (or affiliate) receives a commission whenever someone responding to the advertising they have places completes the desired action, which is typically providing some kind of personal data into a registration form. As an example, it might be something as simple as providing their name and email address – or it might be something more involved, perhaps accepting a free trial offer for a product.
In today’s highly competitive marketplace, companies need a lot of advertising exposure to remain competitive. The primary idea is to have widespread exposure and to have contact with a large group of potential customers. When this is accomplished, the audience for the business is established, and the marketing efforts can begin in earnest.
CPA advertising is rapidly becoming one of the most desirable ways to advertise online. CPA (sometimes also known as PPA, or pay per action) sets up a situation in which the marketer earns a commission each time a visitor completes a particular action specified by the client company.
The type of action that the prospective customer must take for the commission to be earned is specified by the company. In some cases, the action might be buying a trial product from the company, or accepting an introductory service for a limited time. Most often, it is something less complicated – filling out a form with their email address and name, or perhaps one with full address data. In other cases it might involve downloading some free software. In each case, the commission paid to the affiliate will be based on the action required.
When a CPA campaign is initiated, the business will pay out the agreed upon commission to the advertiser, or CPA affiliate, each time a prospect follows the link to the targeted website, and then goes on to complete the specified action or activity. By setting things up in this way, the business obtains a list of highly pre-qualified potential customers for its primary offerings. As many affiliate marketers already know – “it’s all in the list”, and these CPA programs are really all about helping a business to build a list of potential customers. Rather than being dependent on getting a prospect to actually buy something, all the affiliate has to do to earn a commission is to have them fulfill a much simpler (and less expensive) action.
By establishing an advertising campaign using CPA, a company can generate large amounts of traffic for its website, but under the terms of the campaign, it will only pay a commission when a prospective customer completes the desired action while at the website. This is the probable future for Internet affiliate marketing – or at least a much larger part of it. It amounts to to paying only for results, not just traffic – results which are much more likely to bring in real business.
For an affiliate participating in this type of program, there is one major advantage over conventional sales affiliate marketing: In sales, the affiliate won’t receive the commission unless someone spends money and buys something – and then they have to worry about returns. For the affiliate who is running a CPA campaign, however, the barrier to be cleared to earn his or her commission is much easier: the prospect simply has to to agree to provide the requested information, or accept a free trial offer, or download some free software, and the commission is received.
To find out more about being a profitable CPA affiliate affiliate, get your copy of the complete guide to CPA affiliate, which includes a large list of resource links that will help you launch your business quickly. This article, CPA Affiliate Marketing – Why Is It Better? has free reprint rights.



















