The Amazing World of CPA Marketing

Working a regular job makes no sense to me. Maybe it’s for some people. (I suppose it’s for most people. Which is fine. I’m not most people.) The idea of actually getting up and going to a real job and working for a boss and having to put up with people all day long … Egad.

What is beautiful about building an income in internet marketing is that it affords you the ability to do what I did today: sat on the couch with my laptop and a cup of hot cocoa, surrounded by my cats, Radiohead on the CD player, bipping-and-bapping away on my keyboard, making things happen, making money.

This is the dream life. It really is.

Why do I particularly love CPA marketing? It’s sort of a cross between affiliate-marketing … and day-trading. It’s like affiliate-marketing in that you are driving traffic to certain offers that are hosted and managed by large affiliate networks; it’s like affiliate-marketing, also, in that if you want to do a lot with it you are definitely going to have to create websites and landing pages that Google is going to like (in order to get high quality scores and low costs for your ads); and it’s like affiliate-marketing in that when you have managed to build a landing-page site that is generating substantial traffic for you and converting your offers, there’s no reason not to expand it outward into other offers, other products, and email campaigns to continue marketing to the audience you have managed to develop around the site.

But it’s also like day-trading, in that most of what you do involves generating massive keyword lists and massive ad campaigns, and tracking the traffic and EPC (earnings-per-click) each keyword and ad is making for you, so you can kill the losers and build up the winners. It’s also very software-driven, in that, if done properly, you’re making use of these incredible software tools that enable you to rapidly generate and launch hundreds of ad groups with thousands of keywords, all of it trackable and driven to spreadsheets and built in a way that can be continually refined and enhanced. It’s like building up a stock portfolio and tracking every share of every stock, live, in real time, and being able to maneuver the funds you are driving through it all to maximize your profits (principally through continually lowing your ad costs and increasing your conversions, and, again, dropping keywords and ads that aren’t earning and ramping up the ones that are making you the most money).

That’s pretty damn amazing, when you think about it.

And again, I can do it from right here: on my couch. Listening to Radiohead. Or I can do it from San Diego while visiting friends. I can even do it from the trailhead in Colorado, from my laptop and wireless internet card.

What I think I may like most about CPA marketing, from a business point of view, as opposed to the other things I’ve tried in the past, is that it is not contingent on designing your own product, on trying to build up a site and optimize it and hope that it makes you a lot of money over time. No. In CPA marketing, you are able to test markets in a matter of  hours, choose the winners, and then just roll them out. You track them, you drop the losers and ramp up the winners, and maybe you look for ways to turn your big winners into even bigger winners, but ultimately the offer doesn’t really matter all that much, what matters are the numbers you see coming through on your spreadsheets. Now, like stocks, it makes sense, long-term, to choose offers that you think are sound, that deliver real value, and that will stay around for months or years to come. But also like stocks, in the end it still comes down to the numbers. Either it’s earning or it’s not. Either you are optimizing your portfolio, or you are not. And if you have the right knowledge and skills (and tools), and you are willing to work at making something huge happen, there is nothing to stop you from generating six figures a month.

I’m quite content at between $20K and $50K a month, if it leaves me enough time for my other interests and pursuits.  But can you imagine six figures a month?  That kind of money staggers the imagination.  But it’s possible here.

Advertisement