Earning a living from CPA marketing

[crysper]

@Rvfamily have you thought starting a blog and documenting your journey?

I haven't suggested that because I didn't know how committed you are, but I'm pretty sure now you can pull this off. Start a simple blog and post your journey, people will start following you. In 6 months you'll have a following, an email list and you can even start monetizing your list.

After time, the blog can become your main source of income, instead of dealing with unstable offers, networks and so on.

 

[Rvfamily]

I would just like to quickly give a quick thanks to @crysper, @azgold, @tjtutor, @lrs1995 and @K for continuing to follow along and for your continued help and support. Genuinely appreciated.

@crysper, I have a domain and a framework for a blog, but it has no meat on it. I have chosen to post here, in the hopes that I would provide benefit for others and receive help and guidance from the many great members here (the latter is definitely true!). However, I am working on the first few posts for it.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[Rvfamily]

@Rvfamily it's important not to burn out, so mental and physical breaks are a necessity. Glad you took some time.

Have a feeling though, that while you were not sitting at the computer, visions of landers and offers danced through your head.

If you are getting increasing numbers of YT views and subscribers, that could work very well for future videos, which is great, of course. People are subscribing even though they're not clicking anymore. They would only do that if they're interested to see what else you'll produce. At least, that's my take on it. Means you have a targeted, hungry audience.

Re the surveys, I've never done them, so can't help you much with those but sounds like you have a solid and well thought-out plan. Your experience with this type of offer will undoubtedly be helpful.

Best of luck, will be watching for updates.

@azgold,

I must admit, I have become completely consumed by the business of CPA marketing. I find myself thinking about it, and reading about it a great majority of the time.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[T J Tutor]

@Rvfamily have you thought starting a blog and documenting your journey?

I haven't suggested that because I didn't know how committed you are, but I'm pretty sure now you can pull this off. Start a simple blog and post your journey, people will start following you. In 6 months you'll have a following, an email list and you can even start monetizing your list.

After time, the blog can become your main source of income, instead of dealing with unstable offers, networks and so on.

I can't agree more!

 

[Rvfamily]

So, I did get a new campaign up today, but it was mid afternoon before it was up and running. It is a survey campaign, which I decided to direct link, after spending quite a bit of time working on the technical issues involved in setting up landing pages in P202. I must admit, it's probably going to take a little more time for me to have a handle on how to execute tracking.

I watched and rewatched a number of videos dealing with setting up tracking between:

• MaxBounty
• 7Search
• P202

I'm still having some difficulty getting it all together. A work in progress. I thought I had it set up to function properly, but as I am looking at things between the three entities above, none of it is working like it should. So, here is what I've got (any direction would be greatly appreciated ) for my links:

Destination URL in 7Search:
http://incomefromsurveys.us (I purchased this domain for doing survey offers and it redirects to my p202 tracking link)

Affiliate URL in P202 Setup:
Get Paid To Take Online Surveys - Vindale Research

Callback URL at MaxBounty:
http://tracking.lindseymarketinggroup.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&cid=4&subid=#s2#

Get Links URL from P202:
Get Paid To Take Online Surveys - Vindale Research

Here are the links, as I have set them up. I am getting traffic to the offer, bidding on a couple of different types of keywords. I created an initial ad, which looked something like this:

###INCOME FROM HOME###
Earn an income at home or on the go, from anywhere. Receive up to $100 per survey completed or review products and choose to keep the products that you review.

This ad had quite a few impressions, with a fair sized initial keyword list, but only had a couple of clicks. So I revised the ad (I'll show that a little later) and updated my bids to reflect top 4 on every word. My CPC for this so far is $0.11 with 47 clicks and no conversions. I've spent a little over $5.00 so far today (max spend per day is $10).

I cannot see keywords, Affiliate ID or Referral ID in my reports, so I know I don't have it set up right. Again, a work in progress.

Things I've learned in the last few weeks:

1. At least with lower volume traffic sources, you really need to have a broad list of keywords to get started. The volume is simply not high enough in most cases for you to be able to reach a point of statistical significance with very targeted keywords. Test them and play around with the list to see what gets clicks.

For example: When I was looking at traffic to links in SimilarWeb and Alexa, what I found was that overwhelmingly, females visit survey sites. So think what kinds of things are important to females? What things are going on in their lives that would make them be looking at earning some extra money online from home. For some women, it could be a new baby, for others homeschooling, for still others time between classes without having to take a job. This will give you three different angles and sets of keywords to try.

2. At least in my VERY limited experience so far, very general, appeal to all headlines don't convert very well. You need headlines that reflect the angle your working, and this means they need to be targeted.

3. You need to have some funds to be able to test as you go. I know I have read repeatedly that you will probably start with campaigns that lose money, but through optimization and testing you will turn losers into winners. Although I understood this, I didn't REALLY understand it. You are going to have to spend a little money to find winning ideas (combinations of creatives/keywords/traffic sources/offers).

4. I have read several times in blogs and forums that it's probably better to test offers directly, without taking the time to create landers. If the offer turns out to be a dud, you don't want to have wasted the time to make LP's. Test your offers directly and then when you see one that seems to be working, create some landers to test with the offer.

Any help with the tracking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to follow along- I hope you find some value.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[newlxx]

Destination URL in 7Search:
http://incomefromsurveys.us (I purchased this domain for doing survey offers and it redirects to my p202 tracking link)

Thats the mistake your making.
The destination url should be prosper202 link. Only then 7search will be able to replace the token with values so prosper can track them.


These should help:

Setting up a 7Search Campaign
Setup your PeerFly Campaign on Prosper202
Blacklisting Bad Performing SubIDs on 7Search

 

[Rvfamily]

Thats the mistake your making.
The destination url should be prosper202 link. Only then 7search will be able to replace the token with values so prosper can track them.


These should help:

Setting up a 7Search Campaign
Setup your PeerFly Campaign on Prosper202
Blacklisting Bad Performing SubIDs on 7Search

@lrs1995,

Thank you for keeping up with my follow along, I really appreciate your help. The technical side is where I've struggled some. Little by little.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[Rvfamily]

I paused my survey campaign to see what information I could glean from what I have. Unfortunately, since I didn't have my tracking set up properly, I was not able to track the single conversion I had. Even though the stats are pretty ugly, I am convinced there is some opportunity here. The keywords I was bidding on were quite a bit more expensive than the other two offers I had driven traffic to, so this means to me that others are here in this vertical doing well.

My thinking is that there is a ceiling on the bids that I need to figure out a way to stay underneath. This means, I need to one of three things:

1. Find an offer with a higher payout in the same vertical.
2. Find ad copy and headlines that generate more targeted clicks and thus better CR (more on this in a minute).
3. Find different keywords that work on a different angle than the ones I have been bidding on.

In reviewing some of the courses I had purchased when I first started learning about CPA, there was some detailed information about how to pick an offer. They talked a lot about looking at the landing pages and trying to determine if you feel that the page does an effective job of drawing a person in to complete the offer.

For example: Does the page have different colored text, is it small or large, what is the color layout of the page, is the call to action effective, etc. The landing page for the offer I am promoting now has been shown to convert well, and my AM said it was one worth promoting, but I am still a little uncertain.

Anyway, on to the idea of headlines and copywriting. I read an article on the blog conversionscientist (link) that talks about the importance of congruency in your headline, message (ad copy) and product (in this case, offer). It has got me thinking. In essence, the article says you'll get better conversions if your headline, ad copy and offer are congruent. The argument they offer up is that if someone clicks on a headline or banner, and when they get to the page the product is not in line with headline or banner they clicked to get there, they will often feel like they were misled.

This made sense to me, so I will incorporate this into my strategy when creating the headlines and copy. I think I am going to have to buy the book, Cashvertising by Whitman, as it has been mentioned on almost every blog I have been reading. Sew similar seeds, reap similar success.

Here is a graphical representation of my ad spend on the first few campaigns:

Notice (in 1), that I am getting quite a bit more clicks per cent of ad spend than the last few days (2). To generate the same number of clicks, in the current campaign, I have had to spend about three times more per click. Much more competition here. But I think this just means more opportunity.

My keyword list:

shows that there are some words (in the same category) that seem to convert a click per impression much better than others. For example, even though a solid majority of my clicks (79) came from a single keyword at the top of the list, it took 15726 impressions to do so. If you look at the keyword in the number eight spot, you see that 29 clicks were generated from just 88 impressions.

My thinking is that this gives me some idea of the keywords that might be a good starting list for Adwords or Bing Ads to attempt to scale once I have a better handle on CR.

I think I have to agree with @K about the fact that 7Search is a great place to get a feel for things and get some experience promoting, setting up tracking etc. It's just slower, so that I am able to react to the information I'm getting and gain the knowledge necessary so that I am less likely to make the "rookie" mistakes on a faster field.

Stats for the current campaign:

29993 impressions
170 clicks
$22.62 spent
1 conversion at $2 earned

I did make a change to the ad almost immediately after I started the campaign (after reading the article mentioned above), to make it congruent. I think the next couple of ads I test will be more focused on the two angles I am working on (details after campaign is over).

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[Rvfamily]

I thought I might provide a quick update before I start the work day. I was not aware that you need to check your bids in an ongoing basis. Last night as I was resetting everything to work with P202 (BIG thanks to @lrs1995 for the direction on this), I was playing around with some of my keyword bids and noticed that some of the keywords that had very high bids, could be managed back down to more reasonable levels. I guess the takeaway here is that once you start a campaign, it's not a set and forget proposition. That is, if you want to maximize your returns and profits anyway.

I just thought this might be beneficial to others early in their journey to learn CPA.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[azgold]

I thought I might provide a quick update before I start the work day. I was not aware that you need to check your bids in an ongoing basis. Last night as I was resetting everything to work with P202 (BIG thanks to @lrs1995 for the direction on this), I was playing around with some of my keyword bids and noticed that some of the keywords that had very high bids, could be managed back down to more reasonable levels. I guess the takeaway here is that once you start a campaign, it's not a set and forget proposition. That is, if you want to maximize your returns and profits anyway.

I just thought this might be beneficial to others early in their journey to learn CPA.

As always,
Here's to your success!

You're right, @Rvfamily about not keeping an eye on your campaigns. The set-and-forget method with PPC could cost you a lot more money.

The education you're getting is a great foundation for success.

 

[Rvfamily]

Well, as has been the case multiple times, I am once again struggling with technical details. In the interest of helping others and being helped, I am going to provide full disclosure about the campaign I was running. So, here we go.

I was running a campaign with an offer from MaxBounty for Vindale Research #4626, with a payout of $2 per lead. I was using 7Search for the traffic and P202 for tracking (things you knew from following along: from above).

At the moment of pausing the campaign, my total spend for this one campaign is approx $37 with a revenue of $2 for a single conversion. I had generated a total of 286 clicks, with an avg CPC of $0.13 using a set of 25 keywords, broken into two groups (data from 7Search below).

One group were direct relation keywords, like "paid survey" and the second set were keywords that dealt with the angle I was trying to execute in my ad (homeschool moms), like "homeschool living." In the picture below, I'll just show you the KW that produced clicks in 7S.

The bids you see are for the moment before I paused the campaign, and were higher over the last 24 hours of the campaign. You can also see the ad I used for the second half of my testing above. The first ad was slightly different in it's headline and body copy, but communicated to the same audience (younger females; as they make up the lions share of the demographic who frequents survey sites).

Next, I'll show you the data from the "Keyword" tab under "Analyze" in P202. etting the keywords passed through (YAY, some measure of success), and when I go into my prosper UI and look under the "Analyze" tab

The "no keyword" designation was the number of clicks before I was able to get the tracking token in place. As you can see, the top two keywords were "paid survey" with 34 clicks (also highest CPC for any keyword) and "make money online paid survey" with 29 clicks. The young mother/homeschool angle I touched on in the ad and in the KW selection didn't seem to be a good fit.

In the 7S keyword report, you can see a little more cost data and breakdown.

In my thinking, the clear winning word to focus on is the "make money online paid survey" with a CTR of 27.36%, a cost of $8.80 to generate 58 clicks from just 212 impressions.

The unfortunate things is, I do not know which keyword generated the single conversion I had.

Finally, in the "Referer" tab under "Analyze" in P202, we can see the list of referrers here. This gives me the referring websites as we can see here:

Again, the first 155 clicks came through the domain I had listed in 7S, before I had it set up to track correctly.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to go into 7S and retrieve the subid breakdown in order that I might blacklist. I tried following along with @LukePeerFly in his 7S campaign setup, but had some difficulty understanding it. To be honest, I'm not sure if I got the c1 and c2 links between the various places setup properly. My callback URL came out of P202 as
http://tracking.lindseymarketinggroup.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&cid=4&subid=#s2#

I don't see the c1 and c2 variables in the URL, and I'm not sure if they are supposed to be there in the CBURL or if you just see them in the "Get Links" tab. My link is
Get Paid To Take Online Surveys - Vindale Research

Once I get the tracking down, I think I'm ready to make a move over into Adwords or Bing traffic. Even for terms that typically generate a decent amount of impressions and clicks (according the keyword tool) from 7S, there simply isn't enough traffic to provide any opportunity to scale beyond very limited earnings (just my honest opinion at this point).

I hope you found value in this post.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[azgold]

Lack of volume is a common complaint with 7S. I see it more as a training tool, myself. That being said, some people have done well there.

My personal opinion is that a person could do well on 7S with certain types of offers, though I don't know what those would be. I recently read somewhere that they have a big percentage of men in their audience(s).

Sorry to hear that tracking is giving a problem. I am also tracking-challenged. Hopefully, someone who is P202 savvy will drop by and help you out.

 

[newlxx]

Unfortunately, I have not been able to go into 7S and retrieve the subid breakdown in order that I might blacklist. I tried following along with @LukePeerFly in his 7S campaign setup, but had some difficulty understanding it. To be honest, I'm not sure if I got the c1 and c2 links between the various places setup properly. My callback URL came out of P202 as
http://tracking.lindseymarketinggroup.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&cid=4&subid=#s2#

I don't see the c1 and c2 variables in the URL, and I'm not sure if they are supposed to be there in the CBURL or if you just see them in the "Get Links" tab. My link is
Get Paid To Take Online Surveys - Vindale Research

c1 and c2 variables are not required in the postback url.
The only variable required is subid for conversion tracking.

 

[Rvfamily]

c1 and c2 variables are not required in the postback url.
The only variable required is subid for conversion tracking.

Thank you again, @lrs1995 for your help. It's appreciated.

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[Rvfamily]

I have found another offer to promote that is aimed at the male demo. I really like the look of the landing page (very well done) and the offer converts with a payout a little higher than the last one (about 2 1/2 dollars). I have not shown yet, that I can effectively pick an offer that will convert well with 7S traffic, but I feel pretty good about this one (the best laid plans of mice and men, right ).

I plan on a direct link campaign on this one as well, and have used Long Tail Pro to get a larger set of keyword ideas to bid on in the hopes that this will help me gain greater traffic up front. I am looking at at least 50 keywords to bid on, unlike my last several attempts where I had 25 at most.

In addition, I have been working to get my accounts in order to begin using Bing for some offers or as an additional traffic source for others. If there is anyone who reads this that would be willing to provide additional traffic sources (PPC) they have been happy with, I would love to hear from you.

I will post back as soon as I have it up and running, with more information, along with how its performing.

I have a blog name/URL picked out, and a framework for the blog. I have a couple of articles, but will be posting several other articles there over the next week or two. As soon as it looks like I want it to, I'll provide the link in my signature under each post (for those who might be interested ).

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[azgold]

@Rvfamily - best of luck! You're getting close, I can feel it.

If you go with Bing, they are offering free coupons, $100 for Canadians, I think the same for U.S.

 

[internalsoul]

Interesting journal. You are doing pretty good. As azgold said, try bing. You can get more volume and better quality leads. Subscribed to your success. Best of luck.

 

[Rvfamily]

Interesting journal. You are doing pretty good. As azgold said, try bing. You can get more volume and better quality leads. Subscribed to your success. Best of luck.

Thank you @internalsoul

I appreciate your encouragement, and your taking the time to read my follow along. One of the first threads I read when I got my Dojo membership was your $100/day profit. I checked out your blog as well. I like some the the features you've put into it. And your post on traffic sources was prescient.

For someone who is still getting their feet wet, do you have any recommendations as far as traffic goes (a specific one you've been happy with)?

As always,
Here's to your success!

 

[internalsoul]

Thank you @internalsoul

I appreciate your encouragement, and your taking the time to read my follow along. One of the first threads I read when I got my Dojo membership was your $100/day profit. I checked out your blog as well. I like some the the features you've put into it. And your post on traffic sources was prescient.

For someone who is still getting their feet wet, do you have any recommendations as far as traffic goes (a specific one you've been happy with)?

As always,
Here's to your success!

Thanks for your kind words. Site set up is still on progress and lot more interesting posts are about to come.

Regarding traffic source, it all depend on the niche and the offer. If i have to go for PPC, i will always choose bing over 7search. I had a very successful campaign on bing on diet vertical. When i have a successful funnel i would try to scale the campaign to other traffic source. For example, i had scaled the diet campaign from PPV to PPC as i had the funnel and the keywords. So you can do vice-versa. You can scale it up from PPC to PPV or from PPV to PPC. For dating I generally start with top traffic source like exo and TJ. For gaming i prefer to start with PPV. So when it comes to traffic source recommendation, it all depends on the vertical you are promoting. I have been happy with bing, lead impact, trafficvance, exo, traffichunt, trafficjunky.

 

[Rvfamily]

Thanks for your kind words. Site set up is still on progress and lot more interesting posts are about to come.

Regarding traffic source, it all depend on the niche and the offer. If i have to go for PPC, i will always choose bing over 7search. I had a very successful campaign on bing on diet vertical. When i have a successful funnel i would try to scale the campaign to other traffic source. For example, i had scaled the diet campaign from PPV to PPC as i had the funnel and the keywords. So you can do vice-versa. You can scale it up from PPC to PPV or from PPV to PPC. For dating I generally start with top traffic source like exo and TJ. For gaming i prefer to start with PPV. So when it comes to traffic source recommendation, it all depends on the vertical you are promoting. I have been happy with bing, lead impact, trafficvance, exo, traffichunt, trafficjunky.

Hey @internalsoul,

Thanks a lot. That's really what I was looking for. Just some honest insight into what traffic sources people have used and been happy with. I understand you, when you mention matching traffic sources to verticals/types of offers. However, I'm a little fuzzy on "funnel."

I am familiar with a marketing funnel, where you get someone to purchase a lower priced item and lead them through the funnel to higher value, higher priced products or services. How does a funnel relate to a CPA offer? Sorry for my ignorance.

Thanks again for taking the time.

As always,
Here's to your success!