LEGAL AND DISCLAIMER

THE CONTENTS OF THIS MANUAL REFLECT THE AUTHOR’S VIEWS ACQUIRED THROUGH HIS EXPERIENCE ON THE TOPIC UNDER DISCUSSION. THE AUTHOR OR PUBLISHER DISCLAIMS ANY PERSONAL LOSS OR LIABILITY CAUSED BY THE UTILIZATION OF ANY INFORMATION PRESENTED HEREIN. THE AUTHOR IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING ANY LEGAL OR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. THE SERVICES OF A PROFESSIONAL PERSON ARE RECOMMENDED IF LEGAL ADVICE OR ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED. WHILE THE SOURCES MENTIONED HEREIN ARE ASSUMED TO BE RELIABLE AT THE TIME OF WRITING, THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER, OR THEIR AFFILIATES ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR ACTIVITIES. FROM TIME TO TIME, SOURCES MAY TERMINATE OR MOVE AND PRICES MAY CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. SOURCES CAN ONLY BE CONFIRMED RELIABLE AT THE TIME OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION OF THIS MANUAL. THIS MANUAL IS A GUIDE ONLY AND, AS SUCH, SHOULD BE CONSIDERED SOLELY FOR BASIC INFORMATION ON THE TOPIC. EARNINGS OR PROFITS DERIVED FROM PARTICIPATING IN THE FOLLOWING PROGRAM ARE ENTIRELY GENERATED BY THE AMBITIONS, MOTIVATION, DESIRES, AND ABILITIES OF THE INDIVIDUAL READER AND NOTHING IS GUARANTEED. NO PART OF THIS MANUAL MAY BE ALTERED, COPIED, OR DISTRIBUTED, WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR OR PUBLISHER.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LOOT4LEADS.COM.
 

Introduction

Thank you for taking the first step in achieving success with CPA marketing and networks. It's definitely the new way to make money in affiliate marketing and this guide is an online version so that any updates can be made easily and you don't have to download another ebook.  I consistently follow new CPA trends, hot offers, what works, and what doesn't, and in all my findings, they will all be displayed here.  Make sure you take the time to really go through each step of this guide so you have a good idea of how to follow the steps to succeed.  If you follow and actually implement these steps, this system will work for you.  So let's get started!

Loot4Leads.com Contents

What is CPA Marketing?

In simple terms, CPA is an acronym for "cost per action". Throughout each chapter, I will be giving you a complete step by step blueprint on CPA marketing and how you will be making money using all the techniques and secrets I share with you.  By utilizing all the information and tools within your membership here, you will make money online by becoming a "publisher" for CPA networks in which the advertisers will pay you for a "cost per action". 

In a nutshell companies are looking for people like you to promote their products in which they will pay you for the referral which can be anything from referring the user to buy something which they give you a commission or more commonly just getting leads for them.  All you need the user to do is make that next "action" for you to get paid which can be a sale, click, or lead for the company you are promoting.

A cost per action can vary from anything to getting a sale for the advertiser or simply collecting an email address as a lead.  All actions such as a sale or lead that you collect for the advertiser will be paid for you by the CPA network.  If all of this CPA jargon is confusing you, here are three simple examples of how you will be making money as a "publisher" for CPA networks along with a simple illustration to help you understand the complete flow better.

Example 1:  A well known company like NetFlix is an advertiser for a CPA Network like (Azoogle.com) and offers "publishers" (you) $25 for each person that you refer to sign up for a free trial to their service.  This is better than getting a percentage of the sale because it costs the user nothing to sign up to NetFlix service, and the CPA Network will pay you $25 for the referral.  This is an example of a pay per lead action.

Example 2:  A popular company like Entertainment Book sells their coupon book each year for $12.50 to the consumer. If you refer someone that purchases the book, you will get a percentage of the sale. On one network they offer a $7.00 payout, so you get just over 50% commission.  This is an example of a pay per sale action.

Example 3:  A company like Consumer Incentive Promotions runs various offers where they are interested in building their email list so if you refer someone to their service that enters their email address, you get paid. On one network you can make up to $1.70 for someone that enters just their email address.  This is an example of a pay per lead action.

There are dozens and dozens of CPA networks and it seems that new ones start up each week.  It might be hard to find out where to sign up as a publisher since there are so many CPA networks out there, however I've done all the hard work for you.  In the following chapters you will find out the best networks I rank in order from best to worst so you know exactly which ones to sign up for.  Signing up to CPA networks is completely free and the more you sign up for the better, because each CPA network may have different offers than the other.  Other times, CPA networks might have the same offer but one network may payout more than the other. 

Why is CPA Hot?

CPA marketing and networks are hot and lots of people are making money promoting different offers simply because your don't have to sell anything to the user.  That's the whole concept behind this site as I  am going to explain to you how to make money from CPA networks getting leads from users for filling out simple forms of information.  It's hard enough trying to sell something to a person in these tough economic times, so it's the perfect opportunity to get started in CPA marketing and networks to take advantage of this situation!

The main focus of this chapter is to simply explain that "CPA" marketing is just a term in the affiliate marketing industry that is a way for you to make money as a publisher by advertising products and services for companies.  You will learn step by step in future chapters on how to make money, but you need to understand what CPA is all about before you just dive right in if this is all new to you.  To summarize this chapter you should now know that CPA stands for "cost per action" and companies will pay you for sending them leads or sales.

Back to Table of Contents

How to Get Started in CPA as A Publisher?

The first thing you need to do is sign up with CPA networks and start looking through the offers you want to start promoting.  You will find offers from companies in all kinds of niches from everything to insurance companies looking for leads to As Seen on TV products like "ShamWow or Snuggie" that is looking for sales and will pay you for getting them leads or sales.  To be successful in making money online through CPA marketing, its essential to find "niches" or categories and test them out. 

I've already done the work for you on many niches that are profitable, but you will find out that some niches or categories will be profitable for you and others won't.  A lot of it will depend on a lot of factors such as how much competition is against you, where you advertise, etc.  In future chapters I will show you what the best categories and niches have worked out the best for me and you can literally copy and profit from these.  You will find out how to promote and advertise these offers in a variety of ways. Use these techniques in many other niches and profit even more. 

To sign up as a publisher to these CPA networks, the process is very simple.  You will go to their website and click on the sign up button as a publisher and you will fill out the form that will ask you basic information that identifies you.  With the majority of the CPA networks they will ask you for your website name and a description of your site.

 If you didn't sign up for the premium package or are new to CPA marketing or making money online in general, you probably don't have a website yet.  Most CPA networks will require you to have a website so you can promote the offers on your website. 

Don't worry if you don't have a website because some of the techniques I show you how to make money with do not require a website at all.  I will tell you though if you do not have a website, you may not get accepted into all CPA networks, because some do require a website.  If you signed up as a platinum member, you will be able to use the website we setup for you when applying for the CPA network.

Typically any existing website you already have should be approved since CPA networks generally have offers in all types of categories that would be similar to your existing website.  If you do not have a website, I will show you in a future chapter how you can make money promoting CPA offers.  If you are serious about making money through CPA marketing, I highly recommend upgrading to our platinum package where you will get your own customized website.

In the next chapter, I will show you exactly step by step on how to sign up with an affiliate network and the best way to get approved.  To summarize this chapter, you just need to understand that you are going to be a publisher each time you sign up for a CPA network.

Back to Table of Contents

How to Sign Up to A CPA Network

In this chapter I will walk you through step by step on signing up to a CPA network.  Each network will be very similar in the sign up process, so you should have a good idea on how it works overall by seeing the example below.

You will simply need to click on the links in the next chapters to go directly to the top CPA networks that I recommend and for this example I am using the network "Azoogle".  This network has one of the more complicated registration processes, so it will be good to see exactly how this one works.  Some CPA networks simply have a one page form, but this one is a little more in depth.

Step 1:  Once you get to the home page, simply click on "Become Publisher" link.

Step 2:  Read the important information, and click "I Understand"

Step 3:  Enter in your information and click on "Validate Email"

Step 4:  Check your email and click on the link to finish the registration process

Note - The first field can be your company name if you have one, otherwise just use your personal name.  All other questions are self explanatory.

Step 5:  Continue to fill out the info on the next page. (If you are new to CPA, just copy the exact info below as it will pertain to you).  However if you do have a website with the premium package, make sure you do check the "Web" box and enter in your domain name.

Step 6:  Enter in your business type or set as individual if you do not operate as a business.  If you are brand new to making money online, you will simply want to copy the info below and enter in your real social security number.  This information is important so the CPA network can pay you.

Step 7:  Review your information, read the terms, check the boxes, and click on Continue

That's it! You should receive a phone call from an account manager in 1-3 business days depending on the volume of registrations to confirm your information and ask you for any additional information they need. At this point you will just need to wait until they call and approve your account.  Once your account is approved, you are all setup now to start making money instantly!

In the next chapter I will show you the best networks to apply for at first.

Back to Table of Contents

Now that I have shown you an example in the last chapter of what it takes to sign up with a CPA network, it's your turn to do that with any of the networks I have listed below.  I recommend only signing up with 1 network right now so you don't get too overwhelmed with all the different offers, account managers, etc.  The following CPA networks are the ones that I highly recommend.  You will soon find out that there are literally hundreds of CPA networks and some are great, some are good, and some are very bad.  I've tested dozens of them and you will want to start with any of the ones below.

The CPA networks that I have listed above are a great start if you are new to CPA marketing as they are the easiest to sign up with and get approved in order.  You may want to visit each site to see which one you like the best, but any one of these networks will be a great start. 

Once you have found a CPA network that you like, go ahead and register as a publisher.  If you need step by step instructions, please see the previous chapter that will show you information that you may need to fill out the registration form. 

Remember, most networks will ask you for your website address, and if you do not have one, simply put in a URL like www.google.com and then in the description you can add something like "I market using PPC and SEO search traffic". 

Once you have been registered, most all CPA networks will call you to verify all your information and ask additional questions.  A lot of networks are looking for publishers that have been established and know what they are doing or fairly new at making money online.  If you are new to CPA marketing, don't worry, just tell them that you are learning step by step how to make money with CPA networks from this membership here. 

The top two questions that CPA networks will most likely ask you:

1. How do you promote offers?

Answer: I will be buying traffic through search engines, banner space, getting natural search engine traffic, and possibly email traffic through my newsletter.

I will be teaching you a lot of methods on getting traffic to your offers, not just the ones I listed, but if you at least give them this info, that will be good enough for you to get approved.

2. Have you promoted any offers before or which ones interest you?

Answer: I will be promoting offers that are hot and converting well as I like to experiment with any new offer that comes out on a network.

You don't have to get too specific in this answer because you probably don't really know which offers you want to promote at the moment as you want to browse through all of them on their network. 

If for some reason you don't get approved for the CPA network you chose, just go ahead and try registering for another one until you get approved.  Once you are approved, you will get your login and password to the CPA network you chose so you can login and see all the offers available.  You will also be assigned an account manager who will help you every step of the way to be successful. 

They are there for you in case you have any problems getting your check, help give you advice on the best converting offers, etc.  In future chapters I will show you how easy it is to get them to setup a higher payout on many offers on their network.

Once you are signed up and approved to the CPA network, you will want to go to the next chapter to see what first steps to take.

Back to Table of Contents

Once you finally get approved to the CPA network, now the fun really begins!  You should receive an email from your account manager with your login and password that you will need to login.  Simply go to the website of the CPA network you are approved with and login there as a "publisher" or sometimes they refer a publisher as an "affiliate".  Once you are logged in, things might seem a bit overwhelming to you at first. 

The very first thing that you should do is go into your profile and make sure that all your info including your address is correct.  This is important so that the checks you receive will get sent to the correct location.  All CPA networks do require a W-9 on file if you are a US resident.  Make sure that you fill that out and send it back to your affiliate manager.  Typically in your welcome email, the account manager will indicate how to get this filled out and sent back.  This is one of the first things I take care of, because the CPA network cannot release a payment until they have this on file.

In this chapter, I will walk you through how you can navigate around one of the CPA networks.  Please note that each CPA network typically has their own interface which may or may not be completely different from another one so that's why it's important to just use one at first if you are brand new to CPA marketing.  For this example, I am going to use PrimaryAds.com as I found them to be one of the easiest ones to navigate through if you are a newbie.

Once I get logged into PrimaryAds.com I have most of the important information already there in front of me as you can see below.

A couple things to highlight on the home page is that right when you login, you will see what your current earnings are by day and month to date. What I also like about this network is that you will see any new offers that are available by each day along with how much is offered per lead.  If you click on the offer link, you will get a detailed description of the offer and how the landing page looks. 

Another thing to look at is the "Hot Offers" section on the right as it will list all the top offers that many publishers are making good money with.  This is great to look at because all the testing is already done for you and if you choose to run one of these offers, you should get great conversions and make a lot of money with them.

Finally, on the left hand side you will see all the contact info for your affiliate manager.  The best part about CPA marketing unlike any other type of affiliate marketing is that you get a dedicated account manager personally assigned to your account. 

If you have any problems, need some suggestions on what offers to promote, or just about anything else you can think of regarding their network, they will be happy to answer any questions and help you reach your revenue goals.  Typically each account manager has an incentive to help you make money because they might earn a small percentage of all the money you make so its a win / win situation for everyone!

Back to Table of Contents

Understanding Common Types of offers and Payouts

Let's now take a look at how to find offers that you want to begin promoting. Just click on the "Offers" link on the left hand side, and then you will be able to browse through specific offers or by category.

For this example, I am going to choose the "Babies" category because I decided that I want to start advertising offers in this niche.  Let's just say I have a website blog setup that gives information about babies so I want to look through any offers that I could setup links or banners on my site that I think users on my site would like.  Below you will see all the offers that are available for you to promote in the "Baby" category. 

You will notice that it will show the name of the offer, payout per lead, the end date, if incentives are allowed, what links are allowed, and the region the offer is good for.  I will now explain what each field means to you below.

Name = This is simply the name of the offer that should easily describe what is being offered.  So for instance "ClaimFreeRewards - Free Year of Diapers" would indicate that the user has a chance to get a free year of diapers.  You will also click on the name of the offer to get a detailed description of the offer along with your actual link, banners, etc. so that you can start promoting and making money through the offer.

Payout = This is the amount of money you will make each time a lead is generated.  So for example with the "ClaimsFreeRewards" offer it indicates that the offer "converts on email submit".  So all the user has to do when they click on your unique link is enter their email address on the landing page of the offer and you will get paid $1.10.  Pretty simple huh?

Start / End Date = This is simply when the offer first began and when it ends, which really doesn't mean too much to me since the offers have already started and don't end for over 10 years from now.

Incentives Allowed = Most offers will have "NO" to incentives allowed which means that they don't want your user to get anything in return for submitting their information (like email address).  For example, you have a user that goes to the "free diaper" offer submits their email address, and then in turn you pay them $.50 for them to submit their info and you keep $.60 profit.  I don't recommend promoting incentive offers if you are a newbie at CPA marketing and I will explain in future chapters how to promote incentive offers.  For now, this column whether it is Yes or No for incentives allowed won't impact you promoting the offer at all.

Links Allowed = This determines on how you can promote the actual offer.  For instance if you see "All" it means that there are no restrictions and you can promote the offer on your website, directly through search engine marketing, by emailing to your newsletter, etc.  If an offer only allows "solo email", then you are unable to put any links or banners on your website.  Typically most good offers will allow all types of links allowed, meaning you can promote it anyway you want.

Region = This will show you what area the offer is good in.  For instance if you are getting U.S. traffic, then you want to promote offers that are in the U.S. region.  If you have traffic from the U.S. and Canada for example, any user from Canada that clicks on a U.S. offer will automatically be directed to an offer in their region that is similar to the one you are promoting. 

Landing Page = The landing page is simply the "first website page" that the user will see once they click on the offer link.  This is very important as the landing page can make or break how well an offer is converting so it's important to review the page before promoting the offer.

Now let's look at the "free diapers" offer in detail as you will see the info below when you click on the name of the offer.

You will see most of the same information you saw on the previous page, but here you can see a preview of the landing page of the offer.  Just click on the "Click Here" link and it will show you the page where your users will go to once they click on your link.  You will see the sample landing page below.

So you will see that all the user has to do is enter their email address and select which Diapers they want to get.  Once they click on the continue button, you will get paid $1.10.  Now you're probably wondering, whether or not the user will get "free diapers" for a year as the offer claims.  As you can see under the heading of the offer "Participation required. Click for details". 

For these offers and many other ones, the user actually has to participate in surveys, complete other offers, etc. to actually get the free diapers.  However the best part is that you don't have to worry about that as you simply get paid when the user submits their email address and clicks the Continue button.

Now to get your unique link, you will simply click on the "Get Code" link.

Once you click on the link you will see your unique link that you will want to promote as shown below:

So if you were going to promote this offer on your website, you would copy the link and paste it somewhere on your site that could say something like this "Get Free Diapers for Your Baby for One Year, Click Here for Details!".  You would then make a hyperlink with this text with the link above.  You can also get the complete code for a banner in which you would simply copy the HTML code from the offer and paste on your website. 

This is just an example of one particular offer, you can browse through all the categories and offers and see which ones fit your website or areas you want to try and promote.  A good tip is that you should always check out the landing page of an offer and see how well designed and laid out it is. 

For instance, if you were to click on the "free diapers" offer and got to that landing page, would you enter your email address?  I usually always make sure the landing page is clean and easy to enter information.  The "free diapers" offer I believe has an excellent landing page because it's very clean and easy for the user to enter their email address without getting lost somewhere else within the page.

The point of this chapter is to basically get familiar with your CPA network once you get logged in.  Go ahead and browse around their site, view some of the offers, and get to know how to mange through the site easily.  Once again, I've found that each CPA network has a different interface, but once you get through your first one, managing your second, third, and more CPA accounts will be much easier.  The next chapter will walk you through step by step in how to setup your first offer campaign.

Back to Table of Contents

For this example, I will show you an example of how to setup your first campaign by choosing an offer to start promoting.  Using PrimaryAds.com as the CPA network again as shown in the previous chapter, I am going to look through their offers.  The example site that I am going to put an advertisement or offer on is ShrimpRecipe.com as seen below:

As you can see this is a content site that I own in which people can browse through and find all kinds of different shrimp recipes.  Right now I'm running Adsense ads and only making about $7 per day with this one site.  It's not too bad, however with CPA offers, I can make over $1 per lead instead of .05 a click.

 I am going to search through the one field email offers because they are some of the easiest ones to make money with since they only require the user to enter their email address to get paid.

Once I'm logged into PrimaryAds.com again, I will search through the offers by category showing "One Field Email Offers" and click "Find".  From there, I will get a ton of offers in all kinds of categories and niches. Below you will see just a few of some of the offers that are available in the "One Field Email Offers".  Once again, this means that for all the offers shown you will get paid the amount shown just for someone to input their email address on the landing page. 

Since I have a site that is related to food and cooking I have found the perfect offer to promote which is highlighted above.  I will click on the offer to get the details, check out the landing page, and if it looks good, grab my specific link code so I can place it on my website.  Once I clicked on the landing page preview I am shown the following page which I will review to see if it might fit my site:

As you can see from the screen shot above the offer is for a Free Rachel Ray Chef Package which includes pots, pans, magazines, etc.  This seems to be a perfect fit for my website since people that are looking for recipes might be in need of new pots and pans.  So I will simply get the linking code and place that on my site.  Now you can also get banners if they are available for the offer, but I like using text links since people mostly view banners as ads and might be less likely to click on it. 

I went ahead and added the code to the bottom of my recipe site as a footer as you can see below:

The ad is now live and it's important to then login to your CPA network account and check your stats to see how well the offer is performing.  In this example, I've already let the ad run for a week and you will see the stats of how well it did below.  First, I will explain how to check and monitor your reports to see how well your offers that you are promoting are doing.

Click on the Reports link on the menu and it will bring the date range on the right where you can view the stats for that particular range. Below you will see the results for how well this offer did for my site for the past couple of weeks. 

Notice that the first column is the offer ID followed by the name of the offer so you can easily identify it in case you are promoting many other offers.  The next column shows how many banner impressions where shown on the site and that is 0 because I didn't use a banner, rather I used just a text link.  The next column will show how many people clicked on the ad I had at the bottom of my site.  I had 11 people click on the offer and you will see the "Transaction" column shows 2.  This column shows how many people went to the landing page and submitted their email address.  The next column Commission shows how much I earned total which is $2.10.  The next column displays the current rate which the offer pays out. 

The final column might be something new to you which is labeled "EPC".  The term in CPA marketing stands for "earning per click".  In my example above, my EPC is $0.19.  What this means is that I can break down my reporting which indicates that for each person that clicks on my Rachel Ray ad, I will earn $0.19.  Now you will learn a lot more about EPC in future chapters so I don't want to get too technical with this term now, but just know that EPC can change all the time so you have to know how to understand it fully to really base anything off it. For now all you really need to know is that the higher the EPC, the better.  For instance, if I am earning only $.05 for each person that clicks on my Adsense ads, the $.19 I'm earning through CPA marketing is a much better return for me. 

This chapter is to simply show you how to look for offers and get the code that you need to either place them on a website or other ways of marketing like through search engine traffic, article marketing, and more which I will explain in later chapters.

Back to Table of Contents

To promote the CPA offers and start making money capturing leads, you need to get traffic to the actual offers you are promoting.  One easy and "free" way to get traffic to your offers is by article writing.  This is one of my favorite free methods of promoting CPA offers because you can get a lot of traffic to your offers that you are promoting fast and it doesn't cost you a penny so all your earnings are 100% profit!  There are hundreds of article sites out there where you can write an article on a particular topic or niche and having your affiliate link within that article. 

For example, say that you want to promote a CPA offer that is about "loan modifications" and how to save your house from foreclosure.  At this time this particular topic and niche is HOT!  You can write a simple article on what a loan modification is and how it can save your house from foreclosure.  Even if you have no idea on what a loan modification is, the best part about promoting CPA offers is that, the actual landing page that you are going to send your visitors to will have most of the information already on that page where you can copy and rewrite in your own words. 

I'm actually already promoting a loan modification offer using article marketing to drive free traffic to this CPA offer.  Since this is a hot offer and CPA offers will pay you sometimes up to $15 for a lead, many people are paying a lot of money for advertising their offer.  That is why I chose to promote this particular niche "loan modifications" via article marketing so that I get free traffic.  My goal is to have the keywords that people are searching for on loan modifications and trying to save their house show up in the top of Google, Yahoo, etc.  You will get some traffic from people that are searching for articles on the actual article website, but you really make your money when you can get your article on the first or second page of Google. 

I will walk you through how I chose this niche "loan modifications", how to select an offer, write your article, and getting your article in the top 10 of Google.  The first thing that I had to do was find a niche I wanted to promote.  One thing that I do when looking for CPA offers to promote is to understand what topics or news in the industry today are gaining a lot of attention.  Anything that is consistently in the news or you see on television is something that a lot of people are interested in which can result in getting a lot of traffic and conversions to that particular topic. 

So in my example, since home foreclosures are on the rise in the U.S. and has consistently been on the news over the last six months or so.  This means that a lot of people are most likely falling behind on their mortgage payments and can't afford to keep up with their current payment plan.  So, the loan modification CPA offer which is actually a service where a person that is facing foreclosure has an opportunity to make a modification to their loan which could enable them to keep their house and avoid foreclosure. 

Without getting too much into detail about what a loan modification is, basically all the user needs to do in order for me to get my lead and paid for the conversion is fill out a simple form on the first page of the CPA offer which only has six fields.  In this example, for the loan modification offer I'm promoting you will see the landing page the user will go to once they click on my affiliate link within my article.  Once the user completes the six easy fields, and clicks "Go To Step 2", I get paid. 

Regardless is the user doesn't qualify for a loan modification or doesn't even complete page 2, I will get credit for the lead just by having them fill out their info in the six fields on the first page in clicking "Go To Step 2".  This particular CPA offer pays $13.50 per lead which is a great amount since the offer's page is easy and fast to complete for the user.

The first thing you want to do after you have found your niche is to make sure that there are CPA offers in this category that you can promote and make money with.  In my example there are dozens of loan modification offers in most all of the CPA networks so finding one wasn't that hard for me.  If you choose a hot niche that you read about or see on television frequently, then you shouldn't have any problem finding the niche.  Another way to simply find an offer to promote is to go ahead and search through different categories on the CPA networks and see which offers there are a lot of.  Most likely if there are a lot of offers available in a particular category, then this niche is hot and a lot of people are making money with them. 

So for this particular niche, I will show you how I chose the current offer I am promoting.  In this case I am using an offer from Hydra CPA network, but you can use these steps in any network.  The first thing I did was search by keyword for "loan modification" within all their offers so I can see how many were available, check out their landing pages where the user submits their information, and most importantly how much they pay per lead. 

Once I submit my search, I will see all the available offers in the "loan modification" niche.  You will see that there are two particular offers on this network in which one pays $12 per lead and the other pays $13.50 per lead.

I will view each offer by clicking on the link for each one and finding the landing page to see how it looks.  The landing page is very important because when you are sending your visitors to this page, you want it to be laid out very easy and user friendly for the visitor to complete the information on the page so you can get the lead.  The more user friendly and less distractions on the page, the better likely you will earn your money for the user completing the information on that page. 

The landing page below is the offer for "Start A Loan Modification" that pays $12 per lead.  It looks like a very clean and user friendly landing page that has a action item headline "Don't Lose Your Home to Foreclosure" and then information within the body of the page that explains what a loan modification is.  It also has the form where users can get started easily by simply entering their information and answering a few simple questions.  The offer has a total of 13 fields where the user needs to complete although some of them are simple "yes" or "no" questions.  Seems like a good landing page overall, but I still want to evaluate the other offer to compare it.

You will see the next offer "Loan Modification Connection" that pays $13.50 per lead. This landing page is very similar to the other offer as it has the call to action item with the headline "Behind on your Mortgage" along with what a loan modification is at the bottom.  However, this offer has success stories at the bottom and actually is a much shorter form to fill out than the previous offer.  It only contains six total fields that the user has to fill out and submit for you to get credit for the $13.50 per lead. 

In this case, it's really a no brainer for me on which offer I want to promote.  The second offer as pictured below pays a higher lead amount and has more than half less fields for the user to fill out than the first one.  Obviously the less information the user has to fill out should increase your conversions in getting the lead.  I think even if this particular offer paid less than the first, I may still choose this one because the landing page is very user friendly and a lot less personal information than the first offer so more people would be likely to submit their info on this one versus the other offer.

When evaluating different landing pages, it's important to make sure they have a few important things.

1. Call to Action Item - This is usually the headline you see at the top of the page or image that will grab the visitors attention and make them read more. 

2. User Friendly - Make sure that the landing page is easy to navigate and read the important items on the topic that will get the user to complete the offer by entering their information.

3. Minimum Fields - The less information the user has to enter the better your conversions will be.  Also the less personal the information is to the user, the better as well.

Put yourself in the users shoes and see for yourself, would you be likely to stay on the page, read the information, and eventually complete the offer? 

Now that I have found the loan modification CPA offer that I want to promote, it's time to write my article that I am going to submit to article sites.  If you already know information on your niche it will be very easy for you to get ideas and write a short article and eventually drive people to your CPA offer that you are promoting.  For me, I have heard a lot about loan modifications but didn't know exactly everything involved with it and how it worked in detail.  So the first thing I did was google "loan modification" to get an understanding of what this term meant in detail so I can use this as my opening paragraph for my article.

I clicked on the first link in the natural listings and it took me to a page that explained exactly what it was in summary and frequently asked questions about a loan modification.  This is all you need to do when writing an article on any topic or niche.  Simply Google the term and then find the first couple sites in Google to learn about the topic and use that information to write your article. 

Now one thing you do NOT want to do is simply copy the text and paste it in your article.  This will get your article rejected every time by the large article sites.  You simply need to rephrase the information in your own words, add to it, etc.  What I did, was simply take the information of what a loan modification was from the site and reword it in my own words to get my first paragraph of the article.

Next, I wanted to give information on how to help your user "save their home" since this is the topic that I am focusing on with a loan modification.  The next step was to simply go to the CPA offer page that I am going to promote and basically copy all the information from that site into my article. 

You will see towards the bottom of the site it explains how to avoid foreclosure and the benefits of a loan modification.  This is perfect information for my article on how to save your home along with getting the user to click on my affiliate link in my article that will essentially drive them to this page.  I didn't even need to Google the term "loan modification" as this offer has everything I need for knowing about a loan modification.  So I simply copied everything in the red box above and pasted it into my article.  Again, you can't just leave it at that and submit your article.  You need to just reword some of the terms, rephrase a sentence, add to the information from your own perspective, etc.  Just make it your own so it's not deliberate copied information.

You can see how I wrote my article directly from the link below along with a direct screen shot of it:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Save-My-House-and-Avoid-Foreclosure-With-Loan-Modification&id=2132445

You will notice that it looks very similar to the information on the landing page which is exactly what I copied and then just rewrote the text in my own words so it wasn't exact.  Then at the bottom of the article is where I can place my affiliate link to the CPA offer.  Every article site allows you to place a link in your author resource box at the bottom of the article.  Some sites even allow you to add links within the body of the article, but not Ezine Articles. 

Now with many article sites such as Ezine Articles (the site I used in this example) you can't place a direct affiliate link from your article and I will explain later how you can get around that.  Once you have your article written and ready to be submitted, it's time to submit it to the top article sites.  There are hundreds of article sites out on the Internet with new ones popping up everyday, but I will recommend the best ones below as they will get you the most traffic along with the search engines loving these sites so that your article eventually appears in the top pages of Google on certain keywords users are searching for.

Back to Table of Contents

Article Marketing Tips

A few tips on writing your article so that it gets a lot of traffic and appears in the top pages of Google, Yahoo, etc. 

1. The title of your article is the most important part in targeted the keywords you want to rank for in the top of the search engines.  In my case, I wanted to target "save my house", "avoid foreclosure", and "loan modification" and any combinations of those search terms.  So, you need to put these keywords in the title of your article as you can see I did in the example above: "Save My House and Avoid Foreclosure with A Loan Modification".  That was the title of my article.

2. The next thing you want to do is in the first paragraph use these keywords again like "how to save your house", "loan modification" etc.  See the example above on how I used them.

3. Use your keywords again one more time in the body or ending paragraph of your article.

4. Keep your article short and sweet.  Make sure your article contains anywhere from 250 (minimum) and up to 700 (maximum) words per article.  You want to make sure you are getting your point across and teasing the user to learn more and eventually click on your affiliate link in the author resource box.

These are the three main tips that you should follow when writing your article so that it has a great chance of appearing in the top of the search engines for the keywords you are targeting.  In my case "save my house" was the main search term that I wanted to show up in Google for when users where searching for this keyword in Google. 

Here are the top article sites I recommend:

You will simply need to go to each site above and create a free account if you don't have one already to start submitting your articles.  As I mentioned there are hundreds of other article sites, but you really only need to submit your articles to the sites listed above or only just one for that matter to get your traffic from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc.  Once you have your article submitted, go ahead and login to each of the article sites listed above or any others that you choose to use and submit your article.  A few of the article sites such as Ezine Articles and ArticlesBase (first few articles) will need to be approved before they are live to make sure they comply with their guidelines. 

In my loan modification campaign I simply submitted the article to just one site, Ezine Articles and it was approved in a couple days.  Once it's approved, now you just need to wait for the search engines to pick up your article.  It will immediately get traffic from the people that are searching on the actual article sites like Ezine Articles.  After a day or two, you will want to go ahead and search on Google for the keywords you were targeting.  In my case it was "save my house" and below is a screenshot for the first page of the results in Google for "save my house"

I've also ranked well for keyword "save my house from foreclosure" as I came in at #13 on Google as seen below:

It goes even further on Yahoo as I've ranked #5 for keyword "save my house" and #3 for "save my house from foreclosure as seen below:

As well as "save my house from foreclosure"

You will notice that in all of the screen shots above you will see how many different websites have the keywords "save my house" and  "save my house from foreclosure" as it's in the millions.  The keyword "save my house" alone has 83+ million websites that have this keyword within their website.  My article beat out all of these millions of websites getting on the first page in Google and Yahoo!  You may be wondering how I achieved such a great position in the search engines and all it takes is the four important tips that I mentioned earlier.

Results are not always instant as I actually had to wait 3 or 4 days for the article to show up in the top of Google and Yahoo after it was approved live by EzineArticles.  Sometimes you might get lucky and it will appear within hours of your article being approved.  There are many factors that determine how soon your article will show up in the search engines and "if" it even makes it there.  The search engines are sometimes very hard to figure out, but if you follow the important steps as outlined in this chapter above, you will have some success at getting traffic to your articles, user clicks to your CPA offer that you are promoting in the article, and ultimately leads that will earn you money.

Back to Table of Contents

In this section my goal is to continue to get more free traffic to my CPA offer, in this case the loan modification offer, using some more article marketing techniques.  In the last chapter, you saw how I simply wrote one article using Ezine Articles which eventually appeared in the first pages of Google and Yahoo after a few days of it being approved.  I am now going to write a second article targeting a different keyword phrase on another article site.  I could submit another article to Ezine Articles, but I'm going to actually write and submit a new article to my next favorite article site which is ArticlesBase.com. 

As I mentioned in a previous chapter, you need to do your keyword research so that you know exactly which keywords you are going to use in the title of your article and couple other times within the body of your article.  I showed you how to do your keyword research using the Google keyword tool which is a great free tool to use, but I also actually use a much better tool that saves me a lot of time when researching keywords.  It's called Adwords Analyzer and it does mostly the same thing that the free Google keyword tool does, however it also shows me the important number that I need which is how many results or number of websites are competing for that exact keyword phrase. 

In the example above you will see that I put in a couple of keywords that are related to the loan modification offer (mortgages foreclosure).  By putting in both of these keywords, the tool will bring back results with any combination of these keywords in a phrase.  As you can see from above, the keyword "mortgages for people in foreclosure" has 3,570 searches per month and it only has 2,360 websites that have this exact phrase.  Going back to my general rule of thumb where I won't try and get a first page listing in the search engines unless the results show me under 50,000.  In this case the results show well under that and it also gets a lot of searches per month, so I'm going to use this as targeting my keyword phrase when writing my next article.

You can also do your keyword research using the Google keyword tool, but you will just have to find the results of each keyword manually using the procedures as I mentioned earlier.  Just to show you that the number is the same in Google as in the keyword tool I use above you can see from the screen shot below:

Once I wrote my article and submitted it to ArticlesBase.com, I also submitted the link to my article on another website so that I can get an instant back link to my article. With ArticlesBase.com the first 10-20 articles you write will need to wait for approval just like Ezine Articles, however after you submit many articles to this site, you will gain credibility as an author and your articles will be approved instantly after you submit them without having to be manually approved.  The next day after I submitted my article I checked Google using my keyword phrase that I was targeting and trying to get in the top of the search engines with.  Amazingly in just 15 hours my article was ranked #4 in Google for my keyword!!!

All I did to achieve another top ranking for my article was use my keyword phrase in the title of my article and a couple other times within the body of my article, and got one back link to the article from another website.  Another good website where I like to get back links to my articles is folkd.com.  Remember as I mentioned earlier, it's great to get as many back links to your article as you can because Google and other search engines will see that other websites are linking to your article which means that it must be important which in return ranks it high on Google. 

When getting a back link from another site such as folkd.com, it's very easy to do.  Just register for a new account (for your first time only), and submit your link, give it a title (something not exact as your article title) and copy the first or second sentence from your actual article in the summary.  Then add a couple of tags which would be some keyword phrases you are targeting like "loan modifications", "save your home", etc.  Then just submit it, and you will have an instant back link to your article. 

Now getting a back link to your article generally isn't necessary to achieve instant success in your article ranking high in the search engines, however this is a technique that will help maintain your articles high ranking in the long run.  Sometimes articles will appear in the top of the search engine for days or weeks and then all of a sudden disappear as newer content or articles come out.  While getting back links pointing to your article it will help you keep your high position.

Back to Table of Contents

It's an important thing to do before you begin writing your articles, building landing pages, mini sites, etc. so you know which keywords you are going to target and incorporate in your title and throughout your article / site.  Without trying to rank high in the search engines for keywords, you can forget about getting much traffic to your pages.  It's almost impossible without spending a lot of time and money on trying to rank your articles / sites for general keywords like "mortgages" or "loans" because there are too many other sites that are ranking for this term. 

Instead, you need to set a goal at aiming for longer keyword phrases within that niche like "how to get a mortgage" or "cheapest loans chicago".  These terms aren't going to get searched for as much as general keywords, however if you setup pages to target several keyword phrases, they will all add up.  You will also get more targeted traffic that will result in better lead conversions when you target longer keyword phrases.  For example, if your page ranked high for the keyword "loans" and the user was searching for a loan in Portland but you only had information on loans in Chicago, the user isn't going to stay on your page for long.  So by targeting the keyword phrase "cheapest loans chicago", you will have exactly what the user is looking for.

Back to Table of Contents

Using the Keyword Tool

You might be wondering how to determine what keywords to target or pick from for your topic or offer to promote.  Another important thing to do is your keyword research before you begin writing your article so you know which keywords you are going to target and incorporate in your title and throughout your article.  In my case I wanted to see how many people where looking to try and save their home.  A great tool to do your keyword research is a free tool offered by Google located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

As pictured above, I entered in the keyword I wanted to target, see how many people were searching for this keyword, get any synonym terms, and if there was a lot of websites competing for the same term.  Generally it would be great if you can get target a keyword that has anything over 300 searches per month.

The results above tell me that there are two keywords that are receiving over 300 searches per month.  Save my home is actually searched for 6,600 times which would give my article great traffic if I can get it ranked in the top of the search engines.  Now that I have targeted a keyword phrase I want to use, I will now determine if I think I'll be able to rank high enough for it on the search engines.  If there are two many websites that are already targeting this keyword, it will be hard to rank in the top for it and I'll want to choose something else.

Once I click on my article, I can instantly see how many people have viewed it.  In less than a day, I've already had 6 views, which isn't much, but over time this article is going to add up to a lot more views which is all FREE traffic.  The great thing about Articles Base is that I am allowed to use up to three links to my CPA offer within the article.  Twice in the body of the article and once in the resource box at the end of the article as shown below.  Writing this second article was simple because I took a lot of the information from the first article I wrote and then just re-worded again. 

You might be thinking why can't you just copy the exact article you wrote the first time and use it again on another article site since it's your own article.  Yes you can definitely do that, however Google is very smart and if it comes across identical articles, it will treat your second article as duplicate content and not rank it high in the search.  For this reason, I simply modified a couple paragraphs, but you will notice I copied the same asterisk points as in my first article, just re-wrote them in different words.  I succeeded in getting past "duplicate content" in Google's eyes because of re-wording the article. 

Staying in this same niche, I knew that there were a lot of people that were in foreclosure or close to it, so there were probably a lot of keyword phrases that people were searching for.  At first I typed in general keywords like "mortgage foreclosure" to get some ideas of phrases I could target.

I got lots of ideas as you can see below.  To find out if I can rank high for these keywords I would search for the term in Google with (quotes) around it to see ho many competing websites target this exact phrase like I did for the previous example.  Instead of doing each keyword one by one in Google, I actually use a tool that does it all for me so I can easily see which keywords I can rank high for at a glance. 

The tool is called Adword Analyzer that I highly recommend which saves me a TON of time when I do my keyword research and I'm able to find lots of keyword phrases where I can dominate the rankings in the search engines.

When I entered the keyword "mortgages foreclosure" I see that the keyword phrase "mortgages for people in foreclosure" gets 3,750 searches per day with only 2,760 competing websites so this should be easy to rank high for. 

I wrote an article on ArticlesBase.com using the article writing techniques I mentioned earlier and my article ranked #2 for the keywords just a couple days later!

You can see that in almost any niche that you are looking to make money in, just start with general keyword phrases like I did and you will get a lot of other examples for keywords that you can rank high for.  You can do this free with the Google keyword tool and then manually check Google to see how many websites are competing for this term, or you can use Adword Analyzer if you want it automated for you.

Back to Table of Contents

To find out how many websites are competing and targeting for the keyword phrase in my first keyword research example "save my home", I will simply go to Google.com and enter the phrase "save my home" in quotes (which is important) and it will give me the results as pictured below:

You will see that there are 303,000 websites that are targeting the exact phrase "save my home".  It's important to note that I put the phrase in quotes when searching in Google because that gives me the exact phrase results "save my home" instead of for instance "save your home and my credit score".  As a general rule of thumb, I don't like to compete for a keyword (in which I mean use as my main target keyword for my article) if the results in Google show anything over 60,000 websites.  So in this case 303,000 websites are using this exact phrase "save my home" so I'm going to try a different keyword to target instead. 

The Google keyword tool also lists synonyms you might want to consider using as your keywords.  In this case, I see that "save my house" gets 3,600 searches per month which would also give my article a good amount of traffic if I can rank well in the search engines. 

I will know test this out on Google and see how many websites are competing for the new keyword "save my house". 

As you can see above, there are 62,400 websites competing for the exact keyword phrase "save my house".  This means there are a lot less websites using this keyword phrase compared to "save my home" so I would have a much better chance at getting a high ranking in the search engine for this keyword phrase.  Since this is just a bit over my rule of thumb as to not try a keyword phrase that has over 60,000 websites using this exact phrase, I tried it out anyway.  This is how you will want to research your keywords and determine which ones to target and use for your article. 

Once your article is live, there are a few tricks that you will want to do in order to increase your chances of getting your article listed in the top of the search engines and keep it there for a long period of time.  Sometimes articles will appear in the top of the search engines quickly after being approved, but then it will disappear weeks or months later never to be found again.  This can happen for a number of different reasons and without getting too much into how search engines determine how well websites are ranked by keyword, you will want to follow the next steps below.

Back to Table of Contents

Explanation of Backlinks

Backlinks are a big factor in determining how well a website or article is ranked in the search engines.  In simple terms, back links are just the number of websites on the Internet that have a link on their website of another particular website.  For instance, if there is a "how to" website out there on the Internet that is looking for content or information to add to their site and they find my article about "how to save your home", they might find it worthwhile to add a link to my article on their website as it compliments their "how to" site.  Google and Yahoo love sites with back links because this tells them that it's an important website or article that other websites are putting a link to on their website.

So how do you get back links?  There are many sites where you can get your own back links to your article which will increase your ranking in the search engines.  My favorite is Mixx.com, but there are hundreds of other sites where you can get back links to your article.  The best ones are below where basically you can submit a story, news, etc. to the site (like Mixx.com) and then have a link to your article as the story.  This will give you a back link to your article.

In my example, I went to Mixx.com (register for a free account), and login.  Once you get logged in, I went ahead and submitted a link to Mixx (in this case it's my article from Ezine Articles).

This is where you will enter some basic information about your article.  First you simply get the exact URL of the article you submitted and enter that in the page URL of Mixx.

On the next screen, you want to enter a title of the story you are submitting.  In this case I simply abbreviate everything from my article. 

What you will want to do is just summarize everything about your article as you can see how I did above.  The goal in this step is not to get any traffic from submitting your story on Mixx (although you will get some), is to get a back link from Mixx to your article (in my case to my Ezine Article on loan modification). Once you enter the summary and choose a category for your topic, simply click on submit and you will get an instant back link to your article. 

This was just one place you can get back links to your articles and there are several similar websites that you can submit your summary story of your article to gain back links.  Obviously the more back links you get the better, but I have found that simply getting 1 or 2 back links is sufficient in achieving good results.  There's also times where you don't have to get any back links to your article and it will rank just fine for your keywords. 

Now for the exciting part on checking the stats of my article in this example.  The article has been live for about a week now and as I mentioned it just started to show up in the search engines a couple of days ago so it's still fairly new.  To view your article stats you can simply login to your account on the article website or in my case with Ezine Articles, you just need to bring up the actual article.  In my case, I have had 96 people view my article.  That's GREAT news for this article only showing up in the search engines for a couple days now.  Although it's great to get a lot of article views, the main goal is to get people to click on my affiliate link that will take the user to the CPA offer (loan modification page).

To determine how many people clicked on my affiliate link within my article I can either look at my URL clicks within my Ezine Articles account or simply login to the CPA network that I'm running this offer from.  In this case I will find out my stats in Hydra Network as it will show me how many clicks I have had along with any leads I have credit for. 

As you can see above this particular offer has had 26 clicks to it along with 1 action or lead which resulted in $13.50 credited to me! That's GREAT news for this article only being live for a week now and showing up in the search engines just a couple days ago.  Although I didn't get all the 96 people to click on the affiliate link at the bottom of my article, 27% of them did. 

Not everyone is going to click on your link for many different reasons, but anything over 20% of your views that result in clicks would be great.  To turn the maximum amount of user views into clicks, you want to make your article interesting and make sure you use action points like showing a summary of the benefits, rewards, etc.  In my case it was very easy for me to get good information since I copied the CPA offer's landing page and rewrote the information in my own words. 

Remember with article writing, the money you make from CPA offers is PURE profit as in my case with the $13.50 I've already earned from the article just being live on the Internet.  Although article writing can take some time, in the long run it will be well worth it as you won't have to pay Google, Yahoo, or any other search engines a penny as compared to pay per click advertising which is another advertising method I will discuss in a later chapter. 

Article writing and marketing by following the steps I've outlined above is a great way for newbies looking to make money promoting CPA offers as compared to paid advertising.  It requires no money you are risking up front, and I don't recommend paid advertising until you actually learn from article marketing.  This way the money you start earning from article marketing you can put away to start using with paid advertising when the time comes.

With just this one article if I can continue to get the views and clicks it's been getting I should be able to achieve at least one lead per week which gives me an extra $54 per month on only about 15 minutes of work! The best part about writing an article is that you simply submit it, get a couple back links if you want, and forget about it.  Over time if and when the article maintains a high ranking in the search engines, it will continue to get views, clicks, and leads for you month after month and possibly year after year.  I have a couple articles that are consistently earning me money month after month for the past year which I haven't had to pay a dime for advertising!  You can do the same with the start of your article marketing campaigns. 

In the next chapter I will show you how to get even more leads and earn more money using the same CPA offer over and over again.  Since I simply targeted my article on a couple keywords, I can expand my leads and earnings even further by targeting even more keywords in this niche.  In this particular loan modification niche, there are hundreds of keywords that users are searching for based on the results I got back from the Google keyword tool.  I can write another article for instance on the keyword "where to start a loan modification", as people are searching for this every day.  It gives you a different perspective and topic to write on for your new article, but you can promote the same exact CPA offer, in my case the loan modification one, as it will lead the user to find out where they can get a loan modification when they fill out their info on the site.

Back to Table of Contents