The Ultimate Guide to Driving Traffic to CPA Offers

Driving traffic to a CPA offer is more or less identical to driving traffic to any website. You can still get traffic from all of the usual black and white hat sources, and the conversion rate you get depends on the quality of that traffic.

There’s just one catch with CPA; often offers will specify one particular type of traffic. If an offer you take specifies banner ad traffic, and you use the offer link in a text ad, none of the referrals you make will count for payment. You’re breaking the terms of the offer, and thus forfeiting any earnings.

CPA Specific Terms

Some CPA offers are not limited. Others will specify types of traffic, such as banner traffic, traffic from emails, or organic traffic only. Keep this in mind as you read on about types of traffic and various traffic sources; you will need to either focus solely on one type of traffic, or use a variety of offers to capture each type of traffic.

One thing you might want to watch for is Incent offers. This keyword, when present in an offer, means you’re allowed to incentivize the traffic in any way you desire. You can, for example, tell users that if they fill out the form, they get a free copy of your ebook or a 10% off coupon for a product.

You might even tell them they can sign up for an exclusive deals mailing list which you use for other offers. Giveaways work as well; record the people who sign up and award a gift card to a few lucky winners each month. If you’re getting enough conversions and your offer pays enough, it’s a small chunk of your available profits.

Finding Offers

Part of driving traffic to your offers is finding the right offers in the first place. You want to develop a website – or multiple websites – in a niche. Each niche has limits, and you need to have discipline to keep your offers focused. If you find good offers in a different niche, don’t slap them on to your site, save them for a new site in a different niche.

You can find offers using sites like OfferVault or oDigger. Put in keywords relating to your niche and look for offers. By registering for these sites, you can use advanced search criteria, which are extremely helpful for weeding out the offers that don’t apply to your site. You’ll want to specify offers in the right country, for example. An offer in French doesn’t apply to your US-only site, does it?

When you find applicable offers, you will need to review them for any specifications that make them difficult to monetize. Such specifications include limits on the type of traffic, incentives you’re allowed to offer, and the action required to count as a successful conversion.

With a selection of offers in hand, you will need to apply to the networks that host the offer. If you don’t get accepted into the network, you can’t run the offer, so you might have to search for replacements. If you’re already a member of the applicable network, you’re good to go.

Types of CPA Sites

The first choice you need to make is do you opt for a volume-based approach or a quality-based approach.

A volume-based approach has you spending the absolute minimum amount of time and money on your site. You slap up some content, you use a template site, you throw in a few offers, and you run a few ads. That’s it. You do this tens or hundreds of times, creating a lot of minor sites with a lot of offers, trying to hit all the bases. At some point, you reach critical mass and make more money than it takes to set it all up.

A quality-based approach is much more stable for the long term. You create a custom niche site and put your all into it. A custom site design, nicely integrated offers and a constant update schedule keep the site running and hopefully flourishing. You can leverage this site into other monetization methods later, such as affiliate marketing, direct sales of ad space, and even selling your own products.

I recommend the quality-based approach for a few reasons. For one thing, a quality site has more long-term growth potential. For another, a horde of thin sites can earn you a spammer label and cause your sites to be removed from Google rankings, which can hurt quite a bit.

Driving Traffic

Once you have a site set up with some offers, it’s time to drive some traffic to it. You can do this in a number of different ways.

• Organic search. This is the best method for long term growth, but it’s not as good for the quantity-based approach. With organic search, you’re working with SEO to build a brand presence and a trusted reputation, so you need to carefully cherry-pick your offers to avoid scamming your readers.
• Search ads. Using Bing PPC, Google AdWords or other search ads allow you access to a huge amount of targeted traffic. The caveat, of course, is that you have to pay for ads and you’re not guaranteed conversions. If your targeting is off or you’re paying too much for ads, you’ll see very few people actually filling out your CPA offer form, so you won’t be earning back the money you spent, let alone making a profit.
• Mobile ads. Using mobile ad exchanges like Buzzcity opens your site up to a whole wide world of mobile users. Just make sure that your offers are targeted at mobile users, and that your site works perfectly on all mobile devices. This might require shelling out for a responsive design.
• Social media. Organic social media works with the quality-based approach, because you’re building a brand as much as you are an affiliate site. You can curate content, share blog posts and interact with industry veterans through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, all with the goal of driving traffic to your site and your offers.
• Social ads. Much the same as search ads, Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets offer their own PPC ads. Use these to drive traffic to your sites. You can even use targeting information from your audience to run offers you haven’t implemented yet, to give them a trial run.
• Mailing lists. Building your own mailing list is great, but you can also buy space in other site newsletters or in newsletters designed to share affiliate sites with interested consumers.

Using a mixture of these traffic sources is ideal, so you’re not relying too much on any one traffic source. Experiment, find where your best conversions come from, and push for growth.

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