I’ve been talking about getting into CPA for quite a while now as ClickBank is giving me the shits lately. I have actually launched a product nearly 2 months ago now that is not doing as well as i had hoped just yet, but that is another post.

A couple of weeks ago i applied to a relatively small CPA network (won’t say who just yet) that was recommended to me by a forum member and promptly forgot about it. I did however apply properly and even setup a site with some simple CJ offers on it.  About a week ago i got an email from the AM there asking me to give him a call. This was a bonus as usually they like to call you at 3am in the morning (i live in Australia), unless you call them first.

So i chatted to the dude and answered all the usual questions (had to fib a teeny bit but yanno) and after about 5 mins of chatting i was approved and logged in checking out some offers.  10 mins later i was pretending to be an 18 year old girl on facebook, but that is too much work (and another post if you’re interested lol) so i changed my tactics. 2 more mins later i had created a new yahoo answers profile and asked some questions.

Now, I have several YA accounts, 1 level 3 and 3 level 2 and a but load of level 1′s.  I’m sure you are all aware of how simple this marketing “tactic” is and i have used to extensively for promoting CB products, however CPA lead conversions seem to be far easier.

The top 3 offers were some dating shenanigans i was facebooking about the place, can’t be stuffed with that it takes too much effort. The bottom 2 are the same offer, but the bottom one is the auto redirect international offer for non-us traffic. Yahoo Answers took literally 5 mins and check that out from 1 answer (which is now voted as best answer not even by me!). This seems to be getting quite a bit of search traffic too as YA is first result in google and mine is the second of the sub results under that. Easy.

Will keep this up i think for a while and see what stats i get.

I was talking about creating a few blogs/sites to use as a key to getting accepted to various CPA networks. Well i have created 3 blogs in 3 different niches. I will still be keeping these secret (:P) until they are a bit more established and i have used them for what i want.

I have outsourced some content creation for all 3 blogs as i don’t have time to update my now 10 or so blogs (wtf too many blogs) by myself.

Stay tuned for more on this soon. I’m starting to get busy again at my day job, plus ive started back at Mandarin classes two nights a week. Funny story, work have approaced me to advise them on social media and internet marketing strageties. Hah. This is an advertising agency you would of thought they would have a social media expert already!? No. You would be surprised. Anway, that is a whole other post.

Hello dear readers! did you miss me!!? I missed you missing me so i thought i might try to update more regularly. :teef:

Anyway as i was saying last time, i thought i would try my hand at some CPA networks and in order to join some of the programs you need to look like you are setup to sell some stuff by having some sites established to use as, bait in a way. Well on the weekend i bought a couple of  domain names for some new blogs and started to set it up. I’m not going to reveal it here just yet but i will tell you its in the sustainable living niche. (think Earth4Energy). Blogs are a very easy way to setup a professional looking site with minimal work.

Lazy?? PLR to the rescue!

Now i don’t really know a whole lot about this niche at all so where do I get all my content from? I could outsource some fresh articles, but i really cant be bothered with that just yet so i went looking for some PLR articles.  I found a couple of really great ones that are relatively new and don’t seem to be rinsed out by people just copy and pasting them all onto their sites just yet. One even included a 5 part ecourse for my auto responder. Rad.

Some people might think that PLR stuff costs a bomb but i got 130 articles, that 5 part ecourse all for the grand total of $8.97 USD + $5.00 USD = $13.97 USD.  Awesome. Oh actually i almost forgot there was a turnkey minisite i found for sale which has a 21 page ebook and a sales page with graphics for another $15. I got it just for lols and it had some bonuses like audio and transcripts. Totally sweet.

So for a grand total of $28.97USD i have pretty much a whole site ready with a product i can sell and a blog with 100 or so posts and some articles to spare to whack on ezinearticles. Kick ass.

What the hell just happened?

How far did i digress right there!? pretty damn far that’s how far. I completely forgot what i was doing in the first place.  Nevertheless, i now have my blog setup with a whole bunch of articles i got my girlfriend to rewrite on auto post*, auto responder ready to go and mini site being redesigned with some new graphics and text being re-done. And i only actually really started working on this today! Plus i started a 10 day detox today and i was doing work for my day job! How productive am i!? Bloody. And i hardly made any spelling mistakes!

So that just goes to show how even a lazy arse like me can pull out a whole couple of sites in 7 hours of off and on work and a little bit of super lazy PLR purchasing.

Word. Till the next one when i hopefully have got some deals ready to go and stuff.

* If you aren’t setting your blogs up on auto post then you are wasting too much time. If you have all your posts ready to go you dont want to have to come back every day and post a new one. Just set the all up and schedule them to post themselves! Too easy!

So, WTF is CPA?? CPA as you may or may not know stands for Cost Per Action. This means that if you get someone to do something, like submit an email address or give up their post code (zip code) you get somewhere in the region of $1USD. Totally sweet. What happens to that lead once they give up that info is entirely inconsequential to you as you have already been paid. However if you send some shit traffic to that offer and the advertiser cant make any of that $1USD back from any of them, they will start to investigate why.

I have tried this before and didn’t really have much success, probably cos i just jumped right into it and registered for a couple of networks and was caught out not being prepared. The only network that accepted me was probably the easiest one to register with and the biggest, Commission Junction. I did register for Advaliant also but never woke up when they called me at 4am to do a phone interview. This I was absolutely not expecting so i failed. I have heard many good things about them, and their affiliate managers do seem quite friendly (from voice messages and AIM chats!) so i will be trying again with them during my experiments.

So what now? Well, in order to get accepted to the various CPA networks out there, i am going to make a website. This website will be used solely for the purpose of applying for networks. Most of them will not really take you seriously if you look like a bit of a noob. Imagine if you were kind of a dork at school, and you wanted into the cool club. You can’t just rock up and ask if you can be part of it, as the cool kids will simply laugh in your face and say “piss off you weird red headed weirdo” and that girl you fancy from up the street will laugh at you too and you will be forced into becoming somewhat of a recluse for the rest of the term. Ahem. Sorry about that.

So to avoid any embarrassment you need to look like you know what you are doing. You don’t actually have to know what you are doing tho as you can simply bluff your way in. This is where the dummy site comes into play. I wont go into this any more in this post as i don’t actually have one setup yet huhuh :$. So I will go off and build one and come back and show you what I have created.

The next update will probably be in a weeks time hah!

Firstly, apologies to anyone that reads my blog for the lack of updates. Kind of haven’t been in the writing mood lately for some reason, this doesn’t mean that i stopped doing stuff tho!

Secondly, with my review blog plugging away nicely all by itself  one thing i have decided to embark on with a bit more enthusiasm is CPA promotions. Over the next few months i hope to fully establish myself as a fully qualified CPA expert huhu. I will go through the sign up process with a few more networks and report back with my experiences and any tips for anyone out there in my current situation.

So stay tuned for the next update! Which will be i dont know when. Maybe in a week! Who knows!?

Till then!

Oh, if you want to know what i am up to at any particular time, the best way to to that is to follow me on twitter @HughMc. Also as i am not regularly updating the site as much as i once was, subscribing to my RSS Feed is the easiest way of you to see what’s new here without having to visit!