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CPA Marketing Beginner's Guide


1. Introduction to CPA
2. CPA Marketing
3. Getting started with CPA
4. Popular CPA Methods
5. Tips & Tricks



Introduction to CPA

In this guide I will be providing basic insights into the CPA for newbies. I won't go into too much detail about every single method out there but my plan for this guide is to provide a basic insight into CPA for fellow CPA enthusiasts. CPA is a term which stands for "Cost per Acquisition" or "Cost per Action". It's a business model in which an offer-provider pays for a specific action, most common actions (offer types) are: PIN (SMS code) submit, ZIP submit, e-mail address submit, application install, click (CPC - Cost per Click) and lead generation. PIN submit offers are known to have the highest payout, ranging between $1 and $30 depending on country's tier, with France / Switzerland being popular targets due to their high payout PIN offers. ZIP submit and e-mail address submit offers are quite similar, as their name says, they convert at zip/email address submit. The payout of these offers is around $0.50 - $2 on most CPA networks. App install offers are usually divided in 3 most popular categories, Windows / iOS / Android. Windows application installs are usually paying between $0.5 and $2 per conversion, whereas iOS / Android apps are usually having smaller payouts at $0.05 - $1.50. Going to the next offer type, we have CPC. Cost per Click offers are clicks which convert at a single click. All you have to do is to get someone to click the offer and you instantly get a conversion (payout). These offers have high conversion rates though their payout is fairly low. I've saw Shazam CPC offers go for like $0.12 - $0.25 per conversion. Now that you know about the basic offer types and payouts for each type, we are slowly going to delve into more advanced stuff.

CPA Marketing

CPA Marketing is a monetization technique in which an affiliate (you) joins a CPA Network and promotes their offers. Offers are divided in 2 major categories and the several previously mentioned types. The 2 categories of offers are respectively, Incent and Non-Incent offers. Incentive offers allow you to use incentive traffic (blackhat), as an example "Free iPhone 7" landing pages. Non-Incent offers forbid you to put forth incentives for your traffic, if you get caught promoting a non-incent offer using incentive traffic you could get banned for fraud on the CPA Network. That being said, some of the well known CPA Networks are OGAds, Adludum, CPAGrip, AdWorkMedia, CPABuild, PeerFly, MaxBounty, AdGateMedia, AstroCash, MGCash. The ones that I use are OGAds - for mobile traffic and Adludum - for desktop traffic.

To further advance your knowledge, I'm going to explain the terminology of CPA. Spoiler (Click to View)

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1. CPA - Cost per Action / Cost per Acquisition.
2. Niche - Point of interest which targets a specific audience. For example, Gaming, free giftcards, steam giftcard generators, etc.
3. Saturated / Unsaturated - These two words are often used to describe niches. As an example, you've probably seen a Giftcard Generator page sometime in the past. There's a lot of people promoting giftcard niches meaning the giftcard niche is saturated. Whereas, unsaturated niches are niches that have low competition and are fairly unknown & fresh.
4. Landing Page - LP is a page which you create to promote a niche. Landing page contains a content locker which directs the visitors to CPA offers. As an example, in the Giftcards niche you have a giftcards LP which requires the users to complete a survey in order to claim the giftcard. Thus the website itself is your Landing Page.
5. Cloaker - Most commonly used in paid advertising CPA methods. Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Bing Ads don't allow the users to promote incentive CPA offers. To circumvent that, we use cloakers. Cloaking services in a nutshell provide you with a link which redirects Google/Facebook/Bing bot crawlers to a safe page without the incentive (blackhat) content. However, real visitors will be redirected to your incentive Landing Page.
6. CPI - Cost per Install. A subtype of CPA, CPI offers are basically mobile app installs for iOS / Android. The best CPI network nowadays is undoubtedly, OGAds.
7. CTA - Call to Action. Imagine you have a giftcards website which upon loading shows you a big red 'Get your giftcard now!' button. That button is your CTA.
8. CTR - Click Through Rate. CTR is a ratio between number of impressions (views) and number of people who clicked the CTA button. CTR is calculated using the formula, (Number of Clicks / Number of impressions) x 100. So if you have 100 impressions and 3 clicks, your CTR is 3%.
9. Conversion - When someone clicks on your offer and completes the required offer type action (PIN submit, ZIP / e-mail submit..), you will get paid the payout amount for that offer. That is a conversion. An example : Solitaire - France - iOS Incent $0.12. So when someone with an iPhone clicks on the solitaire offer and downloads the app, your conversion would be $0.12.
10.CVR - CVR stands for Conversion Rate. It is similar to CTR and is calculated the same way. You have 1000 visits on your page. Out of those 1 000, 300 people click on an offer. Out of those 300 people that clicked on an offer, only 100 people completed the required information, and you have 100 conversions. 300 clicks / 100 conversions is a 33.33% CVR.

Getting started with CPA

Okay now that we have explained the basics, let's get started. The following 3 things are fundamental to a successful CPA career.

CPA Network is the first requirement. Basically, in order to earn money you will need an account on a CPA Network. I've previously mentioned a few reliable and high quality networks. I recommend OGAds for mobile traffic and Adludum for Desktop traffic since I've been using them myself and had no issues so far. CPA networks often have an application which you need to fill in order to join the network. If you're a complete newbie, I suggest that you read this whole guide, do some research and come up with an idea before applying to a CPA network. Be honest in your application and don't be afraid to elaborate.

Landing Page is the second requirement. You will need a hosting & domain for your landing page. I suggest using http://hostdare.com for your hosting needs and http://namecheap.com for cheap domain names. I've personally used HostDare for a long time now and I have their Professional package which allows me to put unlimited domains on a single hosting for only $5 a month which is a bargain. I've had no downtime and I ran 15 domains on a single hosting without any issues.

Traffic is the third requirement. Even the best landing page and best CPA network will earn you absolutely nothing if you are unable to bring traffic to your landing page. Traffic is the most important aspect in CPA. Even if you have an awful landing page, if you have 100k impressions, 50k clicks and a 2% CVR rate (which is very low) that's still 1000 conversions right there. Since traffic is the most important requirement I will dedicate the next section solely towards it. Without further ado, let's continue.

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Popular CPA Methods

YouTube CPA marketing is the currently most popular CPA method. I personally really like YouTube CPA. With over 1.3 billion users, YouTube is widely popular and has a large audience. 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. YouTube has 50-50 mobile to desktop traffic ratio and with such large digits, there's a huge potential for CPA. Majority of YouTube CPA is split between 3 different methods: Livestreams, Video ranking and Comment ranking. These 3 methods have their own advantages / disadvantages and I will introduce them to you in this section.

Livestreams

Livestreams are broadcasts of videos in an infinite loop which promote a certain niche, "iPhone 7 Giveaway" - just type it in YouTube search and you will see a lot of livestreams. For this method to work you will need OBS or similar livestreaming software, VPS to broadcast your livestream 24/7 and a high quality video which you will broadcast. Video needs to be like an infinite-loop GIF, basically a seamless replay. You will also need to find a SMM service which sells live viewers, which is a bit hard. Live viewers are necessary in order to rank your livestream on YouTube seach results. The method is fairly simple, the hard part is finding live viewers and setting everything up. Once it's all set up it's pretty much autopilot. Advantages of this method are that you can grow your YouTube account insanely fast (I've saw a person gain over 40k subscribers in 2-3 days) and that it is autopilot once it's all set-up correctly. Disadvantages of the method are that it requires a bit larger investment (VPS cost, live viewers costs) and the setup can be a bit hard since you need a really HQ video for this method.

The image shows an example of a good livestream. The video contains precise steps to follow and in the upper left corner there is an infinitely-replaying video which makes people believe that the streamer is right there with them and is holding the iphones that he plans to give away in his hands. You can see that this livestream is successful since around 40k people have left a like on the livestream. Let's say that out of these 40k likes, atleast 20k have reached his landing page. That's 20k impressions on the landing page. Out of these 20k impressions, lets say around 10k have clicked on a CPA offer. Even with an awful 10% CVR, that is still 1 000 conversions. 1 000 conversions is atleast $500. Livestream Owner's initial investment was not larger than $50 so $500 is a ROI of 1000%. So with work & effort, he managed to turn his $50 into $500. That's the charm of the livestream method.

Video Ranking

YouTube Video ranking is a somewhat old CPA method. It's been around for ages and it's very simple. Put simply, video ranking is all about making a high quality video then uploading to YouTube and ranking it for a certain keyword. To achieve this, people usually purchase Social Media Services. I recommend atleast 20k HR (high retention / watchtime) views, 400 video likes and 50 custom comments along with some social signals (G+ shares, FB Shares, Twitter posts). Most common nowadays are mobile game hack niches. So let's say our niche is Clash of Clans. We want to rank our video for the keyword "clash of clans hack" and make it appear on first place whenever someone types "clash of clans hack" into youtube's search box. As I said before we achieve that by purchasing Social Media services. I've personally used SEOClerks.com in the past but HF has a SM section in the Marketplace too.

Video will need to be HQ, atleast 720p or preferably higher. Usually, mobile game hack niche videos contain fake proof. In order to create a good video you will need to learn how to use video-editing software like AfterEffects. Most commonly used is the dynamic counter effect in Adobe AfterEffects (example of this effect: 1 token to 99999 tokens in a game). A professional video will have a voice-over, perhaps a videocam of the speaker and the video contains detailed information, author guides the people from start to finish, even doing the CPA offer on video.

SM Service is relatively easy to find. You will need to find a good views provider. SEOClerks is the best place to find SM services or you could try your luck in the HF Marketplace. As I said before, the default package for ranking any video is : 20k HR views, 50+ custom comments, 400+ video likes and around 500 - 1000 social signals (G+/FB/Twitter shares).

Keywords - You need to be really smart with your targeting. If you're making a video on Clash of Clans Hack, then obviously just a single keyword won't be enough. You want to have as much keywords as you can. To obtain keywords for your videos there's a lot of methods going around the internet but I will tell you about the two reliable ones. First method is to use a website like http://rapidtags.io, the website will generate keywords for you and all you have to do is copy & paste them. The second method is to just go to YouTube and put our niche in the search bar, as an example, we write "Clash of Clans" and YouTube will automatically generate search suggestions for us. We write these down and use them as keywords. Simple as that.

Comment Ranking

Comment Marketing is a YT related comment method. Most commonly it's known as YT Spam because in a nutshell, it's just spamming comments about a CPA Landing Page on YouTube Videos. This method requires 3 things: Landing Page, Comment and Upvotes. Basically, all you require is to write a convincing comment and then deliver upvotes to it, thus making it appear as the top-comment for a video.

The basis on which this method works is really simple. If PewDiePie uploads a new video, with the sheer number of subscribers he has, the video will receive hundreds of thousands views in a single hour (since subscribers receive a notification when a new video is uploaded). If we are quick and quickly rank a comment that means that hundreds of thousands will see our comment.

This is what the comments usually look like. Personally, when using this method I always try to make my comments look more realistic and human-like. So instead of a comment like this, mine would look a lot different. I'd put an avatar on my YouTube account and I'd make the comment a lot longer, even mentioning the video's content. This would lead to a higher CVR and thus, higher earnings. Some effort with this method can yield good results, with a $50 investment I earned around $500 back with pure manual work put into it. Currently the hardest part about this method is finding a provider for upvotes. Recently there was a panel called SocialPire which let members (for a $50 monthly) to deliver up to 2k upvotes per comment (15k daily limit = 450k (30x15k) comment upvotes a month). Sadly due to too much users the panel shutdown and now the people who did this method are trying to establish private panels (which costs a bit more considering you will need to provide the accounts & proxies for upvoting).

This is fairly enough about YouTube CPA and next on the list we will be taking a look at Instagram CPA.

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Instagram is the second most popular CPA method. People mainly choose Instagram CPA due to the stability and simplicity. Main advantages of the Instagram CPA Method is that it can be easily scaled up. In a nutshell, Instagram CPA is all about finding profitable niches then growing x number of accounts using automation software. Recently, a rather popular automation software called MassPlanner was shutdown due to legal issues with Instagram. A lot of people quit Instagram CPA after MP shutdown and currently Instagram is way more unsaturated than it was before. Downside to this method is that it is quite costly, requires a big investment and it takes some time to achieve a positive ROI (Return on Investment). In order to further explain the costs, I'll make an example of a campaign:

20 Instagram Accounts ($1.5 each) = $30.00
Virtual Private Server for FollowLiker = $97.00 (Lifetime license)
10 Dedicated Proxies = $12/month

Total expense: $139.00

As an Instagram CPA amateur it'd probably take a while for you to earn the $139 back. This is the downside of Instagram CPA, you're basically investing $139 in a longer-term project, which could or could not result into higher earnings. As a word of advice, I'd say you should aim to atleast hit $0.5 in daily earnings per account before investing further. So if you have around 100 accounts, you'd be earning stable $50 a day off those accounts in optimal situation.

Method

The actual method for Instagram is fairly simple. You purchase accounts, proxies, automation software and a VPS which will be running your automation software. Distribute IG accounts across different niches and start slowly growing them whilst trying to evade bans. Automation software will be dedicated to gaining traffic (It does a certain amount of follows / likes per day thus creating a traffic source) There's a lot of account sellers around and you can find some on your own, mainly you want to purchase PVA aged Instagram accounts since these have the lowest risk of getting banned. Proxies are great at http://blazingseollc.com and I recommend the dedicated proxies from there. Automation Software which I recommend is FollowLiker (http://www.followliker.com/) and it is currently the best Instagram automation software out there (after MassPlaner shutdown). VPS will be required in order to use the automation software 24/7, generally IG CPA professionals prefer to use these: https://greencloudvps.com/massplanner-optimized-vps.php since they are optimized for IG CPA.

As I've said before, your initial goal is to reach $0.50 / account a day. That's the bare minimum you should be making per account. The initial phase can be quite slow but once your Instagram accounts empire is set-up you're looking at effortless semi-autopilot earnings daily. That's where this CPA method really shines and from then on it's pretty straight-forward: Invest in more accounts, follow the trends and think of unique niches, bank hard and try to evade bans. Instagram can sometimes deliver a punch in form of a ban-wave, though if you have good settings you should be pretty safe.

These are the settings for automation software which I use :

If you are a newbie to Instagram CPA I highly recommend you use these settings. I've found these settings In a very HQ guide written by a great IG CPA marketer DEADZ. You can find the guide here. I recommend it to the people who are interested in a more in-depth guide about Instagram CPA.

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Search Engine Optimization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a rather professional CPA method. Certainly, it can be done by newbies however the true SEO professional marketers are racking in tens of thousands per day with their SEO CPA methods. Personally, I don't have much knowledge about SEO + CPA, however I've done my research and I'm willing to share some of the very basics that SEO and CPA achieve together. As previously mentioned SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, basically it determines how your website ranks on google search results. Instagram/YouTube CPA are just means of gaining traffic to our Landing Page. What if we could directly make our Landing Page appear on Google search results whenever someone searches for something? That's where SEO kicks in. Basically, SEO is divided in Onsite / Offsite SEO. Onsite SEO is the content of your website: Fresh posts and larger keyword density is certainly a big + in your SEO score. Offsite SEO is all about building high-quality backlinks (Links to your website from other websites), social shares (FB/Twitter/Google+) etc.
Refer to the image in order to have a better understanding of how SEO CPA works, improving these can lead to a better ranking for your own websites:

As the image shows, we have Onsite & Off-site SEO. Onsite SEO consists of Content, Coding, Headings, Title Tags, Load Time, Meta-Descriptions. Content is the major point of on-site SEO. A blog which has fresh new posts every day has better 'content' than an outdated blog. So the important thing is to keep updating your website consistently, on a daily basis. This will increase your SEO score a lot. Coding and Load Time refers to the backend of the website, as in which web development language has the website been developed with. Some development languages are faster than others thus the loading time is shorter, also you need to make sure that the images & objects on your website are SEO-optimized. For more information about this read this guide. Title Tags & Headings & Meta-Description all refer to keyword density. If your niche is gaming related then your headings, title tags and meta description should all contain gaming-related keywords. This will also increase your SEO score a lot.

Offsite SEO is a lot different. As the name implies, it's SEO factors that are unrelated to your website that determine your ranking. So what are they? In a nutshell, offsite SEO is all about getting high quality backlinks (an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website), getting social signals (G+/ Facebook / Twitter shares/tweets).

If you'd like to learn more about SEO, please refer to this guide. It covers a completely in-depth guide to SEO which is still relevant to this day.

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For convenience sake I will put these tips and tricks in a spoiler.
Spoiler (Click to View)

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If you are new to CPA in general, I highly suggest you first do a lot of reading and researching. A major mistake newbies make is that they blindly invest money and fail miserably. Rather than doing that, calculate everything and take it easy. As an example, if you are planning on doing Instagram CPA then start with 1 account instead of getting 50. This way even if you fail you've wasted a few dollars, rather than a lot more if you decide to purchase 50.

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If you find yourself a working private method and if it can get saturated, don't share it with anyone. However, if you find a method which can't get saturated then you should either sell the method or get a few referrals that will earn with it and give you a percentage in referral commision (around 5% usually).

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Talk with your affiliate manager a lot. When you sign up on a CPA network, you will be placed under an affiliate manager. Affiliate Managers (AM) are there to assist you. Their job is literally to be pestered by affiliates and help them as far as they can. As an example, if you are able to bring large traffic to a CPI offer which pays 0.20$,  if you talk with your AM he could potentially raise the payout of the offer to 0.30$. For every 1000 conversions, instead of earning $200 you will be earning $300. Who doesn't love extra money? All that resulted from the cooperation with your AM.

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If you are unable to get approved to a network then I suggest you invest in a domain (namecheap) and buy cheap hosting. On your domain, set-up a simple landing page (tons of free landing pages for download all around the web), and put the link to your LP in the network application. Be comphrensive with your answers and don't be afraid to write longer sentences. If you can write an intelligent-looking application most of the CPA networks will accept you without any issues.

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As an CPA marketer you will need to do TONS of research. Register on every CPA forum you can find and just go read. Even old forgotten CPA forums could possibly be a goldmine if you can think of an unique idea.

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Be sure not to break the Terms & Conditions of the CPA Network. Every offer has different ToS and be sure to comply with them, unless you want to get banned / waste your effort and not get paid. As long as you can follow their rules you should have no issues with CPA Networks.

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Looking for good newbie-friendly CPA Networks? I suggest OGAds, Adludum, CPAGrip,CPABuild, AdWorkMedia. They are newbie-friendly due to the lax offer restrictions & ease of use.

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Don't do too many methods at once. In the beginning, your goal is to start slowly and find what works for you. If you wind a winning campaign you should invest some money and scale it so you can maximize the profits. However, many newbies tend to jump into everything at once which ultimately leads to nowhere.

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Don't be an early quitter. If you are trying to achieve success in a CPA Method and it really isn't working out for you, it might just be a temporary thing. Focus on the method a bit more, try to improvise and understand what went wrong. To illustrate this fact : Most commonly people quit when they pay for advertising and they're in a negative ROI. This is such a newbie mistake since paid advertising models require time to optimize the campaign & targeting which in the end would result in a positive ROI (profit).

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Collect data from your Landing Pages. You can track the visitors, browsers, impressions on your website using Google Analytics. It's fairly easy to set-up (If you don't know how, Google it!). This data is vital and certainly helps when optimizing campaigns, as an instance; if you know where your visitors are coming from you can use targeted offers on your LP, as an example, if the majority of your traffic comes from USA using Android OS then of course you want to promote an Android / USA offer on your LP.

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If you are low in investment capital then you can purchase a $5 hosting with unlimited subdomains. For example, you purchase a domain gamehacks.online and your subdomains look like this : ClashOfClans.GameHacks.online, ClashRoyale.GameHacks.online etc. This saves up quite a lot of money.

Anyways, that's it for this tutorial. It took me around 8 hours to compile this tutorial, make the images, dividers and stuff. Also had to edit some parts, experienced some technical issues along the way and the entire process was a ride. Though now that it's over I'm happy to share it with the community. Hope you all get something out of it and have a nice day.

[Cain_]

Very good basics. Thanks to the OP for taking the time to post this info. I am just starting to get into CPA now and it was very helpful.

[Snoopy]

Seems like a pretty good tutorial, will be reading this.

[Nebo]

Very good basics. Thanks to the OP for taking the time to post this info. I am just starting to get into CPA now and it was very helpful.

Thank you very much for reading my tutorial. I really hope you got some foundational insights for your CPA journey.

Seems like a pretty good tutorial, will be reading this.

Thank you.

[cruxxy]

Amazing Tutorial thanks man, very generous post :)

[Nebo]

Amazing Tutorial thanks man, very generous post :)

Thank you, glad you like it. 🤝

[ᴅᴇᴍɪꜱᴇ]

Posting to read it later. Thanks for the share OP. Keep up the good work 👍

[Nebo]

Posting to read it later. Thanks for the share OP. Keep up the good work 👍

No problem, hope you will like it.

[Zens]

nice guide, i will bookmark it. Will read it later. Cheers

[fleischi93]

Thanks for the in-depth thread man, I want to start CPA but couldn't find a decent network that allows adult traffic and pays with paypal yet. Gonna keep looking and take your guide with me.

[Rare Drip]

nice guide btw how to tell if a niche is worth ranking on youtube? Like in terms of search volume, i dont wanna rank it then it makes me 2$ a day. Catch my dirft?
I use the vidiq extension and it shows search volume and competition of a keyword you type on youtube, but idk how accurate it is.

[Nebo]

nice guide btw how to tell if a niche is worth ranking on youtube? Like in terms of search volume, i dont wanna rank it then it makes me 2$ a day. Catch my dirft?
I use the vidiq extension and it shows search volume and competition of a keyword you type on youtube, but idk how accurate it is.

Check out my previous tutorial. Basically KWFinder, google trends and SERPs tool.

https://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=5666435