Cpa V.s. Other Forms Of Monetization?

Hi everyone, I am a fairly new member to this forum and to online marketing as well. I have been browsing this forum among others on the internet to get a better sense of affiliate marketing. I've come across Adsense and clickbank in my searches and was wondering if anyone can break down the difference. I've never tried any methods yet that I've come across. What would you recommend to a complete newbie to begin his quest in online marketing? I've started a blog on blogger just to get a hang of things and practice my writing, but there hasn't been much traction so far. If anyone would be so kind to as to give the push in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Cheers

 

Hi @n4rk92 and welcome to the forum.

Let me see if I can try and answer your question.

Adsense: The starting point. This is by far the easiest way to monetise a website. You simple slap up the ads on prominent ad spots on your pages and when a visitor lands on your page and click on the ads, you get paid a percentage of what the advertiser has paid google. This is also the most widely used and I can say it is a very good starting point. But do not rely solely on this, it is only a starting point.

Clickbank : Clickbank is an affiliate marketplace. It is a network where marketers go to to promote their products and where affiliate marketers like yourself go to to find products worth promoting. The secret to clickbank products is building a website around a niche and then promoting a clickbank product from that niche. For example, let's say your blog is about bitcoin mining strategies and you have steady traffic to your blog, chances are people found your blog by searching for information on bitcoin strategies, so a good product to promote on clickbank will be a product about bitcoin and it's strategies.

While you can use both adsense and clickbank on the same site I always advise people to try each out seperately over a set period and decide which generates the more revenue and stick with it. From experience, if you have a website with laser targeted traffic and you are the go to resource in your niche, clickbank usually outperforms adsense.

Blogger: Good starting point but if you want to be taking seriously online with your blog you should consider a self hosted blog as soon as you can. I suggest using wordpress as a CMS(see wordpress.org). It is easy to transfer your posts from blogger unto wordpress when you are ready.

Try and write meaty articles, long post (1000 - 1500 word) articles tend to do very well. Share your posts! I cannot stress this enough. When you write a good post, try and share it on social networks, forums, Q&A and everywhere and anywhere they are talking about something related to that post. Do not worry about SEO for now. Write good posts and promote it. Finally, set up a means to capture emails from your blog. This is a sure fire way to grow traffic and audience. The sooner you start the better.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

 

Several things spring to mind, the most important of which is "Don't expect anything in the first six months, at least."

Personally, I'd suggest figuring out how (and what) you want to sell before you do anything. Earning through afiiliate marketing CPA and earning through AdSense, for example, are two completely different things with completely different criteria (and neither of which will earn you much on a free blogging platform, but that's true of just about everything you can do on Blogger).

Do you want to work on getting lots of traffic to your site and earn a tiny bit off each person, or do you prefer writing on a specific subject for the next 12 months, to encourage one in every 10,000 people to buy something expensive? Are you going to just use a blog or are you going to advertise, run social media accounts and do a ton of peripheral work as well? Do you know enough about one particular subject - and care enough about it - to keep working on it, every single day, for the next year? Do you have enough time to work on your marketing for several hours every day to kick-start it, or are you hoping to do 20 minutes' work for lots of money?

To be blunt, online marketing is massively oversubscribed, so you need to be absolutely sure that you have the passion and stamina for it. If you do, you can pocket tons of (or at least a reasonable amount of) cash. If not, you'll waste the next 3-6 months of your life.

Oh, and avoid all the "methods" and schemes. They're always oversubscribed as well, so never produce the results you hope for (because 100,000 other people are doing exactly the same thing). Learn the fundamentals rather than relying on step-by-step programs.

 

I think the basic thing for a newbie is to focus on understanding how to get traffic to a blog, before you think of how you will monetize it. Without traffic you won't earn an income from any method. You can use your free blogger blog as a way of trying out different marketing methods. Then, when you get your own domain and pay for hosting, you can apply the same techniques to a blog that has more potential.

You need to decide who you have to target and how you can get those people to view your blog. When you have gained a following you can use your blog to promote affiliate products or to make money from ads. Until then you can continue to practive writing informative posts that people will find helpful and persuasive.

 

Thank you very much for the feedback guys. I will keep on reading and experimenting in my free time. I am starting a new job on Monday and hopefully will be able to allocate more time toward learning more about marketing.

I had an idea of learning HTML, PHP, and CSS to help with front end design. Do you guys think that there are other languages that are more useful that I should focus my time on?

Thank you all for the thorough replies and realistic answers regarding the work.

 

That's another of those "it depends" questions.

You don't actually need any programming or scripting knowledge to run a successful site, especially with the prevalence of good, free CMS apps around. On the other hand, the more you know, the more you can tweak and adjust things so that they are exactly how you want, rather than a close approximation.

Although I learnt HTML back in the 90s (when it was all coded by hand), I opted for a CMS for my sites - WordPress, specifically - because it's easier than handling everything from scratch and because WP is now a real CMS and not just a blogging platform. I had no CSS or php knowledge, but I've picked up both as I've gone along, mostly just to adjust things I don't like or to make a plugin do something in a specific way, rather than the way it was programmed.

IMHO, that's the nice thing about knowledge: you can pick up what you need, as you need it, and build slowly. If someone else does the complex groundwork (WP, Drupal, Joomla or whatever system you opt for), you can get away with zero knowledge of coding, or as much/little as you like.

As far as other languages are concerned, that depends on what underlying system you use (or not). From scratch, you have a choice of dozens of languages; on top of a CMS, your choice depends on the foundation app.

 

CPA (Cost per acquisition) is a bit different from a CPL (Cost per lead) situation in that the leads are higher up in the sales funnel, whereas a CPA typically refers to a completed sale. Though you should clarify all this with whomever you are considering going with, since people like to throw around a lot of these terms but they don't all mean the same things to them.

A CPL is more beneficial to you since you need to just get people through the door so to speak and send them off as a lead to get paid. The company you are sending the leads to, takes if from there and continues to market to that lead to turn them into a paying customer. However, not surprisingly, you get paid less per lead than you would a completed sale.

A CPA arrangement is more advantageous to the company you are sending traffic to, since you are assuming all the risks and costs up until a sale is made. So if they do their math and say they can afford to pay you 7% of every sale that you bring them, and still be profitable on their end, then there is really no risk to them. However a CPA can be more consistent for you, if you have a better understanding how your traffic is converting all the way through the funnel.

One scenario would be if an affiliate was working on a CPL basis, and buying a bunch of incentivized traffic from places such as "Get Paid To" sites, where people are only doing those tasks to get some financial kickback, they are not even interested in the services they are signing up for and have no intention of becoming a customer. The affiliate might be technically generating a lot of leads for the company and getting paid for them, but sooner or later the company is going to look into it and see none of those leads are converting into sales at all, and they lost a bunch of money, than terminate the affiliate.

 

Good example: CPA on many networks is "Cost Per Action", which usually means a signup or something, and not necessarily a sale. Always clarify!

With paid leads, there's often a question of where the lead lives, as well. For example, many advertisers will pay for a lead, but will not only require it to be qualified, but also in the right country. The USA and other Tier 1 countries are, of course, the big target, but Germany has some really good ad prices at the moment, so don't assume an American audience is the best!