Hello, name is Joshua Miller. I blog about making money, the internet, and programming. I’ve been CPA marketing since 2012. Throughout that time, I’ve experienced the highs and some occasional lows.
Today, you’re going to learn something new. You’re going to learn how to make money with CPA, specifically through content locking.
The beauty of making money through CPA is that you earn money creating content that you’re interested in, passionate over, or know lots about. Sure, you’ll have to put in a little bit of effort to get started, and a relatively small amount of money to get a website up and running. Thankfully, you don’t need to know how to program a website. You’ll make money while you sleep, and earn while you’re at work. Most importantly, you’ll be able to repeat the process and compound your earnings.
In a month from now you could have cold hard cash sitting your bank account. That’s a nice thought, right?
What You Are Going To Learn In This Tutorial
- What CPA marketing is
- A few key terms that you should know before you start
- How content locking works (in regard to CPA marketing)
- The Top 3 CPA networks – and the one that I use
- How to find a profitable niche to target, and how to make sure there is a demand for it
- Starting a website, getting a cheap domain with hosting, and installing WordPress
- Some great methods to create content that you can lock
- Simple but effective tried-and-tested techniques to drive visitors to your site
- How to optimize your earnings so you earn the big bucks
Hopefully you’re enticed to read my tutorial by now. However, I must stress before we start, don’t skip any content unless you already have (or know) the content I’m deconstructing.
What Is CPA Marketing?
CPA stands for “Cost per action”. This term refers to the cost an advertiser pays for every action completed. For example, an apple advertiser pays you $1 every time that you get your friend to eat an apple.
CPA marketing works by getting “publishers” to advertise offers to their viewers. However, instead of paying for views or clicks on the offers, the publisher is paid when a certain pre-determined action is completed.
An “action” can be anything. They tend to be simple to achieve, such as getting your viewers to:
- Fill in a short form, such as submitting an email address
- Get a quote for something, for example insurance
- Signing up for a free trial
- Entering a competition
- Buying a product
- Doing a small survey
- Voting in a poll
- Downloading an application
Content locking makes this process much easier to do. By locking content you will incentivise the completion of the action.
Key Terms & Concepts Used In CPA Marketing
CPA marketing can be as hard or as easy as you want to make it. By understanding the key terms and abbreviations, the dashboards and statistics will make way more sense.
- Publisher – A person that creates and distributes content, like a blogger or a musician, for example.
- Locker – Something that asks a user to complete an offer in order to proceed to the content, URL, or download. (Check out an example here.)
- EPC – Earning Per Click (Earnings are divided by amount of clicks on an offer).
- Leads – Completed actions, potential sales generated, amount of people that have made you some money.
- CTR / CR – Click-through rate. This is the amount of people that make you money versus the amount of people that have clicked an offer.
- Niche – A section of a market. For example, “red socks” is a niche in the “socks” market.
How Content Locking Works
The incentivisation principle I previously mentioned is key to the content locking concept.
For example, if I decided to write a short eBook called 10 Weight Loss Tips that Are Proven to Work, I would “lock” the download and ask my visitor to sign up to a dieting newsletter so they could download the eBook. I would then be paid anywhere between $1 – $20+ (on average) per download. This is obviously dependent on the offers available on the network at the time.
I will explain how to create content effectively later in the tutorial, but you need to join a CPA network first.
The Top 3 CPA Networks For Content Locking
Now that you understand CPA and how content locking works in theory, it’s time for you join a CPA network what provides the content lockers.
The CPA network is the company that connects you to the advertisers. They handle the hard work. They provide pre-set out-of-the-box lockers for you to use.
Most of them require an application process. To get ahead quickly, you should sign up to one as soon as possible. Be truthful and fill it out to the best of your ability. Hopefully, you’ll be accepted by the time you’ve read this tutorial!
#1. CPAGrip (personal favourite)
I’ve been with CPAGrip for at least 2 years now. They’ve never missed a payment. They also provide highly competitive rates on their offers, as well as having a super user-friendly dashboard.
If you’re not the most tech-savvy, I would strongly advise this network simply on the basis that the dashboard is so easy to use.
Once you sign up, check out the chat-room-style facility in the dashboard. You can ask questions, contact the affiliate, and discuss CPA marketing content with the rest of the community. This is a very powerful tool that you should definitely take advantage of.
Main Features:
- Page lockers
- URL/File lockers
- Offer walls
- Virtual currency lockers
- Referall program
#2. AdWorkMedia
AWM is a network that definitely deserves a place in the Top 3. It has the same features as CPAGrip but has a lot more pre-set lockers, as well as a product checkout locker for multiple offer completion, and some other more advanced features.
The only notable downside is the slightly more complex dashboard, but don’t let that deter you.
#3. CPALead
The guys and gals at CPALead proudly state that they “invented content-locking”. They also offer the opportunity to lock adult content – something that other networks rarely offer. More or less, they have the same features as CPAGrip and AWM. Their dashboard is fairly straight-forward.
Now that you’ve chosen a network, you need to start considering a niche. It’s important to research that section of the market you’re going to providing content for.
Finding A Profitable Niche
Most people go for the ever-green niches when they first start out; however, they can prove difficult due to the amount of competing websites. Ever-green niches are niches such as weight-loss, investment strategies, relationship advise, or ache treatment. In other words, these are niches that don’t die.
The best tactic is to find a niche that is trending.
#1. How To Find Trending Niches
If you want to start making money really fast, the best way forward is to start locking content in trending niches. These are specific niches that are really popular at the moment, like headlines in the news, on TV, or season specific.
Daily news provides a fantastic source of trending niches. Keep your eyes on current events. When breaking news comes out about some software (or concept, or person), create some relevant content. This could be an eBook on how to get, achieve, or create the content. It could be anything from a set of artwork you’ve created, to a competition page to win the item. Essentially, it could be absolutely anything that you could potentially lock.
If you want to find the very hottest in content on the internet then you should check out Google Trends, which highlights the most searched for content each and every day. It also has a ton of statistics.
#2. How To Research What’s In Demand For Your Niche
There’s no point entering a niche if there’s no demand or traffic for it, unless of course, you’re going to create the demand (which is hard).
It’s much better to use tools such as Google AdWords: Keyword Planner to determine how many people are searching for the content on the internet. This tool allows you to type in a certain keyword and it will show you how many people are searching for it per month.
I’ll discuss later on how you’ll rank your website on Google so that you can start feeding that traffic to your lockers. If you’d like a tutorial on how to use the Keyword Planner tool to find strong niches check out this great tutorial by eCommerceFuel.
Once you’ve got a good idea for a niche that you want to enter, your going to need some where to start putting your content.
The Easiest Way To Start A Website
Once you’ve found yourself a killer niche that’s got some obvious demand and great potential gap for traffic, you need to setup a website.
Scary concept? Hopefully not, but thankfully I’m going to show the easiest way to start a website without learning any programming or web-design.
A little web-design knowledge and experience with WordPress will help, but it’s not really not essential. Once you’ve started making money from CPA you’ll probably want to make more, in which case you’ll probably find yourself interested in learning HTML and CSS. That’s a little while off yet though.
#1. First, You Need Hosting And A Domain Name
- Hosting – A “rented” place on a server somewhere for your website to live on. It sounds more complex than it is.
- Domain Name – Your .com-style name for your website. For example, TrueMiller.com is the domain name for my blog.
HostGator is the most popular hosting provider on the internet. Fortunately for you, they offer domains along with their hosting packages.
Use the HostGator Coupon code: TRUEMILLER. This will get your first month of hosting for $0.01.
I would advise purchasing the Baby Package. It has unlimited add-on domains (for when you make more sites), unlimited disk-space, unlimited bandwidth, a shared SSL certificate (keeps your website secure), and it makes it super easy to install WordPress.
I cannot stress how important it is to consider a good niche-relevant domain. Buying the domain “BlueBabyToys.com” will be an utter waste of time and money if your going to be creating content about “The Cabbage Diet”.
Remember, make your domain niche-relevant, or at least make it catchy and unspecific – like Tumblr, Twitter, or Google.
#2. Next Up: Install WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system used on the web. A content management system is basically software that runs your website for you. This means you don’t need to know how to program. The software handles all the difficult stuff and is ready to work of the box. The best part is that it’s free and it’s super-easy to install once you’ve purchased your HostGator hosting package.
To make a long story short, here’s a tutorial offered by HostGator on how to install WordPress to your site using the “Quick Install” feature in your hosting panel.
Quickly Get To Grips With WordPress
It’s not difficult to use at all. You have a posts section, plugins, themes, and a handful of other relevantly named sections. I’m not going to write a huge WordPress tutorial, so here’s another WordPress introduction video that will take you through every aspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1adVEWOEpcc
It’s important to make your site look fairly attractive. This is easily achieved by using the free themes from the WordPress themes library.
Now you’re going to need to create some content for your site.
Simple & Effective Method To Create Content That You Can Lock
Information products are the easiest things for you to start distributing.
- eBooks
- Video Guides
- Audiobooks
You can distribute anything: software, videos, music, and art. For now, I’ll advise on information products. The same concepts can be applied to anything.
Now you’re probably thinking, “I don’t know how to write an eBook”, or “I don’t anything about weight-loss”. Writing an eBook is simple. You can write up a document in Microsoft Word (or any word processing alternative) and export the file as a .pdf file. There you have it, your eBook is ready to go. The majority of content you need to create an eBook is readily available on the internet.
For example, if I were to create an eBook I’d simply pull information from sources such as:
- 16 Ways to Lose Weight Fast – Health.com
- Drop 5 Pounds in a Week – Cosmopolitan.com
- How to Lose Weight Fast: 3 Simple Steps, Based on Science – AuthorityNutrition.com
These sources are all reputable sources and most people would have no problem rewriting some of the given points. If it were a chore, Freelancer.com provides a great platform for you to pay expert freelancers to do the writing for you. A 1000-2000 word passage would only cost in the region of $10-$30.
#1. How To Make An Attractive Information Product With Ease
I mentioned earlier that you can make an eBook by writing a Word document and saving it as a .pdf file. It really is as simple as that.
Let’s theorize that you’ve started a diet website called “JoshsSuperDiet.com”. Now you need to create a product with a catchy name, like “How To Get Ripped: 9 Simple Expert-Verified Methods”.
Next I’ll Google “how to get ripped”, and I’ll open the top few articles. Each article will have a few methods on how to get ripped.
Grab your 9 favorite methods and rewrite them into your Word document. Throw in a copyright disclaimer so you can sue anyone that distributes your eBook without your consent. Here’s some copy and paste copyright disclaimers.
Finally, save your product as a .pdf. Next, upload your book to a file-host such as Zippyshare or Mega. Make sure that you set your upload to “Private” so that your link isn’t put onto Google.
#2. Find Hot Content Within Your Niche
You’ll employ the same method as earlier. Use Google Trends to find what’s hot. If you’ve started a dieting site, you could look for celebrities in the news that look especially attractive. Using their name as the selling point, you could then put out a new eBook called 5 Ways To Get Slim: Like Kim K at VMAs – or something like that!
Driving Traffic To Your Website
So, you’ve got your site up, you’ve written a little information about your product, and you’ve locked the download link for people that want it. Next up, you need some traffic. This is hard for many; however, there are good methods available.
#1. Search Engine Submissions
First of all, you need to submit your site to the search engines. Otherwise people can’t find you. Here’s a list of a few:
If you go through each search engine’s webmaster’s dashboard than you’ll also be able to submit your sitemap, which has a number of benefits.
#2. Get On Social Media
Create pages on social media. Most people are on social media networks, so put yourself out there too. Simple. The first obvious few are: Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. However, Pinterest is fantastic too. It’s great for pictures especially. Any good site or reputable business will have a social media account. It’s an incredibly overlooked SEO indicator. Social media is a great tool for keeping in touch with your customers. They can follow you, share your content, which helps you rank better on search engines.
#3. Make Videos And Post Them On YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – and it’s all videos. It’s bigger than AOL, Bing, and Yahoo. Videos are great marketing tools. You can influence your viewers to buy things. More importantly, you can tell them about how your fantastic diet eBook is available for free when they sign-up to a simple offer. People love free stuff, right? Right.
If you’ve never made a video before, you can pick one up for $5 from Fiverr.com. $5 is pennies to pay for a high-quality video with a voice-over, especially when you could make more than that after one download!
- Video Testimonials on Fiverr – Great for generating product reviews.
It’s important that you optimize your YouTube videos. Read this article I wrote on how to rank YouTube videos quickly and effectively.
#4. Boost Your YouTube Videos And Your Website
This is the most important part of getting traffic to your locked content.
You need to boost it. You need to increase views, subscribers, and likes. You also need to increase the comments – good comments. The best place for this is SEOClerks. Click the link and you’ll see what I mean first hand. You can get YouTube packages including a few 1000 views, 100s of subscribers, 100s of comments, and likes for $1-$5. It’s a measly investment to rank your YouTube videos #1 for the keyword that you’re aiming at.
There are also other services available where the sellers will boost your site to the page 1 of Google. Obviously, this presents a very strong possibility to make money.
Optimizing Your Offers
Once your traffic starts rolling and you start making some money, then you need to optimize your offers. You don’t want to end up being paid pennies when you could be earning dollars for each download.
And that’s all…
Of course, now you’ll want to put all of these new strategies into practice. Bookmark this page and come back, or check out some more making money tutorials I’ve written. Please, feel free to ask any questions!
Remember to share this super tutorial with friends and family.
