White Hat CPA Methods
Well – Maybe a little Blackhat can be thrown in………
CPA, or cost per action, is by far and large the best source of an online income. It is the great middle ground, between AdSense and other affiliate programs. Unlike AdSense you earn a lot of money per simple action and unlike other affiliate programs you do not have to get the user to fork over big bucks
on the spot to make your commission. Unfortunately everyone else knows this too which makes
breaking into CPA marketing pretty difficult. Fortunately you are about to discover the insider’s
methods and tricks for an entirely white hat way to earn a full time living from CPA offers.
This Guide contains the following information, which together makes a complete white hat CPA campaign:
Classic Craigslist Method
eBay Want it Now Method
Yahoo! Answers Method
Classic Craigslist Method:
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The first thing that we are going to cover is a standard Craigslist campaign, of course with some good twists and advice. Although most of you have probably delved into CPA and Craigslist the fact that you are reading this would lead me to believe that you most likely spent all day posting ads and got maybe 12 leads/sales if you were lucky. This is because, like all things in life, there is an easy and a hard way to run a Craigslist CPA campaign!
The first thing we are going to be doing is, of course, choosing an offer. Now, you should – at least at some point – have a bunch of different CPA accounts so that you can always find an offer that inspires you. If you have only one or two then head over to your account and start browsing. If you have multiple CPA accounts then your best friend is going to be offervault.com, you have to sign up but it is free. This will allow you to search offers across all of the top networks (a little hint, if your network is not listed here they probably either shave really bad or possibly do not even pay! Stay away from the unknown CPA networks).
You are going to want to find an offer that inspires you with a campaign. After a few campaigns this should start coming fairly naturally to you. For now just read through once and see how I do it, then you can go back to the start and run through this to create your own campaign.
The offer that I selected today is going to be for free business cards. This is a free trial so the person will pay like $25 for shipping but will be rebilled big later on. This allows the advertiser to pay me out $14 for each person that wants a set of 250 free business cards.
Now that I picked out my offer I’m going to make a redirect.
This serves two purposes:
1. If your CPA network/particular advertiser doesn’t allow email marketing it will look like you are doing PPC, which is always allowed.
2. It gives a nice clean URL to put in your emails, way better than that mile long affiliate URL they spit out at you.
To make a redirect simply look for a link that is designed either for PPC or email/plain text if available.
If not take any affiliate link they spit at ya for this offer. Now, we are going to create a new .txt document and paste this in it (see example):
<html>
<head>
<title>Loading page…</title>
<meta httpequiv=”refresh” content=”0;http://YOURAFFILIATELINK.com”>
<script>
url=’http://YOURAFFILIATELINK.com’;
if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); }
else { top.location.href=url; }
</script>
</head>
<body><b>…</b>
<a href=http://YOURAFFILIATELINK.com>.</a>.. Please Wait While the page loads!
</body>
</html>
Simply replace the three spots where http://YOURAFFILIATELINK.com appears and replace it with the affiliate link you just generated. Now save this as index.html and upload it to your host. Your domain has now become an instant redirect to your product which not only hides the referrer but also makes everything look nice and clean.
So, I am now going to set up my delayed auto responder using gmail. I know this seems kind of backwards but I already have thought up my plan for turning people into leads and this is just how my mind works so hang in there it will all make sense soon.
The first thing I’m going to do is to create a new gmail account, hopefully you can get that figured out!
A couple of pointers here:
1. Always use a girl’s name.
2. Use her name, first and last, or some variation thereof for her email address as well – this lends to the believability and helps me out a lot because I was born without much creativity.
3. Remember the girl’s name – you’re gonna need it when we get started with Craigslist posting. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for this which is great because it does all of the leg work for you and it is FREE. After you have Thunderbird installed on your computer just power it up and tell the application, when prompted, that you are going to be using a Gmail account. It will load all of the pop/imap settings for you and link it all together! Now all you have to do is to create your auto response. For this feature compose a new email, don’t fill out who it is to just the subject and body. My email, for this campaign will run like this:
Subject:
RE: Free Business Cards Craigslist
Email Body:
Hey,
Hi thanks for getting back to me so quick, sorry to say though I already let the voucher for the free 1,000 business cards go a little while ago. I got a whole ton of people mailing me though so I tracked down a company that is doing a promotion and giving away 250 free business cards, you can find them at :
http://www.YOURURL.com
They’re free so that should get you going, sorry again!
– THE GIRLS NAME YOU PICKED
Of course I would replace the girl’s name and the URL would go to my domain where I uploaded that redirect. By now you are probably seeing where my plan here is f lowing, I am going to be offering a free voucher for 1,000 free business cards. Then when people respond to my email I will mail them back, all automatically with my delayed auto responder, telling them it is gone; since they already have their hopes up some of them will order the free 250 business cards from my offer and I will make $14 for each one who does so!
So now it is time to get posting. I will head over to some major cities in Craigslist and get started here. A little trick for everyone, your IP will get softblocked if you try to post a bunch from it so either change your IP every two posts, if you have DSL or dialup just disconnect, or acquire some phone verified accounts (they run about $3 a pop and a Google search will find a ton) which you can post 2 ads per PVA, or phone verified account, each day.
I will be posting in the ’For Sale’ section in the sub section ’Free Stuff’. For this example I have AT&T DSL so I can simply unplug/replug my modem after each two ads so I am not going to worry about PVAs since this section does not require them.
So I will post my ad in the ’Free Stuff’ section bearing in mind a couple of important points for each individual ad:
1. Each ad must be about 60%+ unique. This means no copy/pasting you actually need to write out each ad. This is easy as you can just kind of change your backstory slightly.
2. Backstory is EVERYTHING. If you just say you are giving away free stuff people are going to know its an ad for a CPA offer and you will get f lagged extremely fast!
3. Title/Email needs to be different in every ad as well. A little trick here for the email part is that if you ad +numbers at the end of your Gmail address it will look unique to Craigslist but the e-mails will still come to you. Example: Your Gmail is somegirl@gmail.com, for your next post input somegirl+232@gmail.com – your email will look unique to Craigslist’s system but it will still come to your inbox because Gmail disregards the + and anything after it.
4. We want to always select the ’Hide’ option on the email then write the email address you picked out in the body of the ad. This is because it will require people to manually email you instead of going through Craigslist’s system. If you do not do this you will be responding to @craigslist.org emails and after you send out 20 mails they will bounce back undeliverable.
5. Never put your link in the ad. It will get f lagged & removed really fast. Sending your link out is the whole purpose of that auto responder we set up!
Alright that pretty well covers that, so now let us move on to what my ad in the campaign would look like:
Title:
Free Voucher for 1,000 Free Business Cards
Ad Body:
Hey all,
I attended a church fund raiser last weekend and my prize ended up being a voucher for 1,000 free business cards from B&L printing in town. Anyways long story short I don’t have a business and am not the kind of gal to get personal cards printed up to hand out at the bar (haha!) so if you can get better use out of these than me go ahead and shoot me an email to YOURGMAIL@gmail.com and I’ll leave the voucher in my mailbox for you to pick up.
Thanks,
THE GIRLS NAME YOU PICKED
That’s all there is to it. Remember, the key to Craigslist is volume. Get PVAs if you cannot change your IP but you get out what you put in. You should be able to post up 20-30 ads in a couple of hours which should be your minimum for any campaign. Most campaigns like this one will yield me 10-50 responses per ad and out of those 1 in about 20 will buy. That means that after you spend a couple of hours posting on Craigslist you should be looking at about $120 a day (conservative figure, I like to shoot low and let high earnings be a pleasant surprise).
Now that you have learned this method pick out an offer of your own, come up with a back story and let your campaign fall into place. Since, after initial setup, you are only going to be spending a couple of hours on this (I can’t stand posting so this is all I’m willing to devote) we will go out now and use a couple of other means to generate some leads for this very same offer.
Using I Want it Now (eBay):
I want it now is eBay’s marketplace which allows users to post that they want to buy something that they cannot find. Then, sellers may respond via a form with the link to their auction. There is one fatal flaw to this system that we are about to exploit the hell out of and that is the fact that they let you send a message to the person who wants something’s email right from a form there; seriously, could they make it any easier for us?
To get started you will need an eBay account and I recommend you make a new one for this because we are going to be borderline spamming, although not really in my eyes because the person is, after all, soliciting sales pitches on a desired product. You account does not need to have a credit card/seller abilities tied to it. Just create a new one real quick and run with it. Now head over to the Want it Now website which can be found at:
http://pages.ebay.com/wantitnow/index.html
From here just run a search for ’Sellers’ with a keyword that your CPA offer fits. In this case I am going to run business cards. The amount of postings here is pretty low but for some types of offers, especially fitness related stuff it can be huge. In order to send them a little message use the box that says ’Ask a question about this post’. If you try to actually respond it will require you to use an eBay listing but this way you can put anything that your little heart desires.
A little tip – they don’t need to be looking for your exact product. As an example, if they are looking for an exercise machine then send them a message saying that you bought it and really didn’t get any results BUT you did manage to lose a ton of weight and feel better in the process with the help of a great all natural diet supplement. The best part? They have a FREE 14 day supply trial going on right now that can be found at http://www.YOURAFFILIATELINK.com
So I have located a few postings for people looking to get business cards done. This offer is pretty easy to get near 100% conversions on because these people were actually already looking to pay money right now for the exact product I am going to show them how to get for free. I will send them a message that will look something like this:
Hey,
I saw that you were looking to pay for some business cards. I just got mine done at http://www.YOURAFFILIATELINK.com and they let you have 250 for free to try to rope ya in. The best part is I came back and ordered another 250 and got those free too. Just thought I’d give you a heads up, no need to pay for something that is free for the taking!
See how easy that was? This method will result in an almost guaranteed sale because they are looking for the exact product I am promoting and probably already had their credit card out ready to spend.
Who doesn’t like to save a little cash? Ok, this method was pretty straightforward so I’m sure you got the hang of it. Lets move on to the next thing I do to promote my CPA offer.
Yahoo! Answers CPA Method:
This is one of the oldest tricks in the book but it works VERY well with CPA offers. I mean, if it made so many sales with crappy ClickBank products where the person actually had to fork over cash just imagine the kind of dough you’re going to be rolling in with free or free trial CPA offers.
The first thing to do is to create two Yahoo! Answers accounts. I suggest you make them on separate IP addresses if you can, if not it is really not that big of a deal I just like to take extra precautions whenever possible. We will call these accounts: Account 1 and Account 2 (yes, again, I am about the most creative person you will probably ever have the pleasure of encountering).
With Account 1 you will make a couple of posts. The trick here is that Yahoo! Answers ranks extremely well in Google so you want to make your title the phrase that a person would be searching for and you are sure to capture a spot somewhere in the top 13 places. The other thing is you want it to also look like a question so that users over at Yahoo! Answers don’ report you and get your question taken down.
For this campaign I will make 3 questions to start with all of which just popped into my head. Probably tomorrow I will do a little keyword research (Google AdWords rocks for this if you have an account) to see what kind of things get a lot of search traffic related to free business cards and I will post up a few more questions. My questions today are going to be, posted with Account 1:
- How to Get Free Business Cards?
- Where to Get Free Business Cards?
- Best Free Business Card Website?
That was pretty easy. I suggest you put a line or two in the body of the question so that you don’t get f lagged as spam. Something like ’how can I get free business cards online?’ should do the trick.
Now I am going to come back with Account 2 and answer all of these questions saying something like:
Hey,
I got 250 free business cards for my business online a few days ago. Check out http://www.YOURAFFILIATELINK.com for their promotional offer which is where I got them!
That was pretty easy. In a couple of days I will simply come back and log on to Account 1 and then choose this as my ’Best Answer’ which puts it up there for everyone who comes from Google to see.
One little note here is that each day I create two new accounts because eventually, if you make too many posts like this, your account will be closed down. Having many accounts means that you will not lose all of your posts if an account is closed. This is one of my favorite CPA methods because this can bring in passive leads/sales for months on end.
That’s all there is to it. You now have a Simple approach to making money, the white hat way, with CPA offers. If you use this method daily you can expect a full time income for far less than a full time work week.
hey man i just wanted 2 say thanks for the info…i’ve learned more in the past two days pokin’ around here than i have in the past 2 months with the “gurus” and networks…Much Respect for doin’ what ya do…