Perhaps we should start by answering the question: “What is CPA Affiliate Marketing?”. Actually, it’s a pretty simple – and appealing – idea. It refers to an advertising strategy in which an affiliate gets paid a commission not for selling something, in most cases, but instead by sending a prospect to a company’s website where they then complete a specified action. This action might be as simple as providing their name and email address, or perhaps some additional data on a form. Other actions might be agreeing to take a free trial for a product or service. The important thing is that the action required to capture a commission is not nearly ad difficult as persuading someone to buy something.

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, companies need a lot of advertising exposure to remain competitive. The primary idea is to have widespread exposure and to have contact with a large group of potential customers. When this is accomplished, the audience for the business is established, and the marketing efforts can begin in earnest.

CPA advertising is rapidly becoming one of the most desirable ways to advertise online. CPA (sometimes also known as PPA, or pay per action) sets up a situation in which the marketer earns a commission each time a visitor completes a particular action specified by the client company.

The company itself must specify what kind of action it wants its potential customers to take. The action might, in a few cases, be buying a product or service from the company. More commonly, it might be filling in a particular form to gain access to information about the product or service offered by the company, or just registering with the company’s website. Depending on the action, the advertising costs (or commissions received by the affiliate) will vary.

When a CPA campaign is initiated, the business will pay out the agreed upon commission to the advertiser, or CPA affiliate, each time a prospect follows the link to the targeted website, and then goes on to complete the specified action or activity. By setting things up in this way, the business obtains a list of highly pre-qualified potential customers for its primary offerings. As many affiliate marketers already know – “it’s all in the list”, and these CPA programs are really all about helping a business to build a list of potential customers. Rather than being dependent on getting a prospect to actually buy something, all the affiliate has to do to earn a commission is to have them fulfill a much simpler (and less expensive) action.

By establishing an advertising campaign using CPA, a company can generate large amounts of traffic for its website, but under the terms of the campaign, it will only pay a commission when a prospective customer completes the desired action while at the website. This is the probable future for Internet affiliate marketing – or at least a much larger part of it. It amounts to to paying only for results, not just traffic – results which are much more likely to bring in real business.

For an affiliate participating in this type of program, there is one major advantage over conventional sales affiliate marketing: In sales, the affiliate won’t receive the commission unless someone spends money and buys something – and then they have to worry about returns. For the affiliate who is running a CPA campaign, however, the barrier to be cleared to earn his or her commission is much easier: the prospect simply has to to agree to provide the requested information, or accept a free trial offer, or download some free software, and the commission is received.

To find out more about being a successful CPA marketing affiliate, download the complete guide to CPA marketing, which includes a large list of marketing resource links that will help you get going quickly. Unique version for reprint here: CPA Affiliate Marketing – Commissions Without Selling.

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