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There are several advertising and monetization options, and your website niche, target audience, traffic volume, and visitor behavior will determine which options are the most reasonable for your particular website.

We are going to show you 10 monetization options that have broad applications, allowing you to start generating revenue, whether you are trying to turn your website into a profitable business or just cover some of your operating expenses. Don’t try and do all of these at once and make sure you give it some time to see results. No one is an overnight success and you need to see what will work for you and your audience.

1. Google AdSense

Google’s advertising platform for publishers, AdSense, shows ads that are highly relevant to your website content and pays you a percentage of the revenue each time they are clicked on. If you had a website about travel, it might display ads from an airline or travel agent. The process couldn’t be any easier:

1. You place HTML code on your website where you want the advertisements to display. Note: AdSense policy allows up to 3 ad blocks on each page of your website.


2. Advertisements that are related to the content are displayed, and Google uses a real-time to ensure that the highest paying ads are shown.


3. Google bills the advertisers and networks for the advertisements that appeared on your website and pays you directly.

This program is among the most popular monetization methods because of its simplicity. There is no dealing with advertisers directly or chasing down invoices for payment. Google handles everything and you receive a check or direct deposit every month for the revenue that your website generated.



Anyone with a website can take advantage of this program and getting started takes just minutes, provided that you have a Google account. You can read more about Google’s AdSense program by reading our Google AdSense Review.

2. Affiliate Offers

Affiliate marketing is a very effective way to monetize your website traffic because it allows you to present your visitors with offers that they are likely to be interested in. For instance, if you had a blog about personal finance you would want to find an affiliate offer that would be of interest to your visitors, such as a credit card offer. You would place a banner or text link on your website that contained your affiliate link and directed the visitor to the offer. Now, if they signed up for the particular offer, which in this case is a credit card, you would be compensated with an affiliate referral payment. Some credit card offers pay out $50 – $100 for every referral an affiliate sends.

There are two different types of offers: Cost Per Action (CPA) and Cost Per Sale (CPS). An example of a CPA offer could be an insurance quote request where the user submits his or her name and contact information to receive additional information. Most CPA offers are lead generation offers. Now, a CPS will generally require a purchase be made and a credit card pixel to be fired in order for an affiliate payment to be issued. An example of a CPS offer would be a diet pill offer, where the consumer actually purchases the product. Generally CPS offers will pay out more than CPA offers.

It is important that you match relevant offers with the content and theme of your website. You wouldn’t place a credit card offer on your blog about diet tips and weight loss. You would want to find a health and fitness offer that you believe your website audience would be interested in. One of the best resources for looking for available affiliate offers is Offer Vault.



You can enter in any search term related to your website content and instantly review the available offers. It also tells you what affiliate networks manages each offer. Once you identify the offers that you want to promote on your website you will want to sign up with the affiliate networks that manage them. You can search Offer Vault by clicking here.

 

3. Create & Sell Your Own Digital Product

This is a monetization strategy that is great for those who have a very niche specific website combined with a large volume of website traffic. Creating your own product allows you to provide something very specific for your visitors and retain 100% of the revenue. Affiliate offers pay you a commission per action, but you don’t have to worry about customer service, refunds, or any issues that might arise. When you sell your own product you have to handle the customer service as well as any problems that pop up.

Don’t worry about stocking inventory and the costs associated with developing a product – go digital! The beauty about creating a digital product such as an eBook is that there are no production and inventory costs after you create it the first time. You can handle the complete creation or you can outsource the work.

There are several WordPress plugins that help you manage your digital downloads and integrate with your payment processor, only allowing your purchaser to download it once their payment is processed. Once you develop the product it is a relatively hands free process.

4. Direct Ad Space

Once your website has a significant amount of traffic and you have built up a following it gives you the ability to sell direct advertising space on your website. Don’t expect these offers to roll in on Day 1. It might take a couple of months but be sure to include details of how you should be contacted by a potential advertiser. Now, Google AdSense doesn’t have any traffic volume requirements, so you can implement that onto a brand new website and your revenue will grow as your blog grows. No advertiser will want to directly purchase exclusive space on a brand new website, but once the traffic numbers increase it becomes more attractive to an advertiser to purchase direct space for a flat monthly fee.

Advertisers that use Google’s platform are charged per click. This can become very expensive for the advertiser so they often look for opportunities to buy ad space for a flat fee. So, imagine that you had a blog about parenting and a retailer of children’s clothes was paying $5 per click on Google’s advertising network. If you charged $500 a month for a banner ad and your blog was receiving 30,000 visitors a month and generating 100,000 page views then it would be a great deal for the advertiser. Their ad would be seen 100,000 times for the same amount of money that they were paying for just 100 clicks using a pay per click model.

You can also combine Google AdSense with your own direct advertising to really generate some serious income from your website.

 

5. Sponsored Posts & Reviews

Publishing sponsored posts is another great way to generate income by leveraging the success and popularity of your website. Advertisers pay large sums of money for bloggers to write reviews about their products and services and post them for their audience to read. It is a popular form of advertising because visitors see it as more of a review than a direct advertisement. This type of non-intrusive advertising is very effective. The amount you can get for a sponsored post varies greatly based on the size of your niche, the niche itself, the popularity of your site and your social media following.

The advertiser will also generally provide the website owner with the product or service to review for free, so in addition to generating revenue you can also collect some nice products and services along the way. SponsoredReviews.com is a service that connects advertisers and websites and it is free to set up an account.

6. Gate Premium Content

If you develop a large loyal following you can start to gate premium content, which means that readers will have to pay to access it. Many websites that successfully gate content will offer the first couple of paragraphs for free in order to grab the interest of the reader. They will naturally want to continue reading so they will be more willing to complete an offer in order to access the rest of the content.

Now, it is important that you discuss this with the account manager of any affiliate offer you plan to require your visitors to complete in order to access your content. Some offers don’t allow incentive traffic while some do. Make sure that you only use offers that allow this type of traffic because the last thing you want to do is forfeit your earnings because you did not follow the guidelines. Just have open communication with your affiliate network and you will be fine.

You can also go straight to your affiliate network and let them know what you plan on doing and they can often suggest an offer that they feel will perform well for you while also remaining within the advertisers guidelines. Remember, they want you to be successful just as much as you do. Since they work with thousands of publishers they will typically have very good suggestions for you.

The key here is to create very high quality content that your readers are going to want to access so bad that they don’t mind filling out a quick survey or filling out a form in order to read it. Don’t gate all of your content though, as this will push away a large percentage of your traffic that isn’t interested in completing an offer.

7. Infolinks

Infolinks is an advertising platform that places in-text ads within your website content and pays you each time that they are clicked. Their software identifies your most valuable keywords within your website content and double-underlines theses keywords, and when your visitor hovers his or her mouse over them an advertisement related to the keyword is displayed. If they decide to click on the “learn more” you are compensated.

Infolinks allows you to customize the look and frequency of the text ads. Making them the same color as your website theme makes them appear to be part of your content, and this will increase your click through rate significantly. Also, they allow you to determine how often they appear. The last thing you want is a page full of clickable ads. One or two per piece of content is enough to attract interest without pushing away visitors.

This is a great platform to sign up for when you are just getting started because every little bit of extra revenue can help you cover basic website expenses like web hosting and domain registration. The payouts per click are fairly low though, so once you build up your traffic and your site becomes more popular there are other monetization methods that will provide you with a bigger and more attractive return.



You can get more information on the infolinks program by clicking here.

8. Generate & Sell Leads

Once you build a strong following and your traffic numbers are constantly increasing you have the ability to generate your own in-house leads that you can then sell directly to an end buyer. This requires a little more work on your end, but the payout per lead generated can be significantly higher than what you would be paid by an affiliate offer.

Not every website is going to have a niche that has a direct demand for leads. Examples of niches that have this demand are finance, retirement and employment. If this isn’t for you then there are ways to come up with very targeted offers that you could create. For example, if you had a website about cars that discussed reviews of new models it would be hard to create an offer around those that wanted to purchase a car, because your visitors would be from all over and you would need to create relationships with nearly every dealership to make that work. It just wouldn’t make financial sense. So, you would think of something complimentary to the new car shopping experience, such as financing the purchase.

You could create an opt-in lead form to generate car-financing leads and then sell them to one of the largest auto financing companies. They wouldn’t have geographical restrictions, so it would allow you to sell all of the leads to one source. This would make it extremely manageable for you as you would just have one purchaser to deal with. If you decide to generate your own leads just make sure it is something general enough that it will interest a large percentage of your visitors and try to sell them all to one buyer.

 

9. Related Posts

Outbrain is a great way to help monetize your blog, as it only includes adding a snippet of code to your website and they tend to have high click through rates. At the end of each blog post you publish the Outbrain widget is displayed and it suggests additional posts that their algorithm feels that your reader would also be interested, as they relate to the content they just finished reading. Each time they click through to one of their recommended articles you are compensated.

You don’t have to worry about the quality of the content being displayed on your website visitors, as Outbrain has a very strict policy and only syndicates content from high quality websites. Your visitors just see the post title and an image, so it really doesn’t distract them from your website. It is a great way to earn additional revenue, especially if the user was going to just leave your website after reading the content of the page they were viewing. You might as well maximize the revenue for every single visitor, and Outbrain is a great way to further monetize your website.



You can get more information about Outbrain by reading our Outbrain Review.

10. Paid Private Forum

Creating a private paid forum on your website is another great way to generate extra revenue. This is a strategy that can take a lot of time and should be attempted when you have more of a following and experience. If you built your website using WordPress then you can install the bbPress plugin and instantly create a forum on your website. The settings allow you to make it a private forum and there are add-on’s that allow you to manage paid subscriptions.



To justify charging a price to access your website forum you need to provide something of incredible value. You need a very strong USP (unique selling point) to justify making it a member’s only forum. Premium content, special offers and having well known industry influencers as members provide incentive for your visitors to sign up.

This provides you with a great opportunity to generate steady residual income, but you need to price you forum access in a way that it will encourage a large user base. Charging a high monthly fee will only attract a small pool of users and the forum will be inactive, causing your users to fall off and cancel their subscriptions. Keep it affordable so a large percentage of your user base will sign up. Even a $3 – $5 monthly fee can translate into a good return if you have a massive group of participants.

With several monetization options, it is a good idea to try several and then stick with the ones that earn you the most money per visitor. With all of the analytical and conversion data available you will be able to determine exactly how much each visitor is worth. Some of the most profitable websites have multiple income streams, so don’t be afraid to test several to determine what results in the biggest return for your site.

Publishers looking to start selling display ads directly will be forced to make a number of decisions in their attempt to monetize this traffic. If you’re fortunate enough to gain traction and start getting some RFPs from potential advertisers, you’ll likely need to decide which pricing methodology you’ll use to sell your display ads.

Because digital display ads can be tracked and analyzed in ways that don’t apply to more traditional advertising media, they can also be priced in different ways. Advertisers are able to track when their ads are clicked and what actions are completed once an ad is clicked, opening up the options for compensating publishers based on different criteria.th

There are three primary ways to price display advertising:

• Cost Per Thousand (CPM)


• Cost Per Click (CPC)


• Cost Per Action (CPA)

This post will take a look at the specifics of these options, including the pros and cons of each.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM)

Under a CPM arrangement, the advertiser agrees to pay the publisher a predetermined amount for every 1,000 ad impressions served. This effectively means that the publisher is compensated for every ad shown.

Here are a few things to know about CPM pricing arrangements:

• Commonly used in direct ad sales


• Commonly used for “branding campaigns” where primary objective is to increase awareness of a company or product


• Results in most predictable income stream for publisher


• Gives publisher nearly full visibility on value delivered to advertiser

For example, an advertiser may agree to run a campaign on a site under the following terms:

• 100,000 impressions in 728 x 90 leaderboard at $5 CPM


• 100,000 impressions in 300 x 600 large skyscraper at $7 CPM

Under such an arrangement, the publisher would make a total of $1,200: $5 for every 1,000 leaderboard impressions served (for a total of $500) and $7 for every 1,000 large skyscraper impressions (for a total of $700).

CPM rates can range from less than a dollar to three figures, meaning that showing 1,000 ads can generate a few cents in earnings or more than $100. That range is so wide because the compositions of audiences from site to site varies so dramatically. Sites that can offer access to targeted, valuable Web traffic can command higher CPMs, while those catering to a broad, relatively unattractive audience will be able to command much less.

Here’s a page from the PopSci.com media kit, showing off the impressively high CPMs that site commands:



Advantages: The most obvious advantage with a CPM agreement is that you make money for every display ad you serve, regardless of whether or not it generates a click, lead, or other action. Every visitor who comes to your site makes you money, plain and simple. This results in a relatively stable stream of earnings; if you can predict your traffic, you can predict your revenue.

The ability to maintain control and visibility is also an advantage here; you know exactly how many ads you serve, and therefore exactly how much you’re owed from your clients.

Disadvantages: From a publisher’s perspective, there aren’t many disadvantages to a CPM pricing model for display ads. But in exchange for the stability achieved, you do risk leaving some money on the table if your site has an audience that performs well from an advertiser perspective. In other words, CPM arrangements don’t always lead to the highest earnings; if your site has an audience that is a good fit for an advertiser’s message, you may be able to generate more by being compensated for each click or each action.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost per click, or CPC, means that the advertiser pays the publisher each time one of their ads is clicked. In other words, the advertiser is paying for visitors sent to their site from the publisher’s site.

Here are a few things to know about CPC:

• Results in more volatile revenue than CPM


• Advertisers pay nothing for ads served that do not generate clicks


• Expands universe of potential advertisers (i.e., many advertisers prefer CPC to CPM campaigns)


• Preferred by advertisers running “direct response” campaigns


• Often used by ad networks such as Google AdSense


• Publishers should have full visibility into revenue generated, since they are able to track and record clicks in most ad serving software programs

Publishers are suppliers of pageviews, so they should always measure their total revenue relative to pageviews (i.e., revenue per 1,000 pageviews) even if they sell ads on a CPC basis.

For example, let’s assume that the same publisher and advertiser from our example above enter into a CPC agreement where the advertiser pays $5 for each click / visitor sent. The publisher runs the ads as follows:

• 100,000 impressions in 728 x 90 leaderboard: generates 100 clicks


• 100,000 impressions in 300 x 600 large skyscraper: generates 120 clicks

This would create $500 in revenue from the leaderboard and $600 in revenue from the large skyscraper ($5 for every click) for a total of $1,100. That translates into an $11 eRPM for the publisher; they generated $1,100 in earnings from 100,000 pageviews ($1,100 / 100 = $11).

Advantages: If you have an audience that is a good fit for a certain type of ad–meaning that the message is likely to appeal to your visitors and they in turn are likely to click on it–CPC campaigns can be great ways to monetize. Just because they are low risk for advertisers (who pay only for the ads that work) doesn’t mean that they can’t be big earners for publishers as well.

You’ll also find that a willingness to participate in CPC campaigns will significantly expand the universe of potential advertisers. Because many companies only want to pay for clicks (and not just eyeballs), there is no shortage of advertisers looking to run CPC campaigns.

Disadvantages: There is a pretty big risk to running CPC campaigns: if the ads aren’t resonating with your audience, you can end up with zero compensation for serving a large number of ads. In other words, you risk giving away a large number of ad impressions for nothing, and making the lion’s share of your revenue from the few ads on which your visitors click.

Cost Per Action (CPA)

There’s another pricing model that requires even more steps to be completed in order for the publisher to be compensated. Under a cost per action (CPA) campaign, the advertiser pays only for clicks that subsequently see visitors complete some specific action. This action can be a purchase of a product, download of a document, sign-up for a newsletter / membership, or countless other steps.

This form of advertising is essentially affiliate marketing, an arrangement where the publisher is compensated for each sale (or another non-monetary transaction) they’re able to generate for the advertiser. This is obviously low risk for the advertiser since they pay only for transactions that generate their desired outcome.

Here are a few things to know about CPA campaigns:

• Lowest risk for advertiser; they pay only when their desired outcome occurs


• Publisher loses visibility into revenue earned

Advantages: Advertisers are willing to pay a lot more for a completed transaction than they are for a single ad impression, so CPA arrangements can allow publishers to make quite a bit of money–up to $100 or even more–from a single ad impression.

Again, the opportunity exists here if you have an audience that is a great fit for a specific advertiser campaign. If you’re trying to convince visitors to your big game hunting blog to sign up for a free sample of lipstick, you’ll probably see a terrible conversion rate. But if you’re presenting that same audience with an opportunity to buy hunting apparel, you might be in business.

Disadvantages: The biggest disadvantage to this arrangement is the increased volatility in earnings. It’s possible that days could go by without a single conversion, even if you’re serving lots of ads and generating lots of clicks.

Another big downside is that the loss in transparency. Once a visitor leaves the publisher’s site and enters the advertiser’s, it’s impossible to know if they convert or leave immediately. The advertiser will of course track this carefully, but this means that the publisher has to take the word of their partner to report honestly on revenue earned.

Most CPA advertisers are ethical and honest in their reporting to partners. But in some niches there are less than reputable characters, and dishonest reporting can be fairly common.

CPM vs. CPC. vs. CPA

There’s no hard and fast rule about which pricing methodology is the best; it depends on the site, audience, and campaign. Publishers generally prefer CPM arrangements since that yields the most predictable cash flow, but that approach won’t necessarily produce the best results (i.e., most revenue) in all situations.

Consider the following hypothetical ad campaign running on your site:

• 1,000,000 ad impressions (in a 300×250 unit we’ll say)


• 1,500 clicks (a click-thru rate, or CTR, of 0.15%)


• 300 memberships created (a conversion rate of 20%)

The revenue generated and the optimal pricing strategy from the publisher’s perspective depends on how much revenue is associated with each deliverable. For example:

• $10 CPM nets $10,000


• $10 CPC nets $15,000


• $100 CPA nets $30,000

Obviously, the revenue generated is very sensitive to the compensation figure associated with each arrangement. In this particular example, the publisher can offer an audience that converts at a relatively high rate–and therefore would make the most money with a CPA arrangement.

 

Cost per advertising, particularly CPM – cost per thousand – is a game of optimizing your numbers. A lot of times, you’re going to want to experiment with different networks until you find one that meets your requirements. Some will be perfectly fine networks, but fail to support your niche. Others may let you down in terms of tools or support. Test out these networks; ideally, several of them will work for you, and you can integrate them on your sites.

Tribal Fusion

First on the list is one of the older and more recognized names in CPM ads, Tribal Fusion, a division of Exponential Advertising. They might be considered a baseline from which other CPMs are measured. They do require a site to have a high level of regular viewership, though, making them unsuitable for new or small sites.

Banner Connect

Based in the Netherlands, Banner Connect partners with several companies, including Appnexus and IBM. They do a lot more than just ads, though, so feel free to explore their platform and see what use you can get out of it. You never know where the next implementation may lead.

CPX Interactive

CPX has a number of ad divisions, including Realtime, AdReady, CCDRMedia, and Consumed Media. They all have different focuses, such as micro-ads and video advertising, in addition to the general CPXi CPM ads.

Adtegrity

Seeing the power of deep targeting, Adtegrity has put a lot of effort into their bid systems, their retargeting, their lookalike audiences and their behavioral targeting. It’s really one of the better alternatives to using traditional Facebook ads, which are better used for CPC or conversion objectives than CPM.

Advertising.com

You would expect the owner of advertising dot com to be a business deep into advertising,and you would be right. They are one of the oldest and one of the best solutions for ads of all sorts, from both sides of the fence, both as publisher and as advertiser. Sites of all sizes in all niches are welcome somewhere in their system.

AdPepper

AdPepper is an interesting take on the theme. They’re an independent network, not part of a larger technology like AOL or another setup. They also serve a global and international audience, with their homepage even translated into both German and Spanish. An excellent option for those outside of the US.

Conversant

Formerly Valueclick, Conversant is up there amongst giants. They are a very old network that has weathered the storms of negative publicity and the backlash against various advertising techniques in their long history. They’re still alive and thriving, so know they’re always ready to adapt to the next big thing. Plus, they work great for even small sites.

Clove Network

Smaller than many of the other networks on this list, Clove is nonetheless a powerful network with a wide range of ad formats available for use. They also have quite a bit in the way of optimizations to help sites implement their ads properly.

Infolinks

The biggest benefit of Infolinks is their smart ad technology, that applies ads in various ways determined to eliminate ad blindness. Too many people tune out or ignore ads; Infolinks has an innovative system to help eliminate that problem. If you find too few people are paying attention to your ads, try this network.

Axill

Axill is a fairly standard ad network with one notable benefit that is largely irrelevant to the vast majority of you, but a primary selling point for a few of you; bitcoins. That’s right, they deal both in accepting and paying out in bitcoins, if you’re the kind of person who keeps up with rapidly inflating virtually profitless digital currencies. Note: They don’t yet deal in Dogecoins, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for those.

Sovrn

Primarily focused on the US to the exclusion of much of the rest of the world, Sovrn – formerly Lijit – has some of the best pay rates of any networks, despite being a smaller and more exclusive network. Just don’t rely too heavily on their analytics.

Propeller Ads Media

Yes, I know this post is primarily about CPM, but you can’t talk about ad networks without talking about Propeller. They’re a damn good network with surprisingly high payouts, more than double those of some other networks, and they’re always on time.

Pulse Point

Pulse Point doesn’t have the slickest website, but don’t let that deceive you. The primary benefit of their ad network is the automation. They have programmatic and algorithmic buying and selling, so you can optimize your ads without ever having to look in detail into the sites you’re using.

Matomy

The Matomy media group is a great ad platform that does display ads, but also works with mobile ads, video ads and social advertising in over a dozen different categories and a wide range of niches. You might not get in – their high level of support requires decent sites – but if you can, they’re pretty great.

Burst Media

Another one of the old giants, Burst Media has a lot of high-profile clients, including Paramount, Loreal, and Disney. They do more than just leverage display advertising; they reach out specifically to brand advocates, those people most interested in promoting your brand, and hook you up.

Popcash

The most controversial entry on this list, Popcash doesn’t so much do page display advertising. Instead, they’re the ones primarily responsible for pop-under ads. Sure, it’s not entirely a modern technology, being replaced by exit intent pops, but they’re still surprisingly effective. Give them a try, if you don’t mind the possible hit to your reputation for using pop unders.

Technorati

Specializing entirely on tech companies, tech sites and others in those niches, Technorati is a widespread provider of information, content marketing and display advertising. Fit their niche and they’re perfect; try to jump in with a cooking blog and you might not find much of use.

AdMarvel

Not to be confused with Marvel Comics, AdMarvel is a network that works with some major companies, including Verizon. They’re great for developers, they have some interesting dynamic optimization options and they give you a lot of control over the ads you display.

Index Exchange

Formerly known as Casale, the rebranding is actually a very modern development. They’re still the same great old network, though, so if you’ve found success with them before,you’ll find it still.

Buzz City

Don’t be turned off by their 90s cartoon logo; Buzz City is a surprisingly great network specializing in mobile ads. More importantly, they’re primarily an international provider, with a huge number of ads served in India, Indonesia, and various African countries.

Vibrant Media

Rounding out this list is Vibrant, an advertiser with a lot of brand connection options that benefit both advertisers and publishers alike. Keep your ads consistent across multiple platforms and hook up with the people you need seeing your ads.

 

 

Driving traffic to a CPA offer is more or less identical to driving traffic to any website. You can still get traffic from all of the usual black and white hat sources, and the conversion rate you get depends on the quality of that traffic.

There’s just one catch with CPA; often offers will specify one particular type of traffic. If an offer you take specifies banner ad traffic, and you use the offer link in a text ad, none of the referrals you make will count for payment. You’re breaking the terms of the offer, and thus forfeiting any earnings.

CPA Specific Terms

Some CPA offers are not limited. Others will specify types of traffic, such as banner traffic, traffic from emails, or organic traffic only. Keep this in mind as you read on about types of traffic and various traffic sources; you will need to either focus solely on one type of traffic, or use a variety of offers to capture each type of traffic.

One thing you might want to watch for is Incent offers. This keyword, when present in an offer, means you’re allowed to incentivize the traffic in any way you desire. You can, for example, tell users that if they fill out the form, they get a free copy of your ebook or a 10% off coupon for a product.

You might even tell them they can sign up for an exclusive deals mailing list which you use for other offers. Giveaways work as well; record the people who sign up and award a gift card to a few lucky winners each month. If you’re getting enough conversions and your offer pays enough, it’s a small chunk of your available profits.

Finding Offers

Part of driving traffic to your offers is finding the right offers in the first place. You want to develop a website – or multiple websites – in a niche. Each niche has limits, and you need to have discipline to keep your offers focused. If you find good offers in a different niche, don’t slap them on to your site, save them for a new site in a different niche.

You can find offers using sites like OfferVault or oDigger. Put in keywords relating to your niche and look for offers. By registering for these sites, you can use advanced search criteria, which are extremely helpful for weeding out the offers that don’t apply to your site. You’ll want to specify offers in the right country, for example. An offer in French doesn’t apply to your US-only site, does it?

When you find applicable offers, you will need to review them for any specifications that make them difficult to monetize. Such specifications include limits on the type of traffic, incentives you’re allowed to offer, and the action required to count as a successful conversion.

With a selection of offers in hand, you will need to apply to the networks that host the offer. If you don’t get accepted into the network, you can’t run the offer, so you might have to search for replacements. If you’re already a member of the applicable network, you’re good to go.

Types of CPA Sites

The first choice you need to make is do you opt for a volume-based approach or a quality-based approach.

A volume-based approach has you spending the absolute minimum amount of time and money on your site. You slap up some content, you use a template site, you throw in a few offers, and you run a few ads. That’s it. You do this tens or hundreds of times, creating a lot of minor sites with a lot of offers, trying to hit all the bases. At some point, you reach critical mass and make more money than it takes to set it all up.

A quality-based approach is much more stable for the long term. You create a custom niche site and put your all into it. A custom site design, nicely integrated offers and a constant update schedule keep the site running and hopefully flourishing. You can leverage this site into other monetization methods later, such as affiliate marketing, direct sales of ad space, and even selling your own products.

I recommend the quality-based approach for a few reasons. For one thing, a quality site has more long-term growth potential. For another, a horde of thin sites can earn you a spammer label and cause your sites to be removed from Google rankings, which can hurt quite a bit.

Driving Traffic

Once you have a site set up with some offers, it’s time to drive some traffic to it. You can do this in a number of different ways.

• Organic search. This is the best method for long term growth, but it’s not as good for the quantity-based approach. With organic search, you’re working with SEO to build a brand presence and a trusted reputation, so you need to carefully cherry-pick your offers to avoid scamming your readers.


• Search ads. Using Bing PPC, Google AdWords or other search ads allow you access to a huge amount of targeted traffic. The caveat, of course, is that you have to pay for ads and you’re not guaranteed conversions. If your targeting is off or you’re paying too much for ads, you’ll see very few people actually filling out your CPA offer form, so you won’t be earning back the money you spent, let alone making a profit.


• Mobile ads. Using mobile ad exchanges like Buzzcity opens your site up to a whole wide world of mobile users. Just make sure that your offers are targeted at mobile users, and that your site works perfectly on all mobile devices. This might require shelling out for a responsive design.


• Social media. Organic social media works with the quality-based approach, because you’re building a brand as much as you are an affiliate site. You can curate content, share blog posts and interact with industry veterans through Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, all with the goal of driving traffic to your site and your offers.


• Social ads. Much the same as search ads, Twitter, Facebook and other social outlets offer their own PPC ads. Use these to drive traffic to your sites. You can even use targeting information from your audience to run offers you haven’t implemented yet, to give them a trial run.


• Mailing lists. Building your own mailing list is great, but you can also buy space in other site newsletters or in newsletters designed to share affiliate sites with interested consumers.

Using a mixture of these traffic sources is ideal, so you’re not relying too much on any one traffic source. Experiment, find where your best conversions come from, and push for growth.

 

Talking about niches in CPA and affiliate marketing is tricky, because there are a lot of people out there who will follow any advice given. If I gave you step by step instructions on how to succeed in a given niche, they wouldn’t be very good instructions a year from now, because a ton of people just follow them and all get into the same niche. Savvy marketers take the method but not the queries, and find their own niches.

That said, I can still give some general niche advice. I won’t be telling you what specific subset of a given topic in a given industry has proven to be valuable, because that’s a lot of research to do to just give away the information.

Before you go hog-wild with a niche, you should always do some research. Do some Google searches for your niche and see where you might be able to fit in. Run some keyword searches on OfferVault and see what sort of offers are available.

It’s also important to investigate the CPA network before you invest too heavily in a site or a niche. An offer may look attractive, but if it’s coming from a network that has a known history of never paying their publishers, it will do you no good to apply and invest in a site to funnel traffic to that offer. You can check out network reviews on oDigger, or run some Google searches fro them as well.

Now, on to the niches.

1. Gaming

Gaming, in this case, refers primarily to video games with a side of mobile gaming. Gaming is interesting, because it’s both very saturated and somewhat low paying, but it has a place on this list because it rewards agile brand builders. Gaming offers work great for 3-6 months, maybe up to a year, but fade quickly compared to other niches. On the other hand, discounting mobile games, thousands of video games come out every year. With mobile included, that number could creep to hundreds of thousands, if not higher. Of course, a lot of them are terrible shovelware no one plays for more than a few seconds, but no one said the games you put on offer had to be good.

2. Gambling

A lot of times, when you plug “gaming” into a search engine, you’ll end up with a lot of gambling results. This is just as true for CPA offers. Gambling has a lot of flexibility in topic, from online casinos to individual games, though it can also be quite saturated. The one notable downside to the gambling niche is the general bad reputation it gets with users and search engines.

3. College

With the rising costs of education, entire generations of students are graduating high school and looking for cheap alternatives. Trade schools, tech schools, community colleges and low cost educational options are all valid niches to pursue. Just beware of trying to compete with some of the ridiculous industry giants also using those CPA offers.

4. Mobile Apps

Mobile is growing at an astonishing pace, having taken over as the dominant means of browsing many social networks. Catering to mobile is still a niche many marketers find hard, so you can actually dig into already-saturated niches and supplant the incumbent giants by catering to mobile when they don’t.

5. Vitamins and Supplements

If there’s one thing that never changes, it’s snake oil. Ten years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, and probably ten thousand years ago, people were peddling ways to be healthier. Sure, it’s an industry dominated by a few big companies, but these big companies need to be careful about what they hawk, lest they open themselves up to lawsuits. As a smaller, more agile marketer, you can adjust your product recommendations on the fly to follow the lucrative offers.

6. Loans

Loans and other personal finance options are another timeless source of high-paying CPA offers. Much like gambling, however, you have to be aware of the seedy underbelly of loan marketing. Either embrace the dark side, or beware of the dangerous payday loanmarketing.

7. Dating

Dating is a niche that has two roles; one on the legitimate side of SFW ads, and one as ads attached to pornographic sites. As frowned upon as the pornography industry is among many circles, it’s perfectly legitimate as a way to make money for thousands of marketers. Dating also has the benefit of a huge variety of niche sites to pick through. Heck, the old standby of Adult Friend Finder has CPA offers in the $120 range.

8. Insurance

Health insurance in the United States has been an ongoing controversy for the last several years, and plenty of people have been searching for alternatives they can find to the state-run marketplaces and subsidies. Other forms of insurance haven’t changed much, though.

9. Weight Loss/Fitness

Fad diets, exercise equipment, weight loss pills, fitness regimens, they’re all potentially lucrative niches. You just need a compelling way to sell whatever it is you’re selling, andyou’re good to go. As a bonus, this is a great one to roll in with other affiliate marketing strategies.

10. Jewelry

You might not think of jewelry as a high-profile niche, but it’s out there. You’ve got everything from wedding rings to diamond candles as options when you dig into this particular niche.

11. Technology

Tech is an incredibly broad niche, admittedly, which means you can find something in there that hasn’t been covered yet, even if it’s a slightly older piece of tech that people just haven’t heard much about. You can also strive to be on the cutting edge, following offers for tech that’s only just been announced or just released.

12. Fitness

Fitness specifically is what got people like Doctor Oz where they are today, and it’s really not hard to replicate their success. It helps that there’s a high turnover in the industry, with rebrandings and public backlash coming in waves that wipes out the top players occasionally.

13. Forex and Binary Options

Who doesn’t want to make money fast on seemingly easy investments? There’s a huge market available for investments and trading moneymaking schemes, ranging from legitimate to beginner’s ebooks to scams. Find the right offers, strike the right tone in your site and you’re golden. You’ll probably make more money than most of the people getting into trading.

14. Business Investments

A surprising number of businesses looking for capital and investments put up offers with high values through various CPA networks. It’s a tough niche to get into, because it requires contacting a very specific type of person with a very specific type of marketing, but if you can get venture capitalists on the hook, you can make a mint.

15. Pets

Time and again, otherwise reasonable people will spend insane amounts of money on stuff for their pets, be it medicine, toys, grooming, food or gimmicks. Use this to your advantage.

 

You can make a lot of money with CPA ads. When one lead for one offer can generate $100 or more, and you have a ready source of tens of thousands of interested people, you can make absolute bank.

That is, right up until the CPA network finds some excuse not to pay you. This happens all too frequently in the world of CPA, and it’s a serious problem affecting new marketers. When you don’t know any better, one attractive network can screw you out of thousands of dollars.

Oh, rarely will the network disappear with your money. They won’t be so blatant. Instead, they’ll find some excuse, some rule you violated, and present you with the violation in lieu of a real customer service response. As far as they’re concerned, the money you earned wasn’t legitimately earned. It’s theirs to keep. Of course, you’re new to CPA marketing and don’t have the legal or financial resources available to take action.

This gets even worse if the traffic you drive to your offers came through PPC. You’re paying for the traffic, and you’re getting conversions, which you expect will cover the cost of the ads and profit. When you find out those conversions didn’t count, you’re in the hole for your ads and you have no profit to cover them. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Thankfully, if you do your research, you can identify the worst of these scam networks and avoid them. What follows is a list of only five, and then some tips on researching and judging any network that isn’t on the list. Never take a network at face value; scammers lie.

Feed Flare Media

Feed Flare is notorious for changing up their minimum payment and for not paying people, or for declaring leads to be invalid. It’s painful all around to try to contact their support and their owner, Collin, makes excuses for advertisers but refuses to relay direct complaints.

EWA

EWA does a lot of PR management to hide their scams, every several months sending out placating messages to sacrifice a major player, announce the sacking of some poor dude who might not even exist, or to talk about a reorganization meant to rid the network of fraud. It never sticks, and a few months later, EWA just stops paying again.

1GreatCPA

Anyone advertising themselves as great is either full of themselves or lying. This one is both. Frequently, they won’t pay, or if they do, they conveniently lose a number of qualified leads to pay less. There have even been reports of them sending out tax documents to people they didn’t pay, just for that added kick in the pants. Always be wary of a CPA network that spends a lot of time replying to reviews on third party sites, particularly if they ignore the good ones.

1st Class CPA

Okay, so this one isn’t that bad, but they’re pretty bad with customer service. In fact, they have even been known to call out their affiliates as illiterate, lazy morons who don’t know how to read TOS documents or parse the dense legalese they use to try to scam newbies. They pay well, for those they like, to keep reviews up. They scam the people who aren’t as invested, and drown out their negative reviews.

COPEAC

Even if I wanted to, I can’t link you to COPEAC’s website, because they finally shut down back in 2012. This is after literal years of doing basically no business. No advertiser would work with them, but they still presented offers, they still ran a public face, and they still duped CPA marketers into sending them traffic. They didn’t pay anyone a dime, and no one lasted there for more than a few weeks, but they were a huge trap for newbies. Thankfully, they’re gone now.

Warnings and Methods for Identifying Scams

So, here’s the thing. Anyone at all, even you, right now, can start an affiliate network.All you need is some web hosting, a software suite for tracking affiliates, and a lot of time. Go out and sign up for 200 CPA networks, register for every offer they have. Now forward the offer to people in your network, and pay them less than you’re being paid for the offer.The referral goes through you and your network.

For example, say Dating Site A pays $50 for a lead. You sign up for that offer and put it on your site, paying $35 for a lead. Some poor newbie CPA marketer signs up for the offer and runs it, and gets ten conversions. That means you have to pay them $350, and you do, and that’s fine. Because you refer the leads to YOUR offer, and you get paid $500 for them. That’s a profit of $150, and you didn’t do the advertising work.

Add on a ton of volume and offers from a ton of affiliates and you have a massive moneymaking scheme. Now toss in a little loose bookkeeping – “losing” leads here and there, or disqualifying some perfectly legitimate leads but counting them for yourself – and you have a lot of money you’re scamming out of people.

Now look at it from the CPA marketer newbie’s perspective. They see a network that accepts anyone, and decent $35 offers. They sign up, they run them, they get paid, though maybe some of their leads go missing. They never know that a better network around the corner – one they can’t get into as a newbie – has the better offers without the middleman. In fact, they never know there’s a middleman.

And this is all just one of many ways a CPA network can introduce fraud into the proceedings.

Whenever you’re investigating a new network, check it out on both Affpaying and oDigger. These will give you an idea of the sorts of offers available, as well as their reviews, their minimum payment, and a number of other terms. Pay special attention to negative reviews; positive reviews are easily faked and aren’t worth much anyways. Negative reviews, well, you need to take with a grain of salt. Some users really will be breaking the rules and complaining about not being paid. Some will legitimately be scammed by the network.

 

If you’re in the affiliate marketing industry, you know all about CPA marketing. If you’re new, though, I’ll give you a quick rundown.

CPA networking is a form of advertising where you build a site and run offers from various companies. It’s your job to get as many people as possible to sign up for those offers or buy the products on offer. For each lead you generate or each offer claimed, you get paid. CPA itself stands for Cost Per Action, where the offer claims and leads generated are the actions.

CPA is one part of a spectrum of affiliate marketing. Other forms include ads that pay you per thousand views, or ads that pay you per click. You also have straight affiliate sales, where you try to get users to buy products, and you’re paid a commission on every sale. Of these, product sales can be the most lucrative based on either sheer volume or on selling high priced items. Beyond that, CPA is the most lucrative. Views are the easiest, followed by clicks, followed by leads; thus views pay the least, and offers the most.

If you’re getting into making money online using CPA, you want to take every step possible to maximize the amount of money you earn. How can you do that?

Join More Networks

In order to gain access to offers, you need to be part of a CPA network. There are literally hundreds of networks out there available, ranging from utter filth to insanely lucrative. They also range between “accepts everyone” and “you have to be a six-figure earner professional to get in.”

The more exclusive the network, the better the offers you find. This is because the companies willing to pay a lot for leads don’t want unqualified leads coming from spam sites; it wastes their time and it tarnishes their brand image. When they work with a network, they want that network to vet their advertisers to meet certain minimum standards.

When you’re first starting with CPA, you won’t be able to get into the best networks. You’ll be limited to a lot of low-tier networks. That said, you should join every network you can, or at least the best ten or twenty that accept you. This way you have your pick of a wide range of offers from various networks and can experiment. You can also:

Join Better Networks

Work your way up. As you join networks, you gain experience. You can leverage that experience and those past earnings as proof that you know what you’re doing and you can work successfully in CPA. Leverage the name recognition of those networks to get into slightly more exclusive better networks.

Repeat this process. Join networks, use them for a while, and then apply to better networks using your existing experience. You’ll be able to climb up the ladder in terms of network quality, which also lets you access better offers, so you can make more money while you’re at it.

Build Better Sites

Offers are just one side of the CPA coin. On the other side, you have your site. In reality, you will have numerous sites, spread out throughout various niches. The goal is to find lucrative offers and build sites around those offers. Work to optimize the traffic and the audience visiting a site, to boost your conversion rate and your raw conversion numbers.

For the most part, this will involve all the basics of SEO and site building that come with any form of website ownership. You’ll need a solid design that appeals to both desktop and mobile users. You’ll need enough content to make your site look legitimate and helpful. If possible, you’ll want to keep an ongoing update schedule, though you don’t need more than one post per week to maintain a niche affiliate site. Just make sure your content isn’t copied or stolen, and that it’s high quality and useful.

Focus on Individual Niches

As you grow and rise in the ranks of exclusive networks, you’ll find a lot of appealing offers that don’t quite fit your niche. The number one killer of CPA sites is trying to cram those offers into your existing sites. Rather than waste time and dilute your audience with a shift in focus, just make another site. You can take the basic template of your successful site and apply that to a new niche, with new content and new topics.

Once you have the pattern down, it’s very possible to start a site from scratch and build it into a solid earner in the space of a few months. Some successful CPA marketers build a new site every 3-6 months. They also aren’t afraid to sell off old sites through a site sales marketplace to get rid of lower earners and focus on the higher earners.

Vary Your Offers

It’s easy to find one offer that converts well and run with it, but sometimes better offers will come out. You can do two things about this.

The first is to switch to new offers when they become available. However, you want to do some split testing first to make sure the new offer converts as well as the old offer. It’s no good switching to something that pays $1 more per action if you lose 25% of your conversions doing so.

The second is to play two networks off each other. Talk to your account representative on one network and bring up the fact that you found a similar offer on a different network and it pays more. In order to keep your business on their network, they’ll probably try to negotiate a better offer for you. By doing this when a new offer appears, you can stay ahead of the curve.

Spend on Advertising

You’re an advertiser and a marketer, and if you’re not spending on advertising, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your potential audience. Using other forms of advertising through other ad networks, you can bring people to your CPA site. There, they’ll be exposed to your content and your offers, where they can convert and earn you cash. You have to spend money to make money, after all.