Hi everyone Im new to cpa

[tsend3]

Im new to cpa any good source of free traffic please thanks

[rproffitt]

I'm not an SEO person but isn't this about you working your SEO?

[rproffitt]

SEO is well done so the question to you is whether or not you are working SEO. As far as I know, you can't get that Cost Per Action without SEO and since SEO is well done, what more can be said that hasn't?

[Dani]

Rproffitt, CPA is cost per acquisition, not action, and actually has nothing at all to do with SEO. In fact, quite the opposite.

SEO is about what you can do to help Google to help you rank in the organic search results and get Google to send traffic your way that you don’t pay for.

CPA, as it’s name implies, is about cost ;) When you pay for traffic, either with PPC, display ads, email campaigns, etc., there’s a cost involved. Sometimes you pay per visitor who clicks through to your landing page. Other times you are permitted “unlimited” traffic, but pay each time you acquire a lead or conversion. That’s what CPA is.

CPA is very popular amongst marketers who don’t have their own websites by using affiliate marketing. This is where marketers sign up as “affiliates” for e-commerce websites where they get a commission each time they send traffic to the website that results in a sale.

Suppose they become an Amazon affiliate and know they can earn $10 for each $100 pair of shoes a visitor they send buys. They then purchase CPA ads promoting the shoes. As long as they set up the CPA campaign to be less than $10 CPA, then they know that any time they pay for the ad from Google/Facebook/etc, they make money from Amazon.

So, to answer your question, tsend3, it is never profitable to use SEO for CPA. It would be a very, very, very difficult uphill battle to rank organically in the search engines for an affiliate link. The only way this would work is if you have a blog, or some other high content site, you wish to rank organically for, and use it to drive your blog’s visitors to affiliates.

Good luck, and let me know if you have any other questions!!

[Dani]

I just want to add there is nothing sleazy or bad about affiliate marketing. Quite the opposite, as most e-commerce sites, Amazon and eBay included, would never be able to survive without affiliates being their salespeople on the front lines. However, this is very true for small businesses and mom and pop e-commerce shops as well. Affiliates are simply the virtual equivalent of salespeople, and every store needs advocates communicating with the customer.

[rproffitt]

Here's the deal. Invariably the question is rarely as stated but more about reducing cost. With better SEO the conversion rate will increase, which means that SEO is lowering the CPA as well.

And without conversions, free traffic looks to increase costs so maybe that's not a good idea.

[Dani]

Sorry, I think we’re talking about two different things. When I purchase a $10 CPA ad campaign, then I know upfront I’m always paying $10 per conversion.

I’m paying the same $10 each time regardless of the conversion rate. I’m paying the same $10 each time there is a conversion regardless of whether I get a conversion every 100 visitors or if it takes them sending me a million visitors before I get that conversion. It still only costs me $10.

[rproffitt]

Maybe the question is invalid? They asked for free traffic, CPA so maybe the question is invalid. How can they get what you noted for free?

[Dani]

They can get it for free via social media marketing … promoting the link in their Facebook and Twitter feeds. They can also (you’re going to say shame on me for saying this) post in forums and put the link in their forum signature. Another way is to blog about the products and put affiliate links in the blog articles. “Top 10 products“ where each product has an affiliate link is a really popular method nowadays that still really works well. Be creative. And hustle.

[Dani]

I just want to add that 14 year old Dani was doing this back in the mid-1990s. Back then, DaniWeb was a personal site about the family dogs. I signed up as an Amazon affiliate where I would earn 10% for each book sale. (Because Amazon was just books back then).

I created some pages on daniweb.com that talked about dog grooming and care, and linked to some Amazon books on the subject that I recommended.

People would land at my website (via Lycos, Alta Vista, or Goto.com, etc. since Google didn’t exist yet) searching for grooming tips and see my “expert” advice followed up by the book recommendations.

I made a fair amount of money that way as a kid, since my love of SEO had the site ranking above dog.com as one of the most trafficked toy dog sites on the web.

I worked on it less and less as a junior and then practically not at all as a senior, went to college, and then repurposed the domain name my sophomore year of college as what it is today.

[Dani]

And as for ways to promote affiliate links … promotion of anything on the Internet just requires getting your link/message in front of eyeballs on a webpage.

Organic SEO is free, but you can’t rank affiliate links, so that option is out.

You can buy ads to get your message out, but that option isn’t free.

So be creative and think of ways where you can post a link or something you want to say for free. UGC sites are a big one … forums, social networks, and the like. You can blog about something. That’s free. You can ask people with blogs to write about it. That can be free if you can convince them to do it. You can chat in chat rooms about it. That’s free.

Most of the free options do require you to take spam rules of the sites, if it’s not a site you are in control of, into consideration. Some people (err, spammers) choose to cast a wide net and publish their “ad” on tens or even hundreds of thousands of sites at a time, with software such as XRumer, with the expectation that most of them will be deleted for spam, but some will survive, and some will be seen before they are deleted. I don’t advocate for doing this, of course, but just putting out there that it’s something that does get done. It’s definitely looked down quite unfavorably from the leaders and members of those communities, of course. But as for the people that do it, they have nothing to lose. They don’t care if a member on one of the sites accused them for spamming. They posted in hundreds of thousands of places. Any handful of places is literally less than inconsequential.

I say this only because, before I knew better, I did this as well, the rebellious teenager that I was.