09.19.08

Make Money Giving Away Free Stuff

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, PPC at 2:36 am by Alok Jain

Does the title sound unbelievable? Sort of ‘too good to be true’? Maybe a little scam-ish even? Don’t worry. It’s not even close to that. And I am about to show you exactly how to make money online by giving away free stuff to people.

What I am about to share with you is a form of Affiliate Marketing, but used by very few people. Those who do use it are making a bunch of money from it. But most people fail to see the awesome opportunity in this.

I’m talking about getting paid for leads, through CPA (Cost Per Action) networks. There are a number of CPA networks that specialize in merchants who pay affiliates per lead. These CPA networks are just like Commission Junction, Clickbank, etc in the sense that they bring merchants and publishers/affiliates together. But the main difference is that these merchants pay you per lead, you don’t have to make a sale to get your commissions.

So what qualifies as a lead? That’s where it starts to get interesting. There are merchants that pay you for just an email address, others who may require an email and telephone number, yet others might want a postal address. But mostly, its never more than 5 fields depending on the offer you promote. And the payouts are handsome - it can range from $1 for a single field offer to $15 for a 5 field offer… sometimes even more.

Let me use an example to make this clearer. Let’s say, you sign up with a CPA network and decide to promote a merchant that pays for a single field - email address. Let’s break this scenario into 3 perspectives - the merchant’s, the affiliate’s and the visitors’ referred by the affiliate.

The merchant, in this scenario, can be either of the three - 1) The company that finally uses the lead hoping to make a sale in the future, or 2) A lead broker who collects leads and sells it to companies mentioned in #1, or 3) A third-party that gives your leads a free gift if they complete other offers in the backend for the kind of companies listed in #1 and #2.

In most cases, you’ll find the third kind of merchants listed with the CPA networks. These are guys who’ve made big businesses out of free offers and can afford to pay $1 - $15 per lead, depending on the quality of lead and the information collected.

Using the example I stated earlier, this merchant will give visitors a free gift - something like an IPOD, or an XBOX or a Laptop even - if this visitor completes a pre-determined number of offers in the backend, after providing his email ID. These offers involve filling out certain forms, surveys or maybe signing up for a free trial of some product. In each of these cases, the merchant gets paid by these bigger companies (which are the #1s and #2s as described earlier).

As for the visitor, it’s quite simple really. He goes to a website that features a free offer for an IPOD or an XBOX, etc. The visitor enters his email ID and he is redirected to the criteria-page where he’s shown a number of offers (surverys, fill forms, sign up for free trials) to complete. If he fulfills the requirement, the free gift is sent to him.

Now, to you - the affiliate! How do you fit in the the entire equation? You are responsible to send the visitors to these merchants. And when the visitors fill out the required fields (email, postal, zip, whatever), you get paid.

Are you with me? Let’s say you are promoting a merchant that pays $1 for a single field - email. And the offer is a free IPOD. You send visitors to a website that promises them a free IPOD and they have to fill out their email ID for more details. And the moment he enters his email ID, you have earned $1 in commission. You just got paid for giving away free stuff!

I know affiliates who make tens of thousands of dollars doing just this. It’s big money, if done the right way. All you have to do is come up with innovative ways to send visitors to the merchant’s landing page through your affiliate link.

Now that you know how this works, let me tell you why most people fail with this. Most people use a standard, traditional marketing approach to promote these offers. They buy expensive keywords on PPC, spend hours writing articles or doing forum marketing, writing blogs on the free offers… to promote the CPA offers. But traditional Affiliate Marketing tricks won’t get you any success with CPA pay-per-lead offers.

You have to be innovative in your approach. You’ve to cleverly disguise your marketing pitch. You’ve to think out of the box. So, for example - if you want to drive PPC traffic to these CPA offers, what kind of keywords will you bid on?

free ipod
get an ipod for free
ipod nano cheap

etc etc.. right?

WRONG!

These obvious keywords are extremely expensive and will burn a big hole in your pocket, let alone make you any money. This is what I mean by a traditional affiliate marketing approach. It won’t work if you want to be successful with CPA offers.

So what kind of keywords can you bid on? You’ve to think laterally to answer this question. Who else might be interested in a free ipod offer? What could they be searching for on Google? Are there any inexpensive (less than 5 cents) keywords you can use to target them?

There may be a large variety of people interested in a free ipod, right? Generally, someone searching for stuff on entertainment is a good target. People searching for movies, actors, actresses, etc might fit the bill. In fact, there are a ton of searches on these kind of keywords and the competition is almost zero. Which means, you can get such keywords for very very cheap.

The next and most important question is - how do you get people searching for these keywords to enter their email ID at the landing page of the merchant? How do you get them interested in the free ipod offer?

You have to somehow tie the two - the keyword they searched for and the free offer. And you have to involve them to take action. Here’s just one way to do it… let’s say there’s this guy who searches for the keyword ‘george clooney’… so he’s probably looking for some information on this actor, maybe his new releases, maybe just pictures/wallpapers, or his upcoming stints, etc.

Now, your job - as an effective CPA Marketer - is to send this searcher to your merchant’s landing page where he fills out his email ID. So your PPC ad has to tie up ‘george clooney’ with the free ipod offer. You can simply say something like - “Is George Clooney too old to act? Take this poll and get a free ipod”.

When searchers click on this ad, you take them to a simple poll you host at your own website/blog or even a third party poll provider. When they submit their answer, redirect them to your affiliate link for the ‘free ipod’ merchant.

Here’s what goes inside the searcher’s mind with this setup. He/she searched for George Clooney looking for info on his movies, etc. So he/she is obviously interested in the actor. When they search, they see your ad asking ‘Is George Clooney too old to act?’…. they will, in most cases, have an opinion on a topic like this.

Then, you give them a little nudge by saying - ‘Take the poll and get a free ipod’. Now, they have 2 motives to click on your ad - one, they have an opinion they might want to share and two, they get something free for doing just that.

Now, the searcher clicks on your ad and sees a yes/no poll which he is almost definite to fill out. And once he does that, he goes to the merchant’s landing page which says something like - ‘Get a free ipod. Enter your email to proceed’.

When he fills out his email id, you get paid! Simple, right?

It is, in fact, simple! However, since you’re dealing with low end commissions like $1, you must be careful with your ad spends. Track everything… and I mean everything - the CPC (cost per click) of your ad, the CTR (click through rate) on your ad, what percentage make it to the merchant’s landing page, conversion rate for signups, etc. Track regularly, and make necessary changes to improve the conversion rates.

CPA Affiliate Marketing is a numbers game and you just can’t afford to neglect that. Once you have a profitable campaign, go ahead and replicate it. Try other keywords, different merchants. The possibilities are endless. Some popular CPA networks you can apply to are maxbounty.com, azoogleads.com, cpastorm.com, neverblueads.com, etc. A quick Google search will return many more networks.

Hope you liked this article.. do leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

 Retweet This Post

Permalink