CPA VS. CPL: What Is The Difference?

In the world of online marketing, there's a bunch of acronyms thrown around that are often confusing to new marketers. It's important to know what these acronyms stand for and what they mean for your business.

What is CPL? CPL stands for Cost-Per-Lead. When you are determining your marketing budget, you may consider doing CPL advertising. This means you are paying only for leads that are delivered to you.

CPL advertising may be less targeted but is still a great way to go. Typically, CPL advertising can run anywhere from $1.00 per lead for loosely targeted leads to upwards of $100.00 per lead for highly targeted, "buyer" leads.

A "buyer" lead is a lead that has already purchased a product in the same or a similar niche as the product or offer you are selling. While $100 may seem like a hefty price tag, it may actually be a great deal depending on your CLV (oh no…another acronym!).

What is CLV? CLV stands for customer lifetime value and is actually the most important number you need to know in your business. the CLV will drive all of your other business decisions and will help you understand what is a reasonable marketing budget for your business.

To calculate the LV of your customer base, take the total revenue you've generated from your sales and divide it by the number of customers you've acquired. For example, if you have generated $58,000 from 40 customers, then the LV per customer would be: $1450.00.

Understanding your CLV will help you to know exactly what it will take to reach your goals. If your business goal is to achieve $1,000,000 in sales and your CLV is around $1,000 then you'd know you would need a minimum of 1,000 customers to achieve that goal.

Then you can set about planning and strategizing how to get there.

How can you tell if the CPL is good for your offer? It just takes a little math. For example, if you get a CPL of $8.00.00. If the Lifetime Value (LV) of your customer is $100.00, then spending $10.00 to get that lead would be great because you are 10X your investment.

What is CPA? CPA is cost-per-acquisition. This is different from CPL because with CPA you are actually paying for a closed sale or a specific action. This is a great way to advertise a product because you are paying for the action you have determined. It may be a sale, a lead or click. (In those cases you would also apply CPL and/or CPC).

CPA is often disclosed by affiliate offers so that the affiliate marketer will know the average cost-per-acquisition when they are marketing a product. This helps the marketer to adjust their marketing/campaign budget so that it is profitable.

For example, if an affiliate knows that the CPA of an offer is around $45.00 and the commission on each product is $100.00, they know that their profit will be around $55.00 after marketing costs.

What is a CPA Network?

A CPA network is a network of advertisers that will pay affiliates for a specific action. For example, ClickSure is a CPA network. Companies and advertisers will load their products into Clickbank and the affiliate marketer will then drive traffic to the various offers.

When a specific action is achieved, such as a sale, the affiliate marketer is then paid for that action.

Another example of a CPA network is Commission Junction. Commission Junction has thousands of advertisers, including some well known names like GoDaddy, Constant Contact, Discover Card, and more. The advertisers are broken up into categories.

As a website owner and/or affiliate marketer, you can choose to advertise any of these companies and/or their products. Some companies will you per click delivered, some for leads delivered and some for sales. They have decided on their CPA and you are paid for delivering the specific action.

As a business owner, you can choose to advertise on CPA networks. You then pay only for the specific action delivered.

As an affiliate, you can choose from thousands of offers that match your marketing niche, the niche of your list, and the niche of your website.

Source: Shannon J Lavenia

How To Earn Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be an excellent way to make money online. There are numerous free affiliate programs anyone can join. Some of the more popular affiliate marketing programs you have probably heard of are Clickbank, Amazon, and AdSense. While, these programs are well known there are various programs for almost any product or website. Earning money with affiliate marketing is not easy, but with the right time, dedication, and energy you can develop an income from being an affiliate.

It is a good choice to run an affiliate marketing campaign or a combination of different affiliate marketing campaigns on a blog or multiple blogs. You sign up with an affiliate marketing program that suits your needs, interests, and looks like it would be profitable. Then, place several of their ads on your blog.

Develop and create unique and original content for your blog in the form of articles that cover the area of your affiliate marketing niche. Post as often as you can and build up your social network so that you will have plenty of outlets for your blog and it's message. Create a multi-level strategy for reaching people with your blog. Print out business cards to notify people in the real world of your blog.

Make sure to offer valuable information and resources on your blog that will attract visitors. An excellent tool for keeping visitors interested in your blog is to offer a regular rotating line up of free ebooks based on subjects you cover on your blog.

Build up an email list with a free email sign up tool placed on your blog. Whenever you have a new freebie coming out you can send out notifications to your email contacts. Creating a heavy traffic flow to your blog is crucial to your affiliate marketing plan. Promote the products on your blog with passion and detailed information that prompts and answers any questions a visitor might have about the products.

Twitter and Facebook are really effective tools for getting your message out to prospective blog visitors. Make sure to include regular posts and tweets with information about your blog in your online affiliate marketing plan. Generate daily original content for your blog to ensure a steady flow of traffic. Filling your articles with keywords that relate to your affiliate marketing will attract visitors that are interested in the information. These visitors are doing searches for the very keywords and content you are blogging about in your affiliate marketing campaign. This creates qualified traffic. Qualified traffic means these visitors are interested in this niche and will likely buy the product, click on an ad, and spend a good amount of time perusing your blog for the information.

You can earn money with affiliate marketing. Like anything else, it takes time, focus, and dedication. If you concentrate on putting as much energy as you can into your affiliate marketing plan you are sure to earn an income, but it may take some time when you initially put your affiliate marketing plan into action.

Source Robert Lynch

Blogging Your Way to Wealth and Fame

Blogging your way to wealth and fame will not happen in an instant. Because it requires the most important ingredient of success and it is called time. It is time that will take you all the way to blogging wealth and fame. Along with direction and compelling unique content without which there can be no success. Blogging your way to wealth and fame starts with your profitable niche. And then the target keywords related to that niche.

This is the most important part of blogging which is why it is also referred to as direction. Without direction you will receive visitors that are not even remotely interested in your content. And that will skyrocket your blog bounce rate. Which is an indication to search engines that audiences do not enjoy your blog.

What is your Profitable Niche?

Your profitable niche is the secret when blogging your way to wealth and fame. It is that one thing you love doing most. If you love that activity enough then you will also have quite some knowledge on the subject. Which is why many a hobby have turned surprisingly profitable. Online success is only imminent when you love what you do. Because when you truly love what you do, then it will be impossible to give up.

What are Target Keywords?

Target keywords are the single words that describe your profitable niche best. And with the Google keyword planner you must research keywords with a high search volume and low competition. Choose the one keyword with the highest search volume and lowest competition. Then make that one keyword the first word of your blog title. Also try to include that single more important keyword within your blog domain name.

Domain and Blog Title?

With the above mentioned target keyword research and your profitable niche. Choose a domain that is not too long and also easily remembered. As should your blog title be. The title however must demonstrate direct relevance to what your blog is about. The blog title must not exceed 60 characters while also counting spaces.

Where must I place the Target Keywords?

Your primary target keyword must be present in your blog domain. And also as the first word of the blog title. But that is just the one primary keyword you want your blog to rank for. You should have several target keywords. You can place more than one target keyword in the blog title providing it is within context. Your blog title is also known as the h1 header.

And like a chain reaction the blog title should be the first words starting the blog meta description. See how that primary target keyword remain a constant, as the first word? But why is that?

Because that is how you tell search engine spiders or crawlers exactly what your blog is about. And in doing that you simplify the indexing technicalities and ultimately boost the blog ranking capability.

There is also the h2 header or also known as the blog post title. So the keywords you wish to target with the content must be present in the blog post title. But with the blog post you also want to pay attention to things like writing. The presence of transition words and preferable absence of passive voice writing.

Furthermore there are image alt tags like with featured images. And these alt tags must also contain the keywords. This way even your features images can be indexed and serve as an internal link. Professional SEO requires a lot of attention. Which is why the majority of professional blogging rock stars (so to speak) all use the Yoast SEO plugin (over 7 million users).

How many words must a Blog Post and Page Contain?

Providing the content is populated with the target keywords and search phrases. It is recommended that content be no less than 1000 - 2000 words. And this goes for both blog pages and posts.

But how often should you come up with this much Compelling Useful Content?

In my opinion. Take your time and work on a post or page so compelling and useful that it cannot be ignored. At least one high quality outstanding post per month. This will require a lot of research because compelling content is something that cannot be found elsewhere online. Offer a proven solution to a common identified need within your niche. And do this with every post and page. Because that is how you get recognised as a professional.

But how will I actually Make Money?

Simple. With a high quality blog you will receive a lot of targeted visitors and also gain subscribers for your email list. Having your own blog and email list is where you promote affiliate products. This is easily obtained by creating a free affiliate membership with ClickBank. Which is the one of the largest digital sales platform online with over 300k products to choose from.

But affiliate marketing and ClickBank is an entire discussion on its own. And a rather large discussion because there is a lot of misdirection on this method. Always remember, there is no such thing as instant fame and fortune. Success requires hard work be it online or otherwise.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Deon_Christie/2244072

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Maybe you have read the term affiliate marketing somewhere but you are not quite sure what it means.

So let me tell you: Affiliate marketing is when you find a buyer for a product that someone else sells.

But why should you find customers for other businesses?

Because they pay you every time they make a sale through one of the people you sent to them.

Ok, this was the "explanation" of what affiliate marketing is, but the concept might not be 100% clear in your mind. That is why I want you to look at this example:

Many phone companies have affiliate programs. I don't want to promote any kind of phone company in this article, so I'm just going to make up a fake telephone company name: Surracall.

So, Surracall likes to get more customers (because more customers mean more money). What do they do to get more customers? They advertise, right. They put spots on TV, radio, and the put ads in magazines. Maybe they even have a sales team that goes out to companies and peoples houses and talks to them - either by phone or in person and tries to get them to switch to Surracall.

But Surracall has some clever marketing people on board. And they say: all this is good, but how about some free advertising?

Now what they do is they offer the opportunity to (basically everybody) to sell Surracall phone contracts for them. Let's say that you bring a new customers to Surracell who signs up for a 12 month contract, Surracall will pay you $30. If you bring two new customers, Surracall will pay you $60, if you bring 10 they will pay you $300 and so on.

Some people are bringing LOTS of new customers to Surracell every single day.

How do they do it?

Well, they DON'T go from door to door or coldcall people.

Some very clever people set up "phone company comparison websites". Because many people go online and they want to compare rates for different phone companies. So they will type something in the search engines like "compare phone companies". If you do that, most likely you will be taken to some site that offers you to type in some data (like where you live, how many hours you spend on the phone each month, whether you mostly call on cell or home phones, etc.) Then you click a button and many different companies show up with different prices.

What do you do? You select the one that has the best offer for you - in this case it might be Surracell because you call a lot to cellphone and they have a cellphone flatrate. And you click on the image where it sais "Sign up here for Surracell". And they you can fill up an form online to sign up with Surracell, and next thing you know: you get a letter from Surracell and can use their services just like you wanted.

Now what happens is that Surracell KNOWS that you signed up because you clicked on that image on the phone company comparison website. And because that person signed up for Surracells affiliate program, Surracell will pay that person a commission. So part of the money you pay for your phone contract will actually get paid to the one who runs that phone company comparison site.

Affiliate marketing can be done in any market - and is most popular on the Internet. Many affiliate marketers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. The good thing with affiliate marketing is that you do not need to have a product. You can just use other people's products to make money. And it is easy to get started as an affiliate marketer with very little budget.

The downside of affiliate marketing is that it is very competitive and you need a lot of marketing knowledge to become successful doing so. But just like with everything in life, if you practice and are disciplined you have the potential to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every month.

On the other hand - many people think that just because they are making money online it will be easy and they can be lazy and just spend 3 hours per day and retire rich. But that's not the way it goes. Yes, there are SOME people who are lucky and got rich with very little work as affiliate marketers - but frankly, it's VERY unlikely that you'll be one of them. In fact I think that you are more likely to win the lottery than getting rich as a lazy affiliate marketer.

But if you apply yourself and put in the hours and do the right things - I'm convinced that you can make some real good money and become financially independent. I don't say it's easy - I don't say it's guaranteed - but I do say it's POSSIBLE.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1229443