Back in Jan. 2008 I began my first real website in the hopes of making money online to replace my day job (because I feared being laid off).  I’ve generated a healthy amount of traffic for the site considering its niche and I’ve achieved a page rank of 3 without any serious SEO strategy.

But I’ve only made about $200 which barely covers the price of my hosting and domain registration for 2008 and 2009.

While I am proud of that site, despite its meager earnings, I still hadn’t solved the problem of replacing my day job’s income.  Around Dec. 2007 I was introduced to a new form of affiliate marketing – Cost-Per-Action (CPA).

The beauty of CPA is that you don’t have to make sales in order to make money.  Now the reality is that to make real money you do need to sell items – just like traditional Affiliate Marketing.  However, you can make money without selling.

The primary examples of no sales CPA offers are free gift card offers and free downloads (like toolbars).

CPA Training: Arbitrage Conspiracy

In Jan. 2009 I started the Arbitrage Conspiracy training for mastering CPA offers.  The course was pricey – $2000.  I honestly would not recommend it to anyone.

Problems

I had several problems with the course.  Here’s a quick list of them:

1. Claims in their marketing material were misleading if not completely inaccurate.
2. The guarantee was not fully explained.  Specifically the guarantee required that I had to spend $3000 to $4000 in order to get my $2000 back.
3. Following their step-by-step examples was the fastest way to lose money.
4. The “tools & products” they recommended were, in my opinion, because of their high affiliate commision rather than their utility or superiority to free tools.
5. All of the course material was done via recorded (Camtasia) powerpoint presentations.  This would have been fine if the presentations weren’t amatuerish.  This would have been fine if the supporting PDF files had contained more 4 bullets.

Tactics and Skills

Now that I’m done complaining I will list a summary of most of what they taught:

1. How to get signed up with the CPA networks
2. How to determine a good offer
   • Primarily an assessment of the landing page
3. How to sign up with Google AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN AdCenter
4. How to write ad copy for Google
   • The focus is on Google because it is more restrictive than Yahoo or MSN
   • This is primarily little tweaks to your ad copy to improve Click-Through-Rate (CTR); the tweaks are good but most of them exist for free (in whole) in dozens of places online
5. How to find keywords
   • Unfortunately the keyword section tells you eight ways to generate keywords, combine and run with it…
   • There was lots of “be creative” and no module on filtering of the keyword list; their methods can easily generate thousands of keywords
   • Advertising on all of the keywords that you generated will cost you a lot of money
6. Direct Linking vs. Your Own Domain and Site
   • The Arbitrage Conspiracy folks made a lot of claims about being able to run these offers without a site; however, you really can’t if you wish to advertise with Google (only 1 advertiser per display URL)
   • That said, I think direct linking is a bad business model (so did the AC folks)
7. Turn Break Even & Barely Profitable Campaigns into Very Profitable Campaigns via Keyword Tracking
   • This is one of those areas where the product they pushed was StatsJunky – a tool that looked very good but is also very expensive and there was no mention at all of the free alternatives (which are less ideal but do exist)
8. Business Management

The information the AC folks provide is useful and broad.  However, I didn’t think it was very deep and they were repeatedly hesistant to show us any real examples (profitable campaigns).