Why Use a CPA Network?
Many affiliates, both experienced and non-experienced often ask the question, why should I use a CPA network or an affiliate network? The answer to this question is relatively straight forward, as there are several ways that a CPA network can help you grow your business. Here are some:
1) Cash flow management. One of the most difficult parts of being an affiliate marketer is the inconsistency of maintaining long term and profitable campaigns. In addition to this, the amount of money being paid out to traffic sources versus the amount of money coming in for the leads you’ve generated can be a huge problem for affiliates. As an affiliate, you want to keep your profitable campaigns running as often as possible, 7 days a week ideally. This is what sets your business apart from many businesses — you can make money every day of the year, Sunday through Monday, holidays, and even while you’re on vacation! While most direct advertisers will pay their affiliates, and even their networks on Monthly NET-15 or NET-30 payment terms, an affiliate network will determine preset revenue figures to pay you much quicker than this. For example, CPATrend pays it’s affiliates generating $2,000+ per month Bi-weekly NET-7, and it’s affiliates generating $4,000+ per month Weekly NET-3. This means that you will have more cash in your hand to reinvest into your successful campaigns and scale them up! Having to wait for Monthly NET-15 or NET-30 payments means you may have to pause your campaigns until you are paid, if you do not have strong cash flow.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, campaigns sometimes cannot wait that long, and thus a network can really come in handy when working towards strong cash flow.
2) Many Offers, Many Advertisers. While this may seem obvious, this is a strong benefit of working with a CPA network. Some networks are very general and have many offers in many niches. Other networks, such as CPATrend, have focused on one or a few niches so that they can best serve their affiliates. By having the wide selection of an affiliate network, you can quickly and seamlessly test offers from many advertisers without having to work on legal documents with each advertiser, invoice each advertiser, communicate with each advertiser on a frequent basis, and ensure payments from each advertiser. You simply have to deal with your account manager for the “one-stop-shop” service that a CPA network can provide you, and the network will do all of that time consuming work for you so that you can focus on what’s important, testing campaigns and finding profitable offers for your traffic.
3) Time Management. Building off of number 2, time management is crucial to the success of any business. An affiliate network takes countless hours off of the affiliates hands in an effort to help them seamlessly work on their business. Most affiliate businesses are a one or two man (or woman) show, and this means that your time is the most valuable asset you have. An affiliate network can spend days or weeks bringing new advertisers in, doing business development, working with their legal team, doing paperwork, managing relationships, doing the technical leg work for setting offers up, managing payments, etc. etc. While some affiliates are able to handle business development, money management, relationship management, AND managing their campaigns, most affiliates see the value in leveraging a CPA network to do most of this work for them!
4) Full Service Support. Although this is not true for all networks, CPATrend provides a truly “full service support” system. When you sign up and are approved into the network, an affiliate manager will reach out to you, ‘hand-deliver’ the offers that would best match your traffic with links, payouts, caps, and any other pertinent information. CPATrend has tons of data at it’s disposal, so taking our advice in terms of what offers will do well for your traffic will work out positively for your business more often than not. At the end of the day, it’s always the affiliate’s job to test offers and find the most profitable ones, but using the affiliate manager’s knowledge of what is working best is a great way to jump start your success.
5) Bounce Your Ideas. If you are able to trust your affiliate network, which you should be able to otherwise you should reconsider who you are working with, then you should be able to bounce ideas off or your account manager. With insights into what is working well, an account manager is the perfect idea to bounce your ideas off of and see what suggestions they can make. At CPATrend, we pride ourselves in our ability to work with our affiliates, while keeping discussions in the strictest confidence. If you share your thoughts with us and have questions for us, we will do everything we can to help you with your campaigns and make positive suggestions to help increase your ROI. It is tough having a business, but not being able to discuss it with people. Most people that you talk to as an affiliate, unless they are other affiliates, will have no idea what you do for a living, and will not be able to truly help you improve your business. So bouncing your ideas off of people in the same space, who have an interest in helping you improve your business and increase your volume is a great benefit of working with a CPA network that you can trust.