Firstly, what are CPA affiliate marketing programs and what does CPA stand for? CPA stands for Cost per Action, which means that you as an affiliate gets paid for an action taken by one of the visitors who have signed up for the offer that was being promoted. Examples of CPA offers are email or zip submits, completing a survey or actually purchasing a product. I am sure you have seen offers which request you to provide your email or zip code in order to obtain further info or an e-book.

You then get paid and the offer converts the moment the email or zip code is provided. CPA affiliate marketing programs are networks that provide a conduit between you, the affiliate and the product owner or advertiser. Affiliates have a wide variety of CPA offers to choose from which also includes lead offers which is very popular in the loan and car loan industry. All you need to do to get your commission is to drive traffic to the offer and get people to fill in a lead form and they do not have to actually take out a loan in order for the offer to convert.

Unfortunately it has been my experience that it is very difficult to get accepted into CPA networks as some networks are more picky than others and even experienced marketers don’t get accepted into CPA networks. How do you then get accepted into CPA networks? I have a set of guidelines which you can follow which will make it a bit easier.

Firstly you should never fill in your domain or website details in your application. They always give you the option to provide it but I just leave it blank as for some reason as soon as I provide it I get rejected. The reason is probably that the network actually goes and visits your site to see what it looks like and how many visitors you get.

Secondly always provide them with your real name, address, email address and phone number. If they ask you what instant messenger are using, you should always use AIM or MSN as for some reason they like people who use AIM. If they ask how you heard about their network, you must say through forums as this shows you are not a complete beginner and have some experience in affiliate marketing.

Some networks will unfortunately make it compulsory for you to enter a website address, so what you can do is to search for available domain names in say Go Daddy or Name cheap and see which ones are available, but don’t buy the domain name. They will also ask you to say how much traffic you are getting and what sort of traffic. Reply that you have problems with your credit card company and was not able to pay for your hosting, but that it will be sorted out shortly. Also mention that you get most of your traffic through Pay Per Click on Google and get about 40000 visitors per month.

If asked if you are registered with other affiliate networks say yes but that you are not comfortable providing the details of these networks at this stage. Next is the phone call. The network will usually say that they will call you within the next 48 hours. The trick here is to call them first to finalise your registration.

There are fortunately hundreds of CPA networks out there that you can choose from and you will get accepted to a few of them.