Many internet marketers make their money by dealing with affiliate programs or with CPA networks that have various kinds of offers they can push in order to make money. Most of these companies are legitimate and will pay you the earnings that you have made on time, every single time. But there are a couple of bad players in the industry. Here are some ways to spot and avoid them:

• Do some research first

Before even signing up for a network simply doing a Google search for their name can bring you a lot of information about the company. You will often find blog posts, forum posts and articles that mention them. Read these. See what other internet marketers are saying about them and look at whether the general opinion is positive or negative.

• Be wary around “start ups” and smaller networks

If a company has not yet established their reputation in the industry, remember that things can go in two ways with them. Either they will grow to become a productive and successful network or they will fold. If it’s the second thing that happens, things are not likely to be pretty. There have been several cases of networks going under and skipping out on tens of thousands of dollars of payments to affiliates. The large majority involved CPA networks which were operating for less than a year.

• Be careful around networks who seem to approve everyone

While there are some notable exceptions to this, such as Commission Junction and ClickBank, which are very reputable networks, as a general rule you should be quite wary around a network that seems to approve every publisher that applies without giving them a phone call or emailing them to ask them about their marketing methods. While you may think it is convenient, this can cause problems down the road, if large amounts of fraudsters manage to sign up and merchants start dropping the network.

• Carefully check the terms of any offers that you run and ask questions if necessary

This is especially the case for “trial” or “membership” offers. While you may be offered a good amount for every sign up, some merchants have been known to use underhanded tactics if not enough of the sign ups that you refer have converted to full members on their end. Some may falsely accuse you of sending fraudulent leads or deliberately using bad quality traffic and refuse to pay you. For this reason, it is very important that you check the terms of the offer to see if the merchant has any special requirements with regards to the type of traffic you can send and its productivity.

• Work with multiple networks and run different offers

It is not a good idea to focus all of your marketing efforts for the month on just one offer or on offers from only one network, no matter how profitable they may seem. Spread out your traffic around several different offers in the niche on different networks. That way, if there is any problem with one of them, you will still be getting paid by the others.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action.  CPA networks are becoming very popular for internet marketers to make money online because companies are paying high commissions for leads.

To give you an example i use a number of CPA networks which ill talk about in a minute that have a number of companies that will pay you commission for every lead you send them.  For example if you send your email lists/website traffic to the advertisers landing page and your referrel puts in their email address to receive whatever they are selling you can earn upto $15 just from your referrel putting in their email address.

I did an experiment the other day and put a link on my facebook status for anyone who wants to make $10 to fill out a free survey.  5 of my facebook friends clicked on the affiliate link in my facebook status and i made $50 just from them completing a quick 2 minutes survey on the advertisers website.

Big named brands spend millions of dollars a year on advertising and the reason they pay so much for leads is because once they have your referrels contact details they can then create a relationship with them and send them offers via email or even sell on their contact details to third partie companies which is a massive business.

I recommend the following CPA networks as they pay the based commissions.

CX Digital Media – Click Here To Register

Neverblue – Click Here To Register

When you fill out your application make sure to fill out the following:

Your complete address, contact telephone and email address that is registered with one of your domain names, e.g john@yourdomain.com , also one of your main websites that you will use to promote their CPA offers.  Make sure your website is upto date and looks professional and related to the niche your hoping to promote.  As your will go through a verification process before you can get accepted onto the network.

You will get a phone call to verify your account, which is normal.  Activation takes about 48 hours