Even though it may have gotten more difficult in recent times, it is still possible to use Craigslist (and other classified ads sites) to promote some CPA offers, and there are still many merchants and networks which allow this kind of promotion. While these tips work for Craigslist, they will obviously be good for any other similar classified ads site out there.

However, many people report having problems, such as getting their ads flagged within minutes, or having their ads not appearing. Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of classified ads sites when used with CPA campaigns.

• Don’t direct link to a CPA offer

While this may seem pretty obvious, a lot of new marketers seem oblivious to the fact that if you put an affiliate link directly into your ad, you will get flagged down rapidly, or your ad will not appear at all. You basically have two ways that you can use to direct traffic from a classified ads site to an affiliate or CPA offer. Either you build your own landing page and register a domain for it, or you have people email you and then reply to them by email. The approach that you will use will vary depending on what you are promoting, but the second option seems to be the most popular and effective for the majority of CPA offers.

• Don’t use an autoresponder

An autoresponder is an email feature which automatically sends a reply with a pre-formatted message to anyone who sends you an email. Autoresponders have their value and are in fact extremely useful for some types of marketing. However, for classified ads, they are not a tool that you can use. Whenever someone gets an automated response to an email that they’ve sent, it automatically shows that something “spammy” is going on. Therefore, you are highly likely to get your ad flagged as spam very quickly if you use an autoresponder. I know that replying to emails personally takes time, but this is something that needs to be done if you want to have success. The task could be outsourced very cheaply as well. If you have to use an autoresponder (not recommended and we will get into more reasons later on) at least use one which is on a delay of a few hours and does not reply to emails automatically as soon as they are received.

• Be creative in your ads

There are certain words such as “make money online” which will get your ad flagged right away. Furthermore, avoid copy pasting ads that you saw in an e-book or in a forum post that details some money making method for Craigslist. These have a high tendency to get flagged right away, since chances are there are many other people who have used them before you. Therefore, the bottom line here is: the ad that you post needs to be creative.

One of the ways to earn money by using CPA networks is by using a content locker, also called a gateway on your website. This is something that can be used with incentive offers to increase conversions. Now what exactly does a gateway do? The principle is very simple. When a user gets to your page, a content gateway will pop up, asking them to complete a CPA offer before they get access to the content presented. These offers are usually short email submits or mobile offers that pay around $1 to $2 a lead.

Is this better than simply having CPA text ads or banners on your site? Well, the answer is usually yes. Many people are used to seeing ad banners, especially the cheesy “Shoot X to get an iPhone” type of ads and will usually ignore them. However, with a content gateway, they will actually have to complete one offer before they get access to the content that they want. Sure, some of them will simply walk away and go to another website. However, some of the visitors will complete the offer, especially if they are really looking forward to seeing the content that is presented on your website.

Many of you may be thinking: sounds great! How do I set this up on my site? There are essentially two ways to do this: either you can sign up for a CPA network such as CPA Lead or Adscend Media, that offers CPA content locking gateways, or use a third party script with incentive offers from another network. Of course, the first would be much easier, as the script has already been designed by the CPA network and all you would need to do is to insert some pre formatted code on your website. If you do use a third party script with another network, make sure that you only do so with incentive offers. Also, discuss with your affiliate manager first to see if you are allowed to do so, to make sure that there are no restrictions on this type of marketing with the network that you are using.

One question that remains is: should you use this on your site at all? The answer here will vary. If you have a completely new website that you’ve just started sending traffic to, then this might be a good idea. However, on the other hand if you have an established site with plenty of regular visitors, you may want to think twice before using a content locker on it. This is because if you are already making a good amount of revenue from these visitors from “regular” CPA offers or pay per click ads, you might risk losing some of your regular traffic if these visitors don’t really like the idea of filling out a CPA offer to get to your content. But there is always a compromise, for example you can set up a “premium” section of your website that requires filling out a CPA offer to access. Or you could display the gateway only to random users, or after they have visited a certain amount of pages on your website.

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.

You aren’t required to be a SEO expert to understand the fact that in order for your website to go up in rankings on Google, you will need to have lots of quality backlinks. These are essential for anyone who is trying to get more traffic through organic search results. While building enough backlinks to have an effect on your traffic can take some work and requires patience on your part, the results will be well worth it. A question that is often asked in webmaster and internet marketing communities is how to get more backlinks for your site. There are many places that you can get backlinks to your site. Here are a few examples:

Article directories

These are sites where you submit an article that is related to your niche. Depending on the rules of the article directory, you can either include links inside the body of your article, or in a signature box at the end. This will help you get traffic in two ways. You will create backlinks to your site and will get some traffic from people who read the article and then click through to your site. Search engines hold article directories in high regard, so they are an essential tool for you to use in your search engine optimization efforts.

Blog comments

On many niche blogs, you can leave a comment after reading a post and include a link to your website. It is important, however that you do not simply spam comments and actually write something useful. Also, make sure that the blog you are commenting on is related to your niche to give you the maximum quality backlinks.

Classified ads sites

Here again, you can get traffic in two ways. Either from the increase in search engine ranking due to your backlinking efforts, or from the people who will see your ad and click on to your site. Not all classifieds sites allow you to insert links in your ads, so check beforehand. Some let you post a link if you pay a small fee.

Video sharing sites

These are places such as YouTube and Dailymotion, where you upload videos for other viewers to watch. Creating your own videos and uploading them is a great way to get traffic from video sharing sites. But a fact that a lot of people forget is that you can also make use of these sites in order to get backlinks as well. Many sites allow you to place a link back to your sites in various places, such as on your profile, in the description of videos that you upload, as well as in comments on other people’s videos.

Remember, backlink building is an activity that will boost your traffic, but it has to be done gradually to have the best results. If done correctly, you will soon notice that your site is increasing in position in search results for your desired keyword and that you are getting more visitors from search engines.

We all know that article marketing is an effective way to get traffic to your website. Whether it is a product that you own, or an affiliate offer that you are running, it is a very effective way of getting the visitors that you need. It also gives you the opportunity to get free traffic. Article marketing can bring you traffic in two ways, either by having readers who see your article click through to your site via your links, or by building backlinks that will help you rise in search engines for your desired keywords. While it is an effective marketing method, there are some things you need to keep under consideration to get the most out of it.

Many who are starting out in article marketing wonder just how long the articles have to be in order to be effective. The general rule is that an article of around 300 to 400 words in sufficient. You see, online readers typically have a short attention span. Any longer and they are likely to lose interest an feel bored. Unless your content has truly captivated them, they wouldn’t bother with reading a long wall of text. If you think that you have more to say than what would fit in a 400 word article, it would be better to split your ideas into two articles or so.

Remember, when you are doing article marketing, the goal is to get the reader to visit your website. Give them some basic information about the topic that your readers are interested in, but leave them wnting to know more about what you are talking about. If your article gives them all the details that they were looking for, readers will see no point in continuing on to your site.

If you want your articles to be useful in getting you backlinks in search engines, the content will have to be unique. Submitting articles to various respected article directories and websites is naturally a good thing to do, but the search engines are looking for content that is unique. Therefore, don’t simply submit the same article over and over. You can, instead, rewrite the article so that search engines will consider it to be unique.

There are a few tools and services available online which claim to be able to automatically take content and make it unique. If you use one of them, make sure that the articles come out as readable to a human being, rather than some gibberish which looks like it was written by someone who doesn’t even speak English. If readers can’t even understand what you are saying, they are quite unlikely to want to visit your website afterward and will simply go read something else. Therefore, it could be much better to rewrite the articles yourself or pay a freelancer a couple of dollars per article to do it for you. The results will usually be quite better.

In the online marketing world there are various ways to draw traffic to your website and therefore earn money by promoting products or services. These could be your own creation or various kinds of affiliate offers that you could be running. Article marketing is one of these methods. What exactly does it consist of? Let’s have an overview:

Simply put, article marketing makes you use articles that are related to the niche of whatever you want to promote in order to get traffic to your website. For example if you are promoting a fax to email solution you could write about the advantages of using such a service. They could also be in the form of a review about a certain product or service. Basically, the content will need to make the user want to buy what you are promoting without sounding too much like an advertisement.

Now where do you post these articles? The most common places used by internet marketers to put up their articles are article directories such as Ezinearticles and GoArticles. They have the advantage of receiving a lot of traffic every day and are ranked very high up in search engines such as Google. You could also post them on blogs or other sites which allow users to submit content.

How do articles actually get you traffic? There are two ways actually. The first one is through the links which are found in your article. Depending on where you post them you would be allowed to either insert links in the body of your article or in your signature (also called a resource box). A reader who is interested in finding out more about what you’re talking about can click on the link and then proceed to your website.

Articles can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. By submitting your articles to high authority websites that are related to your niche and using the keyword that you want to target as your anchor text, you will get some great backlinks to your site. This could increase the position of your site on search engines. Note that building backlinks and doing search engine optimization through article marketing is a process which takes time. Unlike pay per click ads or email marketing, the results will not appear instantly. However it can be well worth it in the end.

Anyone who wants to give article marketing a try will need to know that it is a marketing method that will require some patience and dedication. You will need to write several unique articles and post them online. The traffic will start coming in slowly as more visitors start seeing your articles. But it does have the advantage of being one of the cheapest advertising methods there is. After all, it costs nothing to write the articles and submit them. It simply takes some time. This makes it a perfect solution if you don’t have much of a budget for online advertising.

If you are promoting any type of affiliate offer online, such as a Clickbank product or certain types of CPA offers, you will probably be searching for ways to increase your conversions and thus your revenues. Generally, there are two ways to promote an offer, either direct linking to the offer or creating a landing page. But there is a type of landing page that is being often used by internet marketers out there due to its potential to bring in more conversions: the multi product review page.

Now how does it work and is it complicated to set up?

What this type of landing page consists of is basically creating a comparison of a few offers (usually around 3) of the same category. So if you are promoting a dog training guide on Clickbank, you will basically include information and your affiliate link to 3 different Clickbank dog training products. Your reviews will need to be informational and generally positive, but it is possible to give ratings to the products and make one product appear as slightly better than the other ones. The other products are still “good” and useful to the buyer, it’s just that the top one offers the best value, or the best information, etc.

Setting it up is quite easy. Of course, the page needs to look good to the user and “professional”, not like something an 9 year old put together for his elementary school computer class. You just need to use a template that is related to your niche and structure the information well. You can find many review site templates for free just by browsing internet marketing forums or by doing a quick Google search. Some minimal web design is required, but you only need to know how to use a basic web editor. No need to design fancy graphics, logos, flash movies, etc. Then just get a domain related to your niche and upload it to the server. For some ideas on how the page is supposed to look like, just take a peek at how your competitors pages are doing and structure yours accordingly.

Why should I use this method? Will it be profitable?

This is profitable due to the fact that the user will feel more as if you are “on their side” and presenting information on various products, rather than pitching one product which will look like you are trying to sell them something.

While it is quite unlikely that someone will buy multiple products from the review site (since they all do pretty much the same thing), this is different for free offers. For example, if you are promoting survey sites, free biz opp leads or free dating site signup offers, a user could register at more than one of the sites thus making you more revenue than if you would have only been promoting a single offer. Feel free to try this method with different kinds of offers and see what the results are, then adjust your campaigns accordingly.

Google Adsense is one of the most overlooked areas of monetization of projects in internet marketing sometimes. A lot of bloggers and content creators know about Adsense, but many affiliate marketers and straight internet marketers over look it for other more lucrative offers.

The thing is, however, is that Adsense can be used alongside other offers of CPA, Affiliate links, and more. Adsense doesn’t get in the way of those offers and the bright shiny pictures of your affiliate links will overshadow the text based Adsense stuff, and that is a good thing. Adsense can be a compliment and not the major source of income, but can be a great supplemental offering.

The process to market for ad revenue from Google is fairly simple. Of course the ads which are served on your websites will have two ways of being shown on your website when using AdSense:

1. Ads served will be based off of keywords searched through Google to bring viewers to your site.
2. Ads will derive from relevant content on your site when they arrive from links or direct URL input.

So it is necessary to build up the content on the site to where the ads that appear are relevant to what you will want to be paid for. To look up the value of keywords you will be getting paid for, you can use the keyword tool from Google AdWords (under previous interface) to see the average cost per click of keywords and their synonyms.

Composing content for the website will then need to pull from these keywords that you want to rank for on Google and other major search engines. The content, once created with the appropriate keywords will then be posted to the site and will be indexed by Google over time. When traffic makes its way to the site and the ads are served for the content you provide, it will be more likely that the ads are targeted appropriately.

One of the important things to take note of is to never try to rank for keywords with too much competition. Although the payouts in cost per click on these ad keywords is higher, you will more than likely not rank high enough for those keywords to actually receive ads for those keywords. The best strategy is to try and rank for a range of keywords with average or little competition so that people who do see the site when they search will more likely to click ads when they arrive.