One of the top ways of monetizing websites is lead generation. Here’s how it works. Becoming a CPA affiliate is fairly simple. You sign up with numerous CPA Networks, drive traffic to the custom landing pages they provide or make your own landing pages, and get paid whenever a site visitor fills out and submits a form. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your CPA Offers is through PPC program like Adwords or Yahoo.CPA networks are clearinghouses bringing advertisers and publishers together. The advertisers provide custom landing pages and forms, pays the network commission for making it available to affiliates, and affiliates are paid for driving traffic and generating signups.

CPA stands for “cost per action.” The action is the site visitor filling out the form. Compared to traditional affiliate marketing, it is often a much easier and more lucrative way to monetize a website.

Traditional affiliates have a tougher job. They have to get the traffic, presell the product, and send visitors to the vendor through an affiliate link, hoping to generate something like 1% to 5% sales. Conversions are highly dependent on the vendor’s sales letter and product. If the vendor does a poor job of selling, or has an overpriced or poorly received product, the affiliate has spent a lot of time, and perhaps money, for very little return.

A CPA affiliate also has to get the traffic, either by paying for it, or by putting together a well-optimized site that gets good search engine placement for certain key words. The site visitor fills out a form requesting information, rather than making a decision to purchase at that point. All it entails is that the visitor “request free information” and provide his or her name, email address, and maybe a physical address.

The CPA affiliate gets paid for providing a lead, rather than a sale. Many businesses pay well for leads. They plan on maximizing the long-term value of their customers. For instance, one lead can generate a commission of thousands of dollars to a mortgage broker. An insurance or credit card account is worth recurring commissions potentially for many, many years and even a ring tone lead has a long-term value, since the vendor will continue to market to that person over and over again, selling them many times what it cost to acquire them as a customer.

CPA is one of the best ways to monetize your websites. To really do well at CPA, you need to learn how to use traffic generation methods like Google Adwords effectively, and to build search engine optimized landing pages, but in the long run, CPA can be more lucrative than traditional affiliate marketing. The following is a list of CPA Networks that I’m a member of. I listed NeverblueAds because thus far, that is my best performing network. I recently signed up with the brand new Pepperjam Network and it looks very promising.

More CPA Networks