Endless Solutions Inc – Susan R. Davis

You can harness your mind for creativity and dramatically increase your ability to succeed.

The key to harnessing your mind is to utilize it at times when you have often allowed it to wander unproductively. Those times are powerful moments for your conscious and unconscious minds to work together on solving a problem.

What do I mean? Think about it like this. How many times have you driven down the road, or been a passenger in a car, and you are just staring out at the scenery as it flows by, with no conscious thoughts in your mind? You might go 10 or 15 minutes – or more – without even being aware of what is going on inside or outside of the car.

These are creativity moments – if you can train your brain to use them.

Create a Picture of the Problem

Instead of allowing your mind to just wander aimlessly, give it something to crank on. Picture a problem you are working on and define it in as much detail as you can mentally. Don’t focus on what you’ve done to solve it, or tried to do. Just create a strong mental picture of the issue at hand.

Harness Your Mind

Now harness your mind for the creativity boost. Allow yourself to free associate various issues surrounding the problem. Don’t try to control the process. Just let your mind wander, gently pushing it back towards the problem if you wander off course. If your mind jumps on something that you haven’t considered before, try to relax and gradually allow that thought to come to the forefront.

You need to treat these ideas with care and gentleness. If you grasp too tightly, it will squirt out of your brain and run away. Just ease towards it like you are reaching for a butterfly – slowly, gently, carefully. And embrace the idea.

Building Your Ideas

Now comes the fun part. Build that idea into its own deep thought. Focus on it and again allow your mind to wander, savoring the idea, exploring it fully. But never pushing too hard.

If you have another aha! moment, start the process again. See if you can begin to build a tapestry of these ideas, finding interconnection points, trying to slide pieces together into a bigger picture. If something doesn’t fit, bring it to the forefront of your mind as a “problem issue” and apply your creative mind to it. Does it start to fit? Or is it too far outside the box?

Your mind is a powerful instrument, and you should harness its creative power and put it to work. Any time you are doing something that doesn’t require serious thought – driving, walking, cleaning house, washing dishes, taking a shower – you can shift your focus to something that needs your attention.

Thoughts, ideas, problems. Anything that needs gentle guidance to escape the trap of a boxed-in mind. Creativity is all about thinking outside the box and seeing patterns in seemingly unrelated things. Harness your mind and apply it to these issues, and you’ll have a powerful outside-the-box thinking and problem-solving tool.

Tags: creativity, harness your mind, Productivity, think outside the box

This is the third and final part of my new article series on Cost-Per-Action (CPA) marketing. In this series, we cover the basic ideas involved in CPA marketing and how you can use them in your business. In Part 1 of our Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Marketing series, I gave you a general overview of CPA marketing, how it is used, and how it is different from other forms of marketing. In Part 2 of our Cost-per-Action (CPA) Marketing series, we discussed how an advertiser can use CPA marketing to increase leads, conversions, and sales.

Now, as we conclude in Part 3, we’ll finish by discussing how you can increase your lead generation and sales activities with CPA.

How Do You Use Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Marketing as an Affiliate Business?

As I mentioned in Part 2, there are a number of permutations of the cost-per-action method. These include:

• Email and Zip submits, where you are paid a commission if sometimes submits an email or zip code to an advertiser’s offer.
• Short form and long form submits, where you are paid when a visitor fills out a form with various kinds of information. Some of these forms are very
  short (only 3 or 4 fields), while others can be 10 to 20 fields, or even multi-page forms. The payouts are generally much higher for the longer forms. There are often many variations of payment requirements for these forms, such as the visitor meeting certain requirements.
• Name and phone number submits to funnel a person through a call center – basically the same as the short-form submits.
• Contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways where you are paid for a visitor’s registration to these.
• Downloadable software such as game-interfaces, utilities, and toolbars where you are paid after a successful download. Sometimes the user has to register as well.
• Free trial offers are available as well, where a visitor signs up for a free trial, which may or may not be tied to a continuity program (a user has an ongoing membership fee to s site).
• PIN submit offers – a user submits a cell phone number and their cell is sent a PIN number, which is entered onto the web site’s form to verify the phone number. Sometimes the user’s phone is charged for something. Sometimes, this is just used as a registration method to obtain their phone number.

Other Advantages of CPA Marketing in Your Business

There is another aspect of CPA Marketing that you can use in your own business. You are driving traffic to the offers, just as you do with other affiliate marketing. However, just like other affiliate marketing, you don’t want to lose out on future opportunities to market to this targeted audience. You can direct traffic to a landing page that contains an opt-in form (also called a squeeze page). If you capture emails from these people before referring them on, you can maintain a relationship with them and present other relevant CPA offers to them.

While the additional page in the middle of the sequence may lower your traffic to the CPA offer, there are 2 benefits. You capture names for your list, and the visitors who click through have qualified themselves more, which may lead to a higher conversion rate on the offer page. In other words, the traffic to the offer may be lower, but the end result of higher conversions may positively affect your ROI.

Special Tips for Maximizing Your ROI

Payouts on these various types of offers can vary considerably. An email, zip, state, or PIN submit might be less than a dollar all the way up to several dollars, while a short or long form offer might go as high as $60-$70 per submission. Also, if the advertiser runs their offers on several networks, possibly with different creatives, they might have different payouts on different networks. If you like an offer, you should always try to check out the advertiser on different networks. Offer Vault is good for comparing offers on many networks.

If you discover that the offer is available on multiple networks, you could do 2 different things. If you are on both networks, you could split-test the offers to see which performs better. You could also negotiate with your Affiliate Manager for a higher payout. Some networks pride themselves on meeting or beating the offer payouts of other networks. You can always ask.

Another important tip to consider is your value to the network and advertiser. If you are driving a lot of traffic to an offer, or your traffic is converting really well, or if your leads are particularly high quality, you can sometimes negotiate a higher payout than normal for the offer. Your Affiliate Manager can go to the advertiser and negotiate on your behalf.

Tracking is extremely important when you are a CPA affiliate. You need to keep a close eye on your traffic generation costs and make sure that your return on investment (ROI) justifies CPA marketing offers over other forms of income generation.

CPA marketing offers new marketing opportunities for you as an affiliate. It’s always a great idea to have lots of tools in your toolbox, and CPA marketing is certainly a flexible and useful one.

Do you have any experience as an affiliate or publisher with CPA? Have you had any particular successes or problems that you can share? Do you use a network (or more than one) or do you promote for a company who does it in-house? We’d like to hear about it here.

Tags: Affiliate, CPA, marketing

This is the second part of my new article series on Cost-Per-Action (CPA) marketing. In this series, we cover the basic ideas involved in CPA marketing and how you can use them in your business. In Part 1 of our Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Marketing series, I gave you a general overview of CPA marketing, how it is used, and how it is different from other forms of marketing.

Now, in Part 2, we’ll continue with how you can increase your lead generation, conversions, and sales activities with CPA. And finally, in Part 3, we’ll cover ways that you can use CPA marketing to supplement and grow you business.

How Do You Use Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Marketing as an Advertiser?

Basically, CPA marketing as an advertiser allows you to create a sales funnel that has a stair-step process for gradually converting a lead into a customer. Instead of trying to convert a prospect on first contact, you open yourself up to being able to take a multi-tiered approach.

Traditional lead generation allows this by signing someone up as a subscriber and then reaching them through an email autoresponder sequence. However, with the spam and email deliverability problems in today’s online world, this has some limitations as your sole marketing channel.

What Cost-per-action marketing does is opens up your opportunities. For example, you could do any of, or a combination of, the following:

• Create a zip-submit or state-submit form that would allow you to collect that information from a visitor, and then you could channel them further into the sales funnel while simultaneously customizing your content to meet their profile. You could use geo-targeting to fine-tune your message.
• Create an email-submit CPA offer. This could funnel people into your subscriber process, or just add them to a specially-tailored autoresponder sequence. You could even customize them based on whether or not it is a free-email-address.
• Create a short-form or long-form offer collecting some basic information about your prospect and then use that information to filter them through the funnel in different ways depending on their choices.
• Collect a name and/or a phone number and send it through your offline phone marketing team.
• Run a contest, sweepstakes, or give-away and pre-qualify leads with collection of certain information. You can use this information to refine your marketing practices (who is interested in what kinds of offers?) as well as funneling them into other marketing channels like those above.
• Offer downloadable software such as usable software or toolbars that can maintain a more continual contact with your prospects, allowing you to send them messages, pop up advertising, or offer them special benefits. If you combine this with some kind of registration, you can add email marketing to the mix or have the software logging them periodically into some kind of member area where you can collect additional information, incentivize things, advertise on your behalf or as an affiliate, and much, much more.
• Free trials are also popular. People get something for free, and you have the opportunity of channeling them into a continuity program or email or phone marketing..
• With the increased cell phone customer base, PIN submits are also becoming popular. The online form requests a cell phone number, and a text message with a PIN in it is sent to the phone. You enter the PIN on the onine form to confirm. Often related charges are billed to your phone bill, which allows the advertiser to say that you don’t need a credit card!

The best part of CPA marketing is the flexibility. You can pre-qualify prospects through the system in gradually-increasing decisions on their part, easing them through the system instead of shocking them with a request for a credit card. Prospects are more tight with their wallets these days, so any methods that can boost conversions are helpful.

Leveraging Your Marketing Budget

Another advantage to using CPA Marketing for your business is that you can leverage your marketing budget much more effectively. Like with traditional CPS marketing, you are only paying for results. However, you do have to do more monitoring. You want to make sure that your campaign is collecting quality leads and actions, and that it is affecting your sales funnel with increased conversions and sales. Since you are paying prior to a sale you want to ensure that your results are of sufficiently high quality.

One answer to this dilemma is to use a CPA network to present your offers. They are experts in CPA marketing and can help you to get the most out of your campaigns and budget. They monitor their affiliates closely and make sure that they are helpful rather than harmful and can even shut down an affiliate’s access to your offers if you need to improve your results.

The other positive leverage factor is scalability. You are leveraging the efforts of all of the CPA affiliates who are promoting your offers. The work of many can be much more effective than the work of just your marketing team, not only in reach but also in creativity. Who knows? They might even develop a new technique that is particularly effective that you can adopt for your own.

Using a Network versus In-House Tracking

There are a number of reasons that a network can benefit you. They bear the cost of maintaining high-quality tracking systems, allowing you to spend your marketing budget on more direct methods of success. They interface with your affiliates, so you don’t have to manage them directly, or handle their payments, or monitor them.

However, they get a cut of your fee in return, which skews things slightly so that they are more likely to want higher performance, even if it doesn’t get you the best leads. You need to make sure that they are looking out for your best interests at all times. If not, find another network. If you prefer to go it alone, you’ll have more overhead to manage, but if you already have an affiliate program in place, with tracking software, a help desk, and staff, then expanding out into a CPA program as well as your current CPL or CPS system might be in your best interests.

In the end, CPA marketing is certainly worth taking a look at. It’s flexible, scalable, and can be a great way to market test before rolling out a full product line.

CPA marketing offers new marketing channel opportunities for you as an advertiser. In Part 3 of this Cost-per-Action marketing series, we’ll discuss how you as an affiliate marketer with your own business can use CPA marketing to increase your business profit.

Do you have any experience as an advertiser with CPA? Have you had any particular successes or problems that you can share? Do you use a network (or more than one) or do you handle it in-house? We’d like to hear about it here.

Tags: Advertiser, CPA, marketing