The Advertiser’s Edge: Vic Strizheus on Setting Your Rate and Testing a CPA Offer Before You Spend a Dollar

You’ve got an offer, or you’ve found one worth promoting, and now you need it in front of people who actually take action. Not browsers. Buyers, or at least people willing to fill out a form. Your first instinct might be to go find affiliates yourself, one relationship at a time, and beg them to send traffic your way. Vic Strizheus spends this session showing you a faster route: let a CPA network’s own affiliates, the ones it has already screened, do that work for you, and then hands you the exact tools to figure out what to pay them and what your landing page should look like before you spend a dime testing it live.

Why is it easier to pay for traffic than to become the one sending it?

Vic points to MaxBounty as one of the networks worth checking out, and uses it to make a broader point about how these networks are built. Getting accepted as a publisher, meaning an affiliate who drives traffic for other people’s offers, is genuinely hard. Networks put applicants through hoop after hoop and test after test, specifically because they get flooded with people who sign up and then send garbage traffic. That filtering is a headache if you’re trying to become an affiliate. It’s a gift if you’re the one with the offer, because it means the publishers already inside the network have survived a screening process you didn’t have to build yourself.

That advantage comes with a say in exactly what kind of traffic reaches you. When you set up your offer with a network, you choose the sources you’ll accept and pay for: email marketing, pay-per-click, pay-per-view, or none of the above if you’d rather. One kind Vic tells you to rule out entirely is incentivized traffic, the kind built on sweepstakes-style promises. As he puts it, that’s when “somebody says hey fill out this form. I’m gonna give you a Ferrari” (his own deliberately exaggerated example). People filling out a form to chase a prize aren’t the same as people filling out a form because your offer actually spoke to them, and the difference shows up fast in how those leads behave afterward.

• Email marketing traffic, if you want senders who already have a list warmed up to your niche.
• Pay-per-click traffic, for people actively searching before they land on your page.
• Pay-per-view traffic, if you’re comfortable with a more passive placement.
• No incentivized or sweepstakes traffic. Ever, if you want leads that behave like real prospects.

How do you know what a lead is actually worth before you negotiate?

Most people setting up their first CPA offer are guessing at a payout number. Vic’s fix is to stop guessing and go read the market instead. Inside the network’s campaigns section, you can browse what other advertisers are already paying, category by category. Automotive and insurance-style categories tend to command a premium. A business opportunity offer sits somewhere else. A diet or trial offer somewhere else again. None of it is a secret once you know where to look, and none of it requires a single phone call to find out.

That number becomes your starting point in any conversation with a network. Instead of asking what you should pay, you show up already knowing the range other advertisers in your category are paying, and you negotiate from there instead of from zero.

Where do you get a landing page you can actually trust?

The second research tool Vic walks through is a site called OfferVault, and it solves a different problem: you don’t have to build a landing page from a blank screen and hope it converts. Search a niche, teeth whitening was his example, and dozens of live offers come back, each one already running with real advertiser money behind it. Click through to a full landing page preview and you’re looking at the actual page people are filling out right now, credibility badges and all, right down to the borrowed-trust press logos claiming coverage in USA Today.

The logic is simple once you see it: a page that’s still live, still being paid for, is a page that’s converting. As Vic Strizheus puts it, describing one of the offers he pulls up, “this offer pays $43 per lead right?” That’s not a number he’s inventing to impress you. It’s a number attached to a real, running campaign he found in about a minute of searching, and it’s the kind of proof that tells you the layout, the copy, and the trust signals on that page are worth studying before you build your own version.

What do you do with that page before you risk real money on it?

Here’s where the whole sequence comes together. Model a landing page after what’s already converting on OfferVault. Then, before you ever route a network’s paid traffic to it, test that page against other traffic sources you already have access to: pay-per-click, pay-per-view, an agency, even someone else’s list. Split test more than one version if you can. Let the data tell you which page wins instead of your own opinion of the design.

when you get it to there you bring it here you crush it

Only once you’ve got a page with real numbers behind it do you open an account with a CPA network and run a small test through it. The order matters. Prove the page cheap, on traffic you control, before you hand it to traffic you’re paying for by the lead. Skip that step and you’re paying a network to find out whether your page works. Do it in the right order and you already know the answer before the invoice arrives.

The full session covers more of Vic Strizheus’s own walkthrough inside a live network account, including how he reads a campaigns list category by category. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

So I want to show you a couple of things when it comes to networks. Okay, I'm gonna put actually a list of Networks that that I suggest you check out. All right. These are some of the More most reputable networks in CPA right now.

There’s something, a lot of these are giant networks. Max Bounty is one of them. So I’m just gonna give you a brief kind of walkthrough and just point out some very important details that you need to know about. Okay. So basically, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go to a, to a CPA network. Okay, I’m gonna, again, I’m gonna put a list below this video. You can also search, and you can go to Google’s, you know, and just do a search for, you know, CPA networks, and, and there is hundreds and hundreds of them. I’m gonna put down below this video some of the, some of the highest rated ones, okay, so Max Bounty is, is a really, really, really good network, I suggest checking them out for sure. And basically, what you’re gonna do, you see, by default, they just, they just, you know, advertise for publishers. So they attract, they want to attract a lot of affiliates.

Okay, now I’m gonna tell you, it’s a lot more difficult, okay, to become a publisher, to become an affiliate, than it is to actually get accepted with your offer and have affiliates dry traffic to you, to where you’re paying them money. Okay, let me tell you why that is. Because, as a publisher, okay, they have, they have a lot of affiliates who, who sign up as an affiliate or as a publisher. Okay, and then they send crap traffic, and then the network has to deal with, you know, with that, and they don’t want to do that, okay. So a lot of these networks, in order for you to become a publisher, they need to, I mean, they put you through so many hoops.

They put you through so many tests, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s unbelievable. But the good thing for you, or the good news for you, or for me, for somebody who’s gonna be, you know, an advertiser, right, where we’re gonna put our offers before those publishers is, you know, we just let the affiliate, the, the CPA network, kind of filter through all the, you know, all the, all this, you know, scammy ones, right, and also, and only put our offers before publishers that, you know, have been accepted, and they actually, you know, were put through tremendous amount of, you know, of filtering process, if you will, you know, through, through a lot of different filters in order for them to become a publisher. Which is good, right, which is really good.

What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go to the advertisers section here. Okay, and again, you can read a little bit more about them. You know, looks like they got 16,000 affiliates, right, they can generate traffic for you. And they can, they can, they can generate traffic. See, another cool thing I forgot to tell you in the last video is that you get to specify, you get to decide what kind of traffic you want to accept, and what kind of traffic you will pay for. Okay, so you can say, you know, I only want traffic to come to my stuff from email marketing, or I only want traffic from pay-per-click or pay-per-view. You know, I don’t want any pay-per-view traffic, or I don’t want any incentivize traffic, which I suggest you stay away from incentivize traffic. Okay, what is incentivize traffic?

Well? It’s, you know, when somebody says, hey, fill out this form, I’m gonna give you a Ferrari. I mean, that’s obviously, you know, exaggerated example, but you see, you get, you get the point, right? You want to stay away from any sort of sweepstakes?

You know, incentivize traffic, you just want to be pure, you know, advertising traffic to your landing page, and then people making decision to opt-in or not, based on how your landing page looks like. It makes sense. So you’re gonna click here on become an advertiser, fill out the form, and the process is very, very similar for all the networks. Okay, you fill out the form, and, you know, give them a couple days to contact you. A lot of times they will contact you, but if they don’t, you just follow up, you know, a lot of times they’ll, they’ll send you a confirmation email saying, hey, thank you for applying. You know, if you have any questions, contact us at this phone number, at this email, whatever, and just give them a couple days, you know, three days or four days, whatever, and if you don’t hear back from them, just call them up. Okay, check your email, and there should be a phone number for that network, or, you know, for, for your, you know?

Assigned account manager, give them a call and say, hey, my name is so so, my email is so so, I just wanted to follow up on my application as an advertiser. And again, they’ll look at you a little bit more, you know, serious, when you do that. Okay, so we can do that. Now, one other thing that we can do here is, let’s see if we can check out some of the campaigns. Okay, so click on campaigns, you know, check this out. Here are some of the campaigns that they’re running. Okay, so there’s different categories, as you can see, there is automotive. Okay, car quotes. Okay, and people, are, these are, you know, this, this will give you an example of what people are paying for, you know, per lead. Okay, so, and eight dollars per lead, you know, all the way up to seventeen dollars per lead. That’s, you know, if you’re in the automotive, you know, car quotes category, car loans. Okay, car warranties, you know, all these, as you can see here.

These are a little bit more expensive. Biz up. So if you’re promoting any kind of a business opportunity, right, Avon recruitment, look at that, Avon pays four dollars and ninety cents per lead. Okay, and their EPC is twenty nine cents, make sense, earnings per click. Success system, okay, work from home moms, okay, two dollars and seventy five cents per lead. Okay, trial offers, dating, okay, all these different, I mean, it will give you an idea of what people are paying for, so that, when, that way, when you negotiate, right, you can, you know, you’ll have, you’ll have a good base of what to kind of, kind of a good springboard, you know what I mean?

What, you know, what we’re working, but, you know, email submits, look at that, for electronics. I mean, if you happen to be in electronics, right? Every time somebody fills out a form, okay, this advertiser pays a dollar sixty, two dollars, whatever the amount is. Okay, financials, and all kinds of different categories here. Okay, now, another reason I wanted to show you is, this is this site called offer vault. Okay, offer vault comm, it’s also going to be below the URL I’m gonna post below this video.

Okay, but offer vault is a, it’s a pretty cool little site. It’s actually, it’s a giant site to where you can do a lot of research. Okay, so if I want to know, okay, I want to know, what are some of the highest converting? Lending pages on CPA. Okay, how do, how do you know what, what kind of landing page, you know? How do you know what kind of landing page to model after, you know what I mean?

Well, this site is gonna be of a tremendous help for you. So you can go here, is, let’s say, let’s say if you are promoting, you know, I don’t know, teeth whitening, right? You know, there’s, it’s a popular one. Teeth whitening, right? So then you can go and look at that. You can, you can take a look at this.

There’s 29 search results, right, for teeth whitening, and, you know, and, and, this offer, okay, all these are different offers, and this offer pays $43 per lead, right? So every time somebody fills out a lead, they pay $43, so I want to know, I’m gonna click on here, right? I’m gonna click on full landing page preview. Okay, and I’ll take a look at this and see how this landing page looks like, okay, so when people feel undrinkable, this form out, okay, this advertiser is going to pay $43 every time somebody fills this out, okay? Now, this is, I, you know, I assume this is on some kind of verification system as well, some kind of a double opt-in or something like that, right, but this will give you an idea of how, you know, the landing page is created. I mean, the graphics, right, they have, as you can see here, you know, featured, or, as seen on, USA Today, MSNBC, so all these, you know, credibility logos here, right, the copy, again, take a lot of the, you know, you can take a lot of the, you know, you can take a lot, a lot of the ideas for, you know, what you do from this, okay.

So let’s go back here real quick. So let’s say if you’re in work from home, okay, if you’re, if you’re in work from home, you’re promoting some kind of work from home opportunity, for example, you know, maybe your network marketing, so there’s 61 search results, right, and we’re gonna take a look at this, and, you know, people are paying, you know, this one is paying 75% per sale, so it’s, you know, that’s not really what you want, you want to pay for lead, right? So $56 per lead, okay, $43 per lead, p90 X extreme, CP and ID explain, $40 per sale, actually, $37 per lead. So let’s take a look at this right here and see what this is all about, okay? So this is some kind of teeth whitening as well, okay, business opportunity, business opportunity, okay, this up, Internet, some kind of wealth kit, okay, so, and, and, and you can take a look at, you can take a look at the details, okay, what people are paying. Again, I’m not, I don’t want to take a lot of time here, I, my friend, but as you can see here, you can, you can do a lot of research here, okay.

And you’ll be able to model a lot of the ideas, and a lot of the, you know, the structure of how the landing page is structured, what people are saying. If somebody is paying forty dollars, a hundred dollars per lead, right, and they’re here, chances are they’re probably converting. And if they’re converting, don’t you think you will have, you know, you’ll be able to pull some of the ideas and some of the things that you can model after, right, from the stuff that’s working for them, okay? So use offer vault, uh, as a tool for you to, you know, to get ideas from, for creating your own landing pages, because whatever is on here, I’m telling you, it converts. All right, so, um, that’s, uh, I’m gonna cut this video at about now.

Uh, in the next video, I will, um, I’ll just talk about how to get accepted, I mean, very, very easy, um, you know, just give you a couple ideas on how to get accepted. But bottom line is, this is, create a landing page, okay, you can model after, you know, any one of the landing pages that you see on offer vault, because this stuff is converting. Okay, create something for yourself, test it with other traffic sources, whether it’s PPC, PPV, or, you know, uh, you know, traffic, uh, agencies, or, or other people’s lists, okay, make sure you get some solid data. This is a good example of how to get accepted. So see what your conversions are. You can also split test, again, multiple different pages, okay, to make sure that you come up with the ultimate one, okay, the highest converting one.

Once you have the data, you come back to, you know, you go to a CPA network, open up an account, and, uh, right, and, uh, you know, and you put it up here, do a small test run, okay, and go from there, my friend. But I’m telling you, test it with other traffic sources first, okay? And when you get it to there, you bring it here, you crush it. All right, I’ll see you in video number tres.