Last week I wrote about the fastest way to get started in an online business, with Affiliate Marketing. Now I want to introduce you to the “second” fastest way to get started in an online business, with CPA Marketing.

What is CPA Marketing? CPA stands for “Cost Per Action”. It’s very similar to affiliate marketing, except here instead of getting a percentage of a sale, most of the time you get a set amount of pay for a set action. For example, when a company like Netflix is using a CPA Network, you might have to get a user to sign up for a free trial of Netflix. If you do, you’ll get a set amount of money, even if the user doesn’t end up signing up for a membership.  Others work just by sending leads.  If you send someone to a CPA offer and they give the company their email address, you’ll get a set amount of money.

CPA Marketing is very similar to Affiliate Marketing. The biggest difference is that you’re getting paid for an “action” instead of getting paid a small percentage of a purchase. The second biggest difference is usually the pay. With affiliate marketing, much of the time you’ll end up making a very small percentage of a sale (at least with many retail stores you’ve heard of – this is definitely not true for all affiliate programs), while with CPA Marketing you can easily find offers to promote that make you $10+ an action, and sometimes much more than that.

You may be wondering why I called this the second fastest way to get started in an online business, especially since it sounds so similar to Affiliate Marketing. The only reason I put Affiliate Marketing as a little bit faster was because it may be easier to convince people to buy things from stores they heard of…especially if you don’t have a list and are sending the links to people you know.

CPA Networks do have something up on Affiliate Networks though. In order to make money from an affiliate offer, most likely someone has to spend money to buy something. In many CPA offers though, no one has to buy anything. Just by getting someone to give their information, get a freebie, or sign up for a free trial can earn you a good income.

In my next post I’ll talk more about CPA Networks, how they work, and what types of things you can expect from them.