Today, CPA marketing is widely and popularly used in order to earn fast cash or a steady income through various online business opportunities and marketing platform including video marketing.
By 2019, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to Cisco. Video-on-demand traffic alone will have almost trebled.
Video is the future of content marketing. Not only are videos much easier to create than long-winded articles, they’re also consumed with a higher retention rate.
If you fail to tap into these hot trends, you‟ll be leaving tons of money on the table. And that’s why, the purpose of this guide is to help you tap into this amazing phenomenon and grow your business around it.
To ease your worries, I have put together a manual which will help you figure out an effective way and strategies to monetised the traffic to your CPA content locking offers to help you out there.
It is a simple guide to help you understand what exactly you are getting into and how to help you with marketing your CPA content locking offer using Youtube with different free to use websites and tools.
So, if you are ready to begin, let us start from the basics and take you to where you would like to end up!
Module 1
JOINING CONTENT LOCKING NETWORKS
What is Content Locking CPA
Content Locking is a type of incentivized CPA (Cost Per Action).
Basically through content locking CPA network, you can upload mostly anything you want (no porn, child abuse or wifi hack) and then you promote your content or files online.
Your locked content can be in the form of ebook, software, document, video, etc. and even your web content or links.
The catch is that the person that want to view or download your content/file, will have to complete a small survey or offer or to download and install a promotional software, in order to get access to it.
Usually the content will be unblocked immediately and will be blocked again after few minutes or few days depend on the setting or the lockers from each different networks. The user’s IP address will be use to determine the number of time he has accessed to the links or files and such the permission for him to gain access them.
The amount you get per survey completed differs from survey to survey and it is between $0.11 to $20.
And the surveys differ from country to country. The bottom thing is that the more views/downloads you generate, the more money you make.
Here are some examples of content locking survey which visitors need to complete in order to access the web content, files, links, etc.:–
So where should we promote content locking CPA? Well, there are more methods to promote your files: torrents method, youtube method, facebook method, blog/site method.
Here we use Youtube method ONLY because it is the most effective way to promote this type of CPA.
Why Content Locking
While the easiest way to profit from CPA is by promoting email/zip submits and content locking CPA, email submits have more disadvantages than content locking CPA, although some content locking CPAs do require to submit an email address but the publishers are willing to paid out because the main purpose of the survey carried out by them is to collect data for their marketing purposes.
Below are some of the disadvantages of promoting “Email Submit”:–
- Email/zip submits have a high scrub rate (CPA networks generally “charge back” any action credits to your account due to fraudulent leads, bogus/duplicate information, etc.) due to the increased fraud rate. Most of the ’email submit’ offers do not convert by just submitting an email address, the publisher only make a paid out after the user completed an PAID offer on one or more of the pages after the landing page, therefore, if you’re getting started with CPA, it would be better to avoid them especially the one which promote “freebie” and “gift card”.
- Super cheap traffic/clicks will be needed if you want to make email submit profitable.
- Visitors will be bombarded with spammy emails daily if you are promoting this type of email submit offers, this is worst when you promote this to your own lists, your lists unsubscribe rate will increase tremendously.
Joining Content Locking Network
There are hundreds of CPA networks which have the offers of content locking and some of them are pure 100% content locking networks. If you haven’t join any CPA network before, I will recommend you to join at least one of the following networks which I will guide you through 2 of them and show you how to set up a profitable CPA business.
These are the 4 networks which I highly recommend you to join:–
***Important Note:– While you can see from the above, although there are two networks which provide instant approval, you are still require to have a website/blog which are running by yourself in order to get into these networks easier.
I recommend you to register a domain (You should choose a domain name related to your niche) and get a website hosted if you haven’t done so, this is NECESSARY as you must host your own files in some of the locking content networks, furthermore, you CANNOT get your Youtube Annotation link and WordPress redirect plug-in works without your own website.
And having your own website has the advantages of using one of the approaches of keyword research and embed your video to others web properties. I will show you all of these later in this guide.
Anyway I will use Adscent Media as example for walkthrough the processes in the next modules. So please don’t worry, at this point you just need to join at least TWO of the above networks to maximise your profit. I will explain this later on.
How To Apply To a CPA Network? (Short Guide)
Be honest!
If you are honest to them, they will approve you.
Here are my tipps to get approved without problems:
- Only valid data (like your name, adress, etc.)
- Try to apply with a business eMail adress (so, everything expect a gMail or Yahoo adress or any other free hosting provider)
- For the „Experience“ – Question, answer it like that: If you don’t have experience at all in this kind of business: „Hi, my name is XYZ. Im pretty new in this business but Im willing to work and improve my knowledge on a daily basis. Im reading a lot about CPA in the past and could figure out my own method with Paid traffic which I want to apply with a few offers in your network. If for any reason you need to contact me, feel free to do so whenever you want/business times…“
Module 2
CREATING CONTENT/FILE & LOCK DOCUMENT
NICHE CHOOSING
Bear in mind that when choosing a niche you must always consider the most profitable one but you cannot avoid measuring their competitiveness as well.
Here are the top 5 most profitable niches for 2016 which you can choose to make your ebook and then the content of your video: —
1. Wealth
– Making money
– Managing money
– Keeping money
– Investing
– Real estate
2. Health & Wellness
– feeling better (fitness, more energy, etc.)
– Health prevention and cures (stop smoking, rid of acne, etc.)
– Aging
– Dieting and losing weight
– Healthy eating (nutrition, natural health, organic living)
– Stress reduction
3. Love & Relationships
– Dating
– Marriage
– Parenting
– Family
– Intimacy
– Conflict resolution
4. Personal Development
– Leadership development
– Self Esteem
– Motivation
– Career development
– Life coaching
– Spirituality
5. Hobbies
– Tennis
– Guitar and other instruments
– Scuba diving
– Mountain biking
– Scrapbooking
– Golf
– Dogs
I recommend you to choose ONLY ONE of the above niches at this point, when you can master the method in this guide then only you can use multiple niches AT THE SAME TIME to scale up your profit.
I will choose the niche of “Personal Development/Self Help” for an example in this guide as this is also a highly profitable niche (The U.S. self-improvement market was worth an estimated $11.17 billion in 2011 and it has been forecast 5.5% average yearly gains from 2010- 2014) but less competitive compared to the first three niches.
DOWNLOAD EBOOK & FILES
After you have chosen your niche, now it’s time to prepare the ebook for visitors to download once they are interested in the content that you provide.
Of course you can compile your unique ebook/files if you have some knowledge of the subject of the niche. But you can also download some free or paid PLR (Private Label Right) or MRR (Master Resell Right) products.
You can easily search for many of these in the internet but I recommend this one site which offers tons of high quality PLR ebooks/files for download:–
I will use this for an example.
First, no need to think about any subject which under the “Personal Development” niche, you just need to search ANY PLR/MRR product about one subject RELATED to personal development which you think your audiences may interested in..
**NOTE: Make sure the file that you’re going to download has “Giveaway Rights Included”, if you are unsure please contact the product owner for clarification.
For example, if you’ve searched a PLR MP3 titled “Meditation for Wealth”, just download or purchase it, only then you have an idea to create a video related to this subject matter, not the other way round to create the video first! So the later you will come out an idea of the video title maybe “How To Use Meditation To Reduce Stressing About Money?”
Therefore, in the video content you may talk a bit about meditation for money and then ask your visitors to download the MP3 file if they are willing to know more about the subject. Do you get the idea now?
UPLOAD FILES/EBOOKS
Before upload the file that you obtained, it is advised that if you can split the ebook, video or audio into 2 parts to become two separated files of Part 1 and 2. Doing this you will need any free PDF software for ebook which you can search in the internet.
For video and audio files, I recommend you to use Techsmith’s Camtasia Studio which has an awesome splitting feature build-in.
If unfortunately you cannot do this, you can just simply search and download another file which has a similar or related content with your first file.
The reason to have two separated files is because we are going to upload these to two different networks to maximise our profit. That’s why I advised you to join at least 2 networks in early of this guide.
So after splitting the file into 2 parts, just zipped it with another text file (I use Notepad here) with a link for Part 2 or related content file for your visitor to download. And again, of course the file was locked!
Done! And your zipped file is ready for uploading!
Here, the steps by steps uploading files to Adscend Media Network:
For Adscend Media:
Step 1—– In main page, clicks the Content Locking button.
Step 2—–In the drop-down menu, choose “Adlock Vault”.
Step 3—–In the next page, clicks “Create Vault”.
Step 4—–In next page, fill in your Profile Name.
Step 5—–Fill in your Header Text or use default text.
Step 6—–Uncheck all offers except “Surveys” under “Included Offers”.
Step 7—–Check the term under “Free Access”.
Step 8—–Under “Customize Landing Page”, select you preferable theme.
Step 9—–Clicks “Preview”.
Step 10—–Clicks “Save Changes” in the preview.
Step 11—–Browse your file for uploading.
Step 12—–Clicks “Save Tags” after the file has been uploaded.
Step 13—–In next page, clicks “Get URL”
Step 14—– Now you got the link of your file. Save it anywhere to your computer.
Module 3
PROMOTING FILES WITH YOUTUBE – CREATING VIDEO, UPLOADING & KEYWORD RESEARCH
VIDEO CREATING AND UPLOADING
You can produce your video simply using Slide Show with some free or paid tools, but what I advise is that using real people for demonstration in the video is the most effective way to attract view in Youtube.
I’m not going to discuss making video using variety of tools because you can simply find many tutorials in the internet. If you would like to spend more time to learn about other tools and editors, please see the Free Resources section.
What I’m gonna to discuss here are only 2 approaches for creating a quality video.
First one is by capturing yourself through Youtube feature if you are comfortable for speaking in front of camera. The second approach is by hiring some experts for the video demonstration.
***General Considerations before Creating Video (Important):
You video should not be longer than an average song clip, preferably below 4 minutes, (in order not to lose viewers’ attention). Make it simple, with clear messages and call to action.
I’m using ONLY 2 KINDS of videos which are easier to get view and traffic:
1) Instruction-Demonstration-How To
These videos are usually longer and more detailed. Google love them and they are often rank higher and included on Google top pages.
If you make a short video it is a good idea to start with questions related to the problem followed by the main benefit points (“How To” solve the problem and answers to the questions) and finally a clear call to action (click on the link below, for example) (I will show you how to use annotation and cards to build link within the video later).
2) Testimonials
These videos are usually used in addition to your main marketing video and represent live recording of a person who is using or have used the product.
Therefore this approach can only be done by someone other than yourself. The fastest approach is to hire someone to give you a positive testimonial after giving him the product for a review.
Okay, here are the 2 approaches:
Approach No.1
- Log in to your Youtube account (If you don’t have an account, just register one, it’s a simple process!).
- Create a new channel.
- Click “Upload” button at the top right.
- Click the “Record” button under “Webcam Capture”.
- Start speaking about your subject matter and at the end just request users to click on the link for some free stuffs.
- ● Just select “UNLISTED”.
Approach No.2
- Head over to Fiverr.com
- Search for “Video Testimonial” or “Video Voice Over”
- Find and pay at least 3 persons who have a high reputation and ask for creating a videos testimonial respectively.
- Preferably different people like hot chick, kids, elderly person, etc. for the video testimonial.
- Select for your preferable Gender, Age Range, voice style, etc.
- Provide voice script no longer than 1 minute.
- Once the videos are ready, create a new channel in your Youtube account.
- Upload to Youtube and select “UNLISTED” for the video.
**Very Important: Create and name a new channel differently every time you upload a video, this is to prevent your video being flagged by your competitor and hence your account will be terminated if you have 3 videos in a channel been stroked within 6 months. So upload 1 video to 1 channel is a safer way. You will need a Google Plus account as well to create multiple channels.
To summarize this section: Whether you are surprised or not, making videos is the easiest part. But what I highly recommend is to use the approach No. 2 in order to get fast and effective result as Youtube users like quality videos with professional presentation.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
This is probably the most important step in your ranking strategy.
General considerations:
Try to identify keywords with at least 1,000 searches per month and with less than 50,000 competitor pagesfor the “Phrase” option. If you go after these types of keywords it will greatly increase the chances to get your video on the first page of Google.
I would also like to address here the approach of finding socalled video retainer keywords. The idea is to type keyword candidates into Google and see if there are videos on pages 1-3 of the Google results. If videos are there then you are likely to rank your video on one of the first Google pages too. Conversely, if there are no videos then you should avoid such keywords.
Taking into account my own experience and the fact that Google’s algorithm always changes, my opinion is that it is often not the case. Therefore, while I agree that this is a valuable strategy I personally do not make it as one of the most important considerations.
Tip: Keywords starting with “How To” are very good candidates for ranking videos on Google.
Google Keyword Planner Research:
1) Approach No.1 (With your own website)
You should know what you are offering and have a general idea of the main keywords. If you have absolutely no idea what the main keywords are but at least have a website of the niche that your video is related to, you could do the following:
- Go to Google Keyword Planner
(https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)(Free Adwords Tool, no need to open an account, just use the feature in its first page only)enter your website address there. The tool will give you a set of relevant keywords what it thinks that site is about. Copy 15-20 most relevant keywords to your Notepad.
Below is an example of internet marketing niche keywords found:
- Now you have a set of keywords searched in Google. Sort them by relevancy.
2) Approach No.2 (Without your own website)
- Copy your niche’s main keyword AND the title of your video.
- Copy also your keywords in Google keyword Planner if you were able to use approach No.1, search and sort by relevance.
- Go to YouTube, paste them one by one and see what your competition is.
- If you see videos with the exact keyword match in the title and hundreds of thousands views it will be hard to rank.
- If there are videos with a lot of views (more than 30K views) but NO EXACT MATCHin the title – it is a candidate.
- Based on these criteria choose your best keyword
Note:If you are willing to spend money, such paid/free trial programs as Market Samurai will make these steps much easier – http://www.marketsamurai.com
VIDEO UPLOADING
By now you have your video uploaded and primary keyword ready. Login to your Youtube account, under “Video” click “Video Manager”. Select your desired video and click on “Edit”.
Under “Basic Info” there are 4 subjects to take note
Title
Each word in the title should start with a capital letter. The title should start (or at least include) with your primary keyword.
Criteria to be considered to optimise your title:
- Primary keyword
- Catchy title
- Asking a question
- Using power keywords such as discover, reveal, amazing, instant etc.
Tip: Use “How To”again in your title.
Description
Description should start with your link.
If you do not have your own website and have a long affiliate link, you should use URL shortening services like bit.ly. It shortens and cloaks the ugly looking link and, what is important, provides tracking data. But this make possible for your video been stroked by Youtube review team.
If you do have your own website with WordPress installed, I will discuss a free plugin which can shorten your CPA network’s link. This is a safer way to make your link.
**Important -Your link should be followed by the primary keyword. Primary keyword is the beginning of your description body text. If you start your description text on the next line below the link, please keep in mind that the collapsed version of description can cover the text.
Therefore, if you want the viewers to read your text, start it on the same line as the link.
Description criteria:
- Start with the link
- Include your primary keyword in the beginning
- Depending on the text length and keyword density, consider having your primary keyword in the middle and in the end of the text body
- Consider linking to an authority site in your description
**Important Tips:
1. In your video description, add the following links:
a. Your website
b. The link to the video (yes, the same video you are editing)
c. Add a link to a related video on your channel. (known as silo link building)
Tags
The importance of tags is underestimated. Often, marketers simply do not bother to do research and optimize them. Some consider adding many tags as spamming YouTube. However, what you will find is that you can easily rank for them, sometimes even higher than for your primary keyword. Therefore, the more tags you add the better.
You should include here your primary keyword and its variations as well as the product author’s name. Separate tags either by comma or include each tag (one tag could consist of several words) in quotes.
If you have several videos for the same niche or product and want them to appear together in the related videos column, you should have your special tag(s) for all of them. Other tags could be different for each video to spread out your chances of ranking for different keywords.
For example, if your video title is “Meditation For Wealth” by Jones Lo, it comes from a website Examplewebsite.com, and you have several Youtube Channels, consider all your videos to include the following group of special tags:
Meditation, wealth, Examplewebsite.com, Jones Lo & the “Channel Names”.
Criteria for tags:
- Primary keyword
- Primary keyword variations
- Youtube Channel Name **Important
- Author’s name
- your website address
- Special keywords (the same for different videos in the same niche/product)
- The more tags the better
Here is the screenshot of my 4 videos which appears together in the related videos column when users search for one of my videos. This was the outcome using the technique above:
Important Note:One interesting technique to generate/hijack traffic is the following. Find your competitor with lots of traffic/views. Copy his/her tags (and title); add them to your tags. Whenever his/her video is watched your clip will be in the related videos column.
Video Thumbnail
Tip: If your content allows, insert a good looking woman image around those points.
Under “Advanced Setting”, there are some crucial settings:
Comments
Consider setting it to “Allow all comments with approval only”.
Syndication -Everywhere, make this video available on mobile phones and TV.
Category
If you want targeted visitors – then choose the corresponding category. If your video is general and you want more traffic use common sense. For example, Entertainment, Music, Film and Animation would have more traffic than Science. Many niche free stuffs answer “how to” questions and correspondingly should go to How To & Style.
View Ratings –Yes, allow users to view rating.
Distribution Option – Allow Embedding, external sites may embed and play this video.
USING ANNOTATION AND CARDS
Annotations
- Very Important –This is a MUST HAVE and effective feature!
This is a great feature for profiting from CPA which people can click to your link within the video. You can use it in many ways: to direct viewers to what you want them to do, call to action, watermark the clip etc. But what is important is that annotations are text and could be crawled by Google. Use it to add at least your primary keyword.
One approach to add keywords is to minimize the text size and the time your annotation is displayed.
You can also make your text clickable to link to another YouTube video, playlist or channel.
Keep in mind though that those links are only internal for YouTube website properties. If you want to make a clickable overlay to an external link, example your own website linkuse this method below:
Note: This is the most important part of monetising your video, without this, user will simply watch your video without getting through your locked content and download your file.
First, click on your profile logo at the top right:
And then “Setting”
Click “Playback” under “ACCOUNT SETTING”, check “Show annotations and in-video notifications” & “Always show captions”.
After that go to “Creator Studio” and clicks “Status and features” under “CHANNEL”.
You can see your status of “External Annotations” is inactive. You need to verify your account to activate it.
Just clicks the “Verify” button.
In step 1, select your country, “Text me the verification code”, enter your phone number and submit.
In step 2, enter your verification code received from your phone. Your Youtube account is now verified!
Next step is to add your associated website. Go to “Creator Studio” again and clicks “Advanced” under “CHANNEL”.
Your status is pending now, clicks “verify” to get a code and then paste it to your website main page and upload to your server.
Go back to your Youtube account and clicks the “Refresh” button, now your channel is associated with your website!
Redirect Link – Using WordPress Plugin
Okay now you have your associated website activated, we should go to your WordPress website to create a safe redirect link which is going to integrate to your Youtube video.
Note: A direct link to CPA offer/download file is impossible to integrate into the annotation and card since Youtube only allow associated website, i.e. your website link. Therefore using this re-direct plugin is a must!
First search a wordpress plugin in your WordPress panel under “Add New Plugin”, type: Simple Link Cloaker
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-link-cloaker/
Install it and go to “Setting”, click “Simple Link Cloaker”.
Add the “Name”, “Slug” and the URL where you want the user to be redirected to. Select “301” for Redirection Type.
Add the “Name”, “Slug” and the URL where you want the user to be redirected to. Select “301” for Redirection Type.
Now go to your Youtube Channel Video Edit Page and click “Cards” at the top:
Enter the details of your card:
Save it and clicks “ADD card”.
Create and enter your link to your associated website. That’s all!
Next is to create your annotation. Now click “Annotation” at the top:
Select “Note”:
Under “Note” type some “Call to Action” texts to ask users to click on.
Clicks “Associated Website” under “Video” drop-down menu, and paste your download link here!
Done! You have created your “Caption” or “Card” and “Annotation”. You now have a video with two in-video clickable links redirect to your CPA content locking offer that look like below:
Module 4
VIDEO BOOKMARKING, INDEXING & EMBEDDING
BOOKMARKING & INDEXING
While there are many ways to index and bookmark a YouTube video, I will only focus on 3 easy, quick and (semi)- automated resources.
- After you uploaded your video, go to http://masspings.com/(Free Mass Ping WebSite)
Make a RSS feed (RSS Feed Generator Creator) http://fetchrss.com/
Submit your RSS feed (Find on Google Free RSS Submit online, make sure to validate it).
Share your video to social profile:
- Go to onlywire.com
Sign up for a free account. Download the program. Create social accounts (optional: hire somebody on fiverr.com for $5 to create accounts for you).
Onlywire automatically submits your URL to more than 50 bookmarking sites. Allowed limit for a free account is 300 submissions per month. While less than fifty work and you have to enter 4-5 captchas manually it is free and automatic.
If you use more than 300 submissions in less than 30 days your account will be suspended. You will create a new free account.
3) Go to socialmonkee.com(Paid Service)
Create an account. Get 25 unique inbound links every single day. Download and install socialmonkee Firefox plugin. Social Monkee allows spintax. You can submit up to 125 sites with drip-feed feature.
EMBED VIDEO TO BLOGS & OTHER WEB PROPERTIES
Video sitemap is a way to help search engine discover your videos and index them accordingly. It also allows you to link one video to a specific post/page
You can embed your video to your WordPress blogs and other web properties. Make video and submit them to Google using the following 2 Free WordPress plugins:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/youtube-video-sitemapgen erator/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-video-seo/
Module 5
VIEW COUNT & TRAFFIC DRIVING
If you did proper keyword research and video page optimization, by now you should see your video on the first page of YouTube (and hopefully Google) for your primary keyword or for one of the tags. You should also start to see some organic views.
The number of views help people click on your video, and the more clicks/views you have the higher your ranking. The higher your rankings the more views you get. Together with increasing number of social bookmarks it is sort of a snowball effect.
To help with your view count, there are free view exchange programs. There are many of them. The main idea is that you automatically watch videos of the network members and earn credits. In turn, you submit your video’s URL and get views from other participants.
Among those programs, in my opinion, the best one is :
You can earn credits by watching, liking, subscribing, commenting other users videos and channels, and then you can spend these credits on getting views, likes, comments, subscribers for your own videos and channels.
It is a view exchange site which will expose any video you add to thousands of members in order to increase the view count
You do not only get views but subscribers, favorites, likes and comments too. It does not violate YouTube TOS, randomized, and you get everything in correct proportions: the number of comments is smaller than likes, likes smaller than favorites etc.
If you want fast view and rank highin Youtube and have some money to invest, I highly recommend these two cheap and effective video ranking services:
Get your 1K views for $1.00
Quality and fast views
Next steps
After exchanging or buying views for a few days, go to your Youtube video statistic and check for its view count. If your view count has reached at least 1000, make your video “Public”.
By making your video to public now, you should see your video will be ranked highly easier and stay longer in the first few pages.
And this is one of my CPA content locking earning, though I’ve spend total of $9.99 for purchasing ebook/files and buying views, and still have a net profit of $ 14.86 in 2 days, an average of $7 plus per day. If you’ve purchased 5 videos from Fiverr which I’ve recommended, your cost of $25 will be covered by the profit within 4 days, starting day 6 or 7 onwards is your net profit :
Module 6
Scaling Up
SCALE UP
Make more videos and channels and start making videos of different niches after you have mastered these skills in this guide. I’m sure you will get result sooner if you do it consistently and progressively.
FINAL WORD
In conclusion, I would like to say that obviously there are better ways, tools and methods to make money with CPA content locking, I hope this report provides enough free/paid and (semi)-automated tools and resources for you to get started and quickly get your videos ranked on YouTube and make a killing in CPA content locking. The only thing left is to take action!