In today’s post, I’m going to go over the three biggest mistakes that CPA affiliates make with sweepstakes style offers, and show you how to avoid making those same mistakes. As an extra bonus. I’m going to tell you about a free case study you can get access to that shows you step by step the paid traffic, all the ads, the landing pages, the optimization strategies and everything you need to know about running sweepstakes profitably.
So, I’ve noticed a ton of training online around sweepstakes style affiliate offers. If you don’t know what a sweepstake offer is, it’s basically your email submit offers. You see them on most CPA affiliate networks. They pay out roughly $1.50-$4 sometimes for an email submit. Now, in most cases, let’s just be clear… You’re not getting paid for an email submit. You’re getting paid once the user goes through a certain number of steps in the back end of these offers.
OK, so for example, these offers generally offer something like a free iPhone or a free drone or a free Amazon gift card. A user arrives on the page. They enter their email and then they answer a bunch of questions and then they have to register, at which point they also have to take part in another offer before they ever get close to the freebie that you’re offering on the front page. So these offers, generally speaking, range in different payouts and are not always single opt-in.
Now, sometimes you can find direct advertisers who will pay you for the email itself, but it’s going to be a significantly lower payout and oftentimes it requires very high quality traffic. So here’s where the mistakes begin to happen.
Table of Contents
Mistake #1 – Sweepstakes Looks Easy
First mistake is people think it’s easy. OK, this is very common, especially with new affiliates. They come in and they see email, submit and they think, wow, I’m going to get paid to get somebody to enter an email.
Sounds great. Sounds easy. You start doing it and you realize it doesn’t convert after the email submit. Secondly, the quality of your traffic is not good because of the user intent. It does require marketing skills. It requires you to become good at connecting with people, not just trying to be shady and getting people to enter an email address into a form. You actually have to tell them about the offer, what it is and how it works.
Obviously, there are affiliates out there doing extremely well, running these offers with landing pages that have little spinning wheels or little fake surveys. That requires in-depth technical skills. As an affiliate marketer, you’re not going to be able to make this work direct linking or anything like that.
Mistake #2 – Buying Ads on Any Media Platform
OK. Mistake number two, people think that they can just buy ads on any media platform or any ad platform and this is going to work for them.
Basically what’s going to happen is you’re going to get banned on places like Facebook and Google. These offers are considered a little bit misleading. They say you’re basically offering somebody access to a free iPhone or they can win an iPhone, but in most cases, they have to go through a bunch of hoops before they ever get access to this offer. This makes people upset. It makes them angry. It makes them complain.
And any kind of complaints, especially on Facebook, are going to result in an immediate ban. If you want more information on how NOT to get banned on Facebook, check out a video I posted on the DayJobHacks YouTube channel.
Mistake #3 – Running Sweepstakes on Push Ads
The third big mistake that people are making with CPA sweepstakes is running push ads. I see this strategy everywhere. It’s on YouTube. You find it in so-called guru courses. It’s on Facebook groups. Everyone is talking about running sweepstakes on push ads. You’re going to find out that it’s actually not as easy as everyone makes it sound. There is a lot of effort involved in doing this. There are so many steps you need to take.
Landing Pages
For example, first of all, you need a landing page that engages users. Sounds simple enough, but this isn’t very easy for most people. Most of these landing pages require in-depth coding skills to make them look like a real survey, or to make it look like a real game.
Direct Advertiser Connection
Secondly, you have to make sure that you have a direct advertiser connection, meaning you’re not going through a network, then to the advertiser. I highly recommend you have a direct advertiser, meaning you’re going to actually be communicating with the people that own the offers.
This is very important because now once you start running native and push ads, the quality is going to be bad on many placements. If you start testing and running very bad quality traffic through a network, or you don’t have a very good relationship with these people, they are going to take you off the offer. They probably won’t pay you and your whole sweepstakes business is going to be gone. So make sure that you have a good relationship before you start running these ad platforms to your lead generation forms.
And this is particularly why I don’t run lead offers on native ads and push ads. Generally speaking, I’m always running credit cards submit types of affiliate offers where I’m actually selling a product. Another thing you’re going to find with push ads, is that the placements are going to be extremely competitive. If you don’t have a spy tool or you don’t have a way of tracking and analyzing your data, then you’re going to have a very hard time finding really good placements.
When you do find a placement it’s going to be very difficult to scale it because everyone else is already going to know that placement exists. There are a ton of affiliates and marketers flocking to these platforms and taking up all the great placements. So you’re going to be constantly fighting and battling to find the best placements.
Final Thoughts
So those are some of the big things that you need to consider if you’re going to be running sweepstakes. Now, if you want to see an actual case study showing this more in-depth, the actual ads, the landing pages, the optimization strategies, all the things that you’re going to have to consider if you’re going to go down this path of running paid ads to sweepstakes style offers, then check our free training.
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