I've been promoting affiliate / CPA offers via email for over 18 years. However, I do things differently than most.
I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.
I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.
Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...
The bulk of the PPL offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.
I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers. I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight sales. For them, mass appeal is still the number one thing I look for and I also look for one of the following...
1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once something similar shows up in Walmart.
2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.
3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.
However, I mainly promote non-PPL offers on the backend.
Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.
I drive traffic and build responsive email lists by acquiring different forms of email data.
Fresh / targeted 3rd party data, which is email leads of users that have shown an interest in a specific PPL niche or offer and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record of each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.
Generate real-time Co-reg, which works by placing an ad for a specific PPL offer on a co-registration network and their publishers display it and users that view the ad can request more info about the offer. When a user requests more info, their contact info is automatically imported into your ESP account / campaign and they are sent a message regarding the offer. You pay on a per lead basis.
There is also rev-share data, which is basically 3rd party data (typically fresh / targeted) that you get for $0 upfront costs and you split the revenue generated from sending it with the data provider. Those that provide rev-share are typically just aggregating the data and aren't marketers and provide it to those that know how to monetize.
So with the above, I am getting fresh / targeted leads specifically for the PPL offers I'm promoting. However, they are not typically as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list that you build yourself. So to compensate for this you need to work with higher volume. This is not a big deal since the cost is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to traditional list building methods.
When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.
So basically the real reason I promote PPL offers because they provide the path of least resistance to generating conversions / $$$ and converting the data into cash producing assets.
There's actually more to it than it sounds, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.
Couple things I didn't mention because it is beyond anyone doing when they first start out.
You can get aged 3rd party data but it is more involved and requires special tools to do successfully.
Once you have experience, you can find companies that have opt-in / buyer lists that do little with them or nothing at all via email marketing...mainly they call all the users and or don't know anything about promoting affiliate / CPA offers to fully monetize their data. This requires more work because you have to find the companies, where the other options above it's easy to get access to the data. This is what would be considered 2nd party data, as you manage the companies data and monetize it for a percentage of the net profits generated.
Something to think about.
