What I found after making my 1st dollar. For those of you making a few dollars a day. I started there too. I remember it must have been something like I spent $25 and made $26. I was telling this to a girlfriend and she must have thought I was an idiot. In fact, most people will. But I believed and believed people on forums like this that claim to make the big money. So you have to get excited for yourself and just know if you keep doing what you are doing the numbers will get better. After a while I quit my other work and started supporting myself full-time. It was at that time I realized how few people actually there were making a living at this.
One important thing I can tell you if you do start making money in CPA is that Networks and AMs want your business and volume all to themselves. Don't do this. I wish someone had told me this. It's tempting b/c you will get better payouts and better payment terms and it is nice to be appreciated. I've had to learn the hard way many times that this is not good. I'm telling you it's tempting and it's also just easier but don't do it. Why? Pushing too much volume and you are the one that gets hit the hardest when things go wrong. Especially now as networks are having more trouble than they used to. You are the one they decide to squeeze. Makes no sense but they seem to figure since you have the volume you won't miss it. I've seen it over and over again when raising volume. Everything is fine so I slowly start raising volume and it happens again. Especially now as there are some networks that are being late on payments. If they owe a 4 guys $500 they will pay them. They owe you $2000 guess what happens.
Also, it's not just with the new and small Networks. Pushing volume with established networks the Advertisers will look at your traffic more than the other guy. If someone is pushing 10 leads a week and another is pushing 10 a day. Guess who they start to sharpen their pencil with? I don't know what the magic number is but around $500/week is the maximum.
Even sending good traffic you would be surprised what they will find. I say all this b/c it goes against what the networks are trying to get you to do. And with all the incentives and just ease of tracking and placing ads it's easy to fall for. You have enough to worry about just making money. So it is easy to fall into. The absolute worst part is that when you make a living at this these hits are a lot bigger to recover from when you "put all your eggs in one basket" I hope this helps someone.