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There’s a aprticular type of CPA (Cost Per Action) offer called an incentive offer. An incentive is when the CPA marketer is allowed to provide some sort of reward to the customer in order to entice them to complete the offer. 

It’s a popular model, with several big sites making big money, and smaller site making (I assume) smaller money. MyPoints.com is one of the most popular rewards sites that has forged relationships with online merchants to provide points for money spent (so they aren’t really a good CPA example). You can accumulate these points and then exchanges them for prizes. XPango.com is another one taht seems to be more oriented around CPA. Both of these are huge sites with hundreds of thousands of members, and both have been around for a while.

There are plenty of CPA marketing companies that offer incentives (I’ll list some as I try them out to see which are best).

So my next endeavor will be to build an incentive site. I’ll be building a points reward site with a very simple flow: join, complete offers, earn points, exchange points for Amazin gift certificates. You’ll also earn points for referring members and will also earn a percentage of the point the members you refer earn.

There are a few reasons why I’ve decided to give this a try. The main one is that I’m tired of one-off offer sites. By one-off I’m talking about the vast majority of typical niche sites. You build a site about blue widgets, you backlink it to try to get it ranked, and a person searching for blue widgets (hopefully) finds your site. Once they arrive, you convince them how great blue widgets are and entince them to click through to Amazon (or wherever) in the hopes that they will buy a blue widget and you’ll get a percentage.

This is the most common type of affiliate arrangement, but there’s a limitation here (albeit one that’s highly dependant on the product or service you’re marketing). Once customer buys a blue widget, he or she most likely won’t be looking for another one any time soon. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that repeat business is limited primarily to people looking for blue widgets. There’s typically no community, no membership. And the next time a person wants a blue widget, he or she will type it into Google again and go to whomever shows up (which might no longer be you).

I’ve built a great many of these types of sites. Some made very good money while others made very small money. What I want is to get away from the one-off and get into the repeat business. In the catalog world, we call this downstream. This is the terms used for additional sales past the initial sale. It’s essentially a measure of return business. It’s the difference between getting paid once and getting paid multiple times.

List building is the one-off methodology for downsteam promotion. Maybe when you show up at my blue widget site, I tell you I publish a monthly blue widget newsletter and I get you to sign up. Now, once a month, I sent you a newsletter with the most recent blue widget news. This is my way of staying in touch with you so the next time you want a blue widget, or decide to buy blue widget 2.0, you’ll do it through my site.

Don’t get me wrong – one-off sites can make money, but it’s leveraging the downstream and generating repeat business that really takes you to the next level.

Hence my foray into building a rewards site where you join, become a member, complete offers and earn points, trade points for Amazon gift certificates, and then come back to. Why? Because new offers are added that will give you new opportunities to earn points and, hence, get Amazon gift certificates.

I started out coding my own rewards site, but custom development takes time and motivation, two things I’ve been lacking recently. So I’ve gone with an off-the-shelf solution. As I get the site stood up and use the software, I’ll do a review of it and a summary of the research that led me to buy it.

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