- What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work
- How Much Can You Earn on Affiliate Offers
- How to Find a Niche for Earning from Affiliate Offers
- How to Choose the Best Traffic Source for CPA Marketing
- How to Choose an Affiliate Network for Earning with CPA Marketing
- How to Choose an Offer for Earning with CPA Marketing
- How to Earn on Affiliate Offers: Step-by-Step Guide
Do you have a website with thousands of visitors, but Google Adsense brings in only $10–20 a month? Or maybe you’re just planning to create your own blog, YouTube, or TikTok account? There’s a solution that many underestimate — CPA marketing. This is not simple banner advertising, but a model where every user action (registration, purchase, or subscription) can bring you dozens of times more money. And modern affiliate networks — from Admitad to Awin — have already made this market as accessible as possible: simple setup, convenient analytics, and hundreds of profitable offers. Next, we’ll show you how to understand CPA marketing, what traffic sources exist, and how to start earning from scratch.
What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work
Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where a partner (a website owner, YouTube channel creator, or social media page owner) promotes a business’s products or services and receives a reward for it. For example, the owner of a website about online learning writes course descriptions and inserts links to Udemy, Skillshare, or edX. For every course purchased after clicking on that link, the webmaster receives a certain percentage of its cost.
Thus, affiliate marketing benefits both sides: the business gains new customers without direct advertising costs, and the blogger earns steady income in a loyal way, since they recommend quality products and services without intrusive ads, as if simply sharing a useful product they genuinely like.
One of the most interesting features of earning with CPA marketing is the use of cookies. When a user clicks on an affiliate link, the system stores a tag in their browser with information about the webmaster. Even if the purchase is not made immediately, the reward will still be credited to the partner.
For instance, the cookie duration in the Cityhost affiliate program reaches 80 days: even if the user decides to buy affordable reliable hosting a month after clicking your link, you will still receive 10% of their order! This allows you to earn from “delayed” purchases, making affiliate marketing especially attractive.
And to start earning with CPA marketing through the Cityhost affiliate program, your traffic source doesn’t even have to meet any requirements, nor do you need to order our services: you just need to register on the website and get a referral link in the “Control Panel” → “Referral Program”. Friends and readers who follow your link will receive a 10% discount, and you will receive a lifetime percentage from each of their orders. The money you earn can not only be spent on Cityhost services but also withdrawn to a bank card.
Read also: TOP-7 non-trivial ways to earn money on the Internet
How Much Can You Earn on Affiliate Offers
Earnings on affiliate offers depend on the niche, traffic, ad network, and specific program. On average, the payout per conversion ranges from $1–5 for a simple action (registration, subscription) to $50–200 for a sale (financial services, software).
To better understand how much you can earn with CPA marketing, let’s look at several offers from the Admitad network:
- Hotline.Finance Online Insurance Service. Rates range from 4% to 15% of the service cost. For example, when a user pays for the “MiniCASCO” policy from UNIQA Insurance Company through Hotline.Finance, you receive 7%, which is 536.41 UAH.
- Foxtrot UA Retail Chain. Rates depend on product categories: “Household Appliances” — 3%, “Electronics/Audio and Video” — 2%, “Miscellaneous” — 1%. For instance, if someone clicks your link and buys a smartphone for 20 000 UAH, you receive 400 UAH.
- “Є-Гроші” Online Microcredit Service. Offers 1 153 UAH for the first loan issued, and 151 UAH for a repeat loan.
- Retouch4.me AI-Based Photo Retouching Tools. For a subscription, you can earn 38.46%, and for a confirmed purchase — 11.54%. If a user clicks your link and pays for the Retouch4.me Professional subscription at $35, you receive $13.5.
- NordVPN Internet Security Solution. Allows you to earn 43.95% of the order cost. For example, if a user buys NordVPN Plus for one year at $71.88, you receive $31.59.
- Udemy Online Learning Platform. Offers 8.45% of the course price. For instance, if a user clicks your link and buys the course “The Complete Full-Stack Web Development Bootcamp” for $89.99, you earn $7.6.
Now you see that it’s hard to name exact earnings on affiliate offers, since each program has its own rates. But let’s take as an example an online course marketplace and the Udemy affiliate program through Admitad. Even with traffic of 1 000 visitors per month and a 1% conversion rate, we can make about 10 sales and earn $76 monthly. And with 10 000 visitors at the same conversion rate, our income could reach $760. And that’s just one affiliate offer — on a single traffic source, we can promote dozens of similar ones.
Read also: How to Monetize Blog Content: Overview of Methods and Platforms for Earning Profit
How to Find a Niche for Earning from Affiliate Offers
You should start earning with CPA marketing by finding the best niche — one or several topics you will cover and for which you will recommend products. Accordingly, you should choose a niche that you understand and/or are interested in, meaning you already have the knowledge needed to write and analyze content, or you are ready to spend time to figure it out. We recommend writing down 3–5 topics right away, since most of them may not suit you during analysis. We will take the broad niche of “building websites on your own” and analyze it, and you can examine others using the same approach.
First, go to Google Trends to understand whether this niche is relevant at all. There is no data for the query “creating websites yourself” so we used the keyword “how to create a website”. As you can see in the screenshot, the topic is generally steadily popular.
Interest over time is a display of a search term’s popularity over a certain period. There are three key points: 100 is the peak of popularity, 50 is a drop by half, and 0 means insufficient data for that period.
Now let’s move to Semrush. With a free account you can access basic data, which is quite enough for an initial niche analysis. In our case, the main keyword has 22 200 monthly searches and very hard difficulty (100%).
Therefore, it is better to choose a sub-niche, for example, how to create a website on WordPress.
Additionally, we will analyze YouTube. It’s enough to enter the main keyword in the search and look at the number of videos and their views. In our case, videos gain an average of 100 000 views, and some — 700–800 thousand.
And here is an important point: different tools show different data, and the niche itself may be in higher demand on certain traffic sources. Many users search for information not only on Google, but also on YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. For example, videos on the topic “how to make a website on WordPress” can gain hundreds of thousands of views, even if the frequency looks middle in SEO tools. This means there is demand; it is simply distributed across different platforms.
Also keep in mind that we checked only one keyword, while the niche combines thousands of queries, so the total number of searches can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands. For example, you can write about what a domain and hosting are, how a virtual server differs from a dedicated one, where to buy a VPS server, which CMS to build a site on, how a paid theme differs from a free one, and so on.
And don’t forget that our main goal is to earn on affiliate offers. We will analyze popular CPA networks in more detail later, and for now we will conduct an analysis on Admitad. In the niche we chose, you can earn on hosting providers, paid themes and plugins, website builders, and SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, Mangools. For example, with the Envato affiliate program, we can earn from €14.88 to €89.43 per subscription.
You can analyze any other niche in the same way. Just approach the analysis comprehensively, checking various traffic sources and using different tools.
Read also: Where to Start a Digital Products Business in 2025: 10 Popular Products
How to Choose the Best Traffic Source for CPA Marketing
Websites with search traffic, YouTube channels, pages and groups on popular social networks (including TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter), targeted advertising via Instagram Ads and Facebook Ads, content platforms and forums, PPC advertising through Google Ads, and native ad networks — these are just some of the traffic sources that have been used for years and still show effective results. The choice depends on many factors, but the key ones are time, risk, and budget.
If you want fast results, have a sufficient budget for testing, and are ready to take risks, choose targeted or contextual advertising. If you want long-term results with minimal risks but are prepared to invest time in content creation, then focus on search traffic, organic promotion on social media, and online communities.
Using SEO to Earn with CPA Marketing
Despite the development of artificial intelligence, including AI-generated answers appearing directly in search results, SEO remains one of the most effective ways to get traffic for earning on affiliate offers. You buy a domain and rent virtual hosting, install a content management system, a template and plugins, and fill the web resource with niche content. Usually, the first traffic appears within 3–6 months, after which you can start applying to affiliate programs.
Example of earning with CPA marketing through a website. In the article “The Best Python Tutorial for Beginners (Top 10 List)”, there are affiliate links to Udemy, Udacity and other platforms via a CPA network.
The key task in promoting a website in search engines is to create high-quality content with proper optimization: organically use keywords in texts, set up Title and Description tags, configure schema markup, build internal linking, and so on. To speed up growth, you can use guest posts and backlinks, but you need to do this carefully.
Such efforts pay off with long-term traffic (some pages stay in the TOP-10 results for 5–10 years), low ongoing investment after content creation (it’s enough to update information once or twice a year), and user trust. However, at the start, you need quite a bit of time to set up the online project, plus knowledge or money for content creation and investment in promotion. You also need to take into account search engine algorithms, which sometimes surprise even experienced SEO specialists (one example being Google’s March 2024 update).
SEO traffic works especially well for travel (hotels, flights, tours), technology (SaaS, VPN, gadgets), education (online courses, services, learning apps, books), and finance (loans, investments, cryptocurrencies) affiliate programs.
Using Forums and Content Platforms for Affiliate Offers
Want to find a highly trusted target audience — and for free? Sounds almost impossible. Yet it’s achievable if you create profiles and stay active on forums and content platforms. Although often underestimated in CPA marketing, they can deliver very high-quality traffic, especially for SEO offers, SaaS, financial services, and educational products.
You can find traffic for CPA marketing on the following platforms:
- Reddit — the largest forum in the world, with millions of niche subreddits, including communities in Ukrainian. It’s important to create a profile, spend several weeks publishing posts and giving detailed answers without links, gradually building up your rating. Only later can you add answers and posts with affiliate links, but in a native way. A major advantage of Reddit is its strong organic SEO effect (posts rank well in Google) and high trust, but you need to be ready for strict rules, since you can get banned for open advertising.
Example screenshot a discussion “I Want to Learn Copywriting. Where should I start?” on Reddit. While there’s no affiliate link in this particular answer, it easily could have been.
- Quora — a question-and-answer platform. It’s especially popular in the USA, Canada, the UK, and India. On Quora, you also need to work carefully: provide detailed, expert-level answers with real value, and only then use “soft advertising”, for example: “My site speed increased from 60 to 90 on Google Speed after switching to Cityhost virtual hosting, enabling caching plugins, and optimizing images” + a link with the right keyword. Again, moderation is strict, and it takes time to build up an account.
Example screenshot a discussion “Effective simple ways to speed up a website” featuring an answer with a link to your website with an article that has a bunch of affiliate links.
- Medium — a blogging platform with strong Google rankings. Anyone can create their own blog there and write articles in the format of guides, rankings, and reviews, adding affiliate links. The safest way is to insert links carefully: first point them to your own site, and from there redirect users to affiliate products.
Other popular platforms include LinkedIn Articles (great for B2B offers such as CRM, SaaS, hosting), Dev.to and Hashnode (IT audience), Substack and Ghost (email blogs popular abroad). There are plenty of such platforms, so you can build an effective traffic source for CPA marketing. But you need to approach this as a full-fledged project, meaning investing time in content creation and building a reputation.
Earning with CPA Marketing on Social Media
Posts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest can go viral within hours, gaining tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. By using this correctly, you can realistically earn hundreds of dollars even without significant investment in promotion. However, keep in mind the system’s specifics: algorithm changes can reduce reach, spam can lead to bans, and complaints from competitors or unfriendly users can get your posts reported.
If you still want to try earning with affiliate programs through social media, you need to choose the right platform:
- Instagram. Best suited for promoting clothing, cosmetics, accessories, fitness, travel, and online learning. You can create before/after photos, carousel posts with tips, interactive Stories with links, and Reels with reviews.
- TikTok. Works well for affiliate programs with gadgets, mobile apps, clothing and accessories, fitness, games, and books. Once you gain 1 000 followers, you can advertise offers in live streams.
- Facebook. Focus on an adult audience by promoting offers in finance, real estate, education, and insurance. Short posts, longreads, case stories, and even videos all perform well.
- Pinterest. This visual idea-search platform has a useful feature — links inside images. You first attract attention on Pinterest, then provide detailed information on your website, and finally a warmed-up, interested audience goes on to purchase the product via your link. Pinterest works well for niches like travel (insurance, bookings, tours), education (online courses), and products (fashion, health, home decor, DIY items).
The key feature of social media is the constant need to produce new content. Often, even videos from new users can quickly go viral, but given the high competition, staying in recommendations without regular updates is extremely difficult.
Read also: How to Promote Your Website Using Social Media
Earning with CPA Marketing Through Paid Advertising on Social Media
If you don’t want to spend time constantly creating content — with no guarantees, since social media algorithms change all the time — you can try targeted advertising on Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and TikTok Ads. You create ad creatives, launch campaigns with demographic targeting (age, location, interests), use A/B testing, and continuously work on reducing ad spend while increasing conversions.
The most effective tool for targeted traffic is advertising in the Meta ecosystem — Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads. It performs well in niches such as finance (microloans, bank cards), health and nutrition (supplements, weight loss, male enhancement), and e-commerce product offers. These services give you precise targeting by interests, behavior, age, and location of your target audience, real-time analytics, budget control, the ability to test creatives, and instant feedback on results.
However, you should take into account the high competition in popular niches and frequent bans, which creates the need to use proxies, anti-detect browsers, and “farmed” accounts. Plus, regardless of what people say about quick results, you’ll need to learn all the settings to minimize the risk of being banned and carry out a lot of testing.
Driving Traffic for CPA Marketing Through PPC Advertising
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is an advertising model where you pay for each click on your ad. It allows you to quickly get targeted traffic. The most interesting part is that users are already interested in a specific topic and are actively searching for products or services, which explains the high conversion rate. The main task is to choose the right offer and optimize costs.
The most popular ways to drive traffic through PPC advertising include:
- Google Ads. You’ve probably seen these ads in Google search results, appearing right after AI-generated answers and before website listings, as well as on websites and YouTube. It’s suitable for hosting, VPN, SaaS services, bank cards, loans, insurance, and education. However, due to strict moderation, it’s difficult to work with niches like health supplements, dating, and gambling.
- Microsoft Advertising. If you plan to earn from financial products, SaaS, software, or educational offers for an English-speaking audience, it’s worth trying Bing Ads. The audience here is generally older with higher purchasing power, and clicks are cheaper than in Google Ads. However, traffic volume is smaller.
- Native Ads. Platforms like Taboola, MGID, Outbrain, and others allow you to place ad blocks on news sites in the form of articles and banners. This works well for a wide range of offers, including health, consumer products, education, and finance. Native ad blocks can generate large volumes of traffic, and users don’t always realize they are ads. But strong copy and clickbait headlines are needed, as well as significant upfront investment to run tests and find working combinations.
For maximum effectiveness, choose high-intent keywords, direct traffic first to your own landing page to highlight all product benefits and fully convince users, and only then send them to the partner’s product page. However, be prepared for competition in popular niches, which means high click costs. Additionally, click fraud (fake clicks) is common and can drain a large portion of the budget.
How to Choose an Affiliate Network for Earning with CPA Marketing
Once you’ve chosen a niche and traffic sources, the next step is to start earning on affiliate offers. You can work with them either directly or through CPA networks — intermediaries between advertisers and webmasters. We’ll begin with the second option, since it allows you to work with hundreds of advertisers in one place, get comprehensive analytics, tools for work, training materials, and guaranteed payouts.
When choosing an affiliate network, first check whether there is access and payout availability for Ukrainian citizens. For example, the popular network Impact stopped working with Ukrainian users in November 2024. If the network supports users from Ukraine, register and check whether the offers you need are available (some platforms let you preview advertisers without registration, but the information is limited, so we recommend creating an account). Also pay attention to the minimum payout threshold (often $20–50) and payout frequency (usually unlimited withdrawals after reaching the minimum amount or several times on fixed dates each month). And definitely read reviews on forums, blogs, and YouTube.
The most popular CPA networks with withdrawal options to Ukrainian bank cards or Payoneer include:
- Admitad — one of the largest international CPA networks, working with over 2 000 advertisers. Offers deals in categories such as travel and tourism, online stores, digital services, financial products, online games, and mobile apps. Provides a variety of tools including a deeplink generator, shortlink, link tester, coupons, and browser extensions. Supports withdrawals to Ukrainian bank cards.
- Awin — a global affiliate network with more than 25 000 advertisers worldwide. Offers plenty of deals in niches such as eCommerce (clothing, gadgets, beauty), finance (loans, investments), travel, technology (SaaS, VPN), and entertainment (games, streaming). Includes many exclusive programs for the USA, EU, and Ukraine. In 2025, AI tools were added for campaign optimization. Supports withdrawals via Payoneer and direct SWIFT transfers.
ShareASale — previously operated as a separate CPA network, but was acquired by Awin in 2017 to expand into the U.S. market. They initially worked in parallel, but in 2025 all users began to be migrated to the Awin platform, and ShareASale is scheduled to close in October 2025.
- ClickDealer — a global network with offices in Europe, Asia, and the USA, founded in 2012. It has more than 15 000 partners with a strong focus on innovation, especially popular among media buyers. ClickDealer offers deals in niches such as gambling, eCommerce, crypto, loans, health supplements, and dating. Provides direct payouts to Ukrainian bank cards without conversion, as well as Payoneer.
- MyLead — a global affiliate platform founded in Poland in 2014. Hosts offers from more than 5 000 campaigns across 20+ verticals, including eCommerce (clothing, gadgets), dating, nutra (health, weight loss), gambling, fintech (loans, crypto), and software (VPN, antivirus). MyLead offers multiple withdrawal methods including Ukrainian bank cards and Payoneer, with weekly or monthly payouts.
This is only a part of the CPA networks, as a full review of all well-known platforms deserves a separate article. But to simplify your search, we’ve highlighted the above and other platforms by niche.
We specifically selected CPA networks suitable for Ukrainian users. At the time of preparing this material, you can register on them, find affiliate offers, and after reaching the minimum payout threshold, withdraw funds to Ukrainian bank cards or Payoneer.
How to Choose an Offer for Earning with CPA Marketing
Your income directly depends on the affiliate program, so you need to approach this carefully. We recommend paying attention to the following points:
- Niche and region. Choose a program based on your target audience, considering their location and interests. For example, if you have a technology website with most visitors from Ukraine, select offers for VPNs or gadgets.
- Rates. Check the payout listed on the offer page, since it is often split into several conditions. For example, they may only pay for first-time subscriptions, while registrations or renewals bring no payment or only a minimal percentage.
- EPC (Earnings Per Click). Shows the average earnings per click on an affiliate link. On Admitad, EPC is displayed as the average earnings per 100 clicks.
- CR (Conversion Rate). Indicates the conversion rate, i.e., the percentage of users who performed the required action after clicking. The higher this indicator, the easier it is to convert your audience into sales.
- Approval rate. The higher the percentage, the more applications/purchases are actually confirmed by the advertiser.
- Average processing time. How many days on average the advertiser takes to review an application.
- Last action. Shows the date of the most recent recorded conversion. This is an important criterion since it helps you understand whether the offer is still relevant.
- Cookie duration. On average, 30 days. This means if a user clicks your affiliate link on your site and makes a purchase within 30 days, the sale will be credited to you.
Additionally, always review the general rules of cooperation with the specific advertiser, as violating them can result in all your earnings being canceled and your account blocked. Check what advertising materials are available, such as banners, landing pages, and so on. A big advantage is the availability of coupons and promo codes: some brands provide them immediately after approving your application to join their program, while for others you need to request them.
How to Earn on Affiliate Offers: Step-by-Step Guide
There are dozens of ways to get traffic for CPA networks. Above, we described only a small part of them, and each requires detailed study, resources for training, and experimentation. As an example, we decided to focus on what we know best — website search engine optimization.
Let’s go step by step on how to earn from affiliate offers with websites:
- Choose a niche. We chose website creation with WordPress. This topic allows us to start by focusing on sub-niches (low-frequency keywords) and later scale the project easily. This way, we can work with different affiliate programs, including hosting and domains, virtual and dedicated servers, plugins, VPNs, SEO tools, and even online courses.
- Choose a traffic source. Since we’re talking about website creation, it’s logical to use a WordPress site as the traffic source. This allows us to immediately demonstrate the results we achieved using the tools we’re promoting.
- Drive traffic. Register a domain and hosting, create a WordPress site, install a theme and plugins, set up the structure, and perform basic SEO optimization with Rank Math or a similar plugin. Then start developing content — write hosting reviews, compare plugins, create guides like “how to create a website”, and so on. Our project will gradually begin to get indexed by search engines, bringing in quality traffic.
- Find affiliate offers. Register in CPA networks such as Admitad and Awin. Start searching for the offers you need and submit applications: some brands approve requests automatically, but more often you’ll have to wait 1–2 days. Here you should be careful: in some CPA networks, if your application is rejected, the brand may block you completely. That’s why it’s better to first reach at least 200–300 daily visitors before applying for offers.
- Promote affiliate products. After approval, you’ll gain access to affiliate links and marketing materials. You can add them to already published articles (if they’re directly related to the advertisers) and write new content. To manage affiliate links, shorten URLs, and track clicks from CPA networks and programs, you can use the WordPress plugin ThirstyAffiliates or similar tools.
Next, promote your content (share articles on social media, forums, and content platforms), analyze statistics, make adjustments, and scale the project to increase income. We’ve only described one traffic source here, but you can build a full project: create a site, focus on filling and promoting it, then expand to a YouTube channel, later add social media, forums, and content platforms.
And yes, CPA marketing is not “quick money”, because any type of traffic requires time to learn and money to test. But earning on affiliate offers can bring in much more than built-in monetization on social media, Google Adsense, or selling guest posts. With your own website, CPA marketing is a long-term strategy that, if done right, can generate stable income from $500 to $5000+ per month.
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