There is a specific art to polling. I’m talking about comparing 1, 2 or more things such as celebrities, video games, movies or anything else to entice socialization from people clicking over to your landing page, participating in a poll and if you’re like me, most likely ending up on a related offer page. The whole idea of a poll as a CPA Marketer is to get inside people’s interest, offer them to pick their choice, and then redirect them onto an offer that is closely related to whatever got them to the previous poll landing page.

This is where people go wrong…

The days of Apple iphone’s, ipod nano’s, and things that are immensely popular are over. If you are still having success with this, then more power to you. There are much simpler ways to make money with polls, and hopefully after this, you will try it for yourself and see.

To make the most of your polls and get the most targeted of prospects clicking over to your pages you have to poll something that is of interest to them right? That part is simple since there is millions of things you can poll. However, if you want to get the most bang for your buck, I would suggest trying this.

Poll two offer related things. What I am saying is that if you have a Mac Makeup offer and a Revlon Makeup offer, then make a poll that asks the user to choose their favorite. Instead of promoting just one off for either choice, now you have the option of promoting an offer for each. Whoever is clicking over to the poll and choosing the makeup they like best is going to be a lot more targeted than some 16 year old that is voting between Transformers and the Dark Knight for a chance at an iPhone.

See where I am going with this? To stay relevant and run your polls in the search engines you would have to write some text about Transformers and the Dark Knight which could possibly take away the attention of your prospect. If you know anything about market research then you should know that the attention span of someone clicking over to a poll like that is probably in the general web surfing state of mind. I call these tirekickers and money flushers. You might as well wash your dollar bills and hard work down the drain. If it’s profitable, it wont be for long.

If we poll two types of makeup we open ourselves up for polls striving for longetivity and a bit more consistency. We know women go goo-goo ga-ga over makeup (sry ladies!). People love to vote, especially in the US. They just cant stop themselves. Women love to vote and they are going to choose their favorite makeup and then be slapped with a chance at a free makeup kit (or whatever) that is the same type as the one they just chose. It does not get any simple than this.

Landing Page Metrics:

I never thought putting text that said "Vote now for an iphone" went over to well. As a matter of fact, most of the advertisers do not like this. It can be viewed as a slim form of incentivization and they hate it. Besides, the idea is to SURPRISE your voters. Surprising a 21 yr old female with a free makeup offer of the same brand she just voted for is far more efficient than presenting an iphone offer to a general web surfer who saw your ad on the keyword "transformers". So dont put what your offering on the landing page. Surprise your prospects with something closely related and at the same time, you will stay in the good gracious of the advertiser and network you are getting paid from.

Traffic Tactics

This is a no-brainer. If you do not have an "email this link" on your poll page, then you are just killing yourself. It does not matter where you put the offer whether it be Paid Search, high traffic social networks, Yahoo Answers or whereever. If you dont have a way for other people to distribute your poll to others, then you are severly limiting the amount of income you could potentially make with the poll. Just imagine for a second that a Myspace user is surfing google and comes across your poll. They see it, they click on it, they see the poll and decide to send it to their friend list (which is say 1,000 people). This is how you make your polls go viral.

Sometimes I have had operated polls at a LOSS on google just because of this simple fact. I cannot stress this enough. Just put the link to your poll page ON your poll page and say something like "Share this poll with your friends by copying THIS link". If you want to get crafty you can incorporate bookmarking buttons such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Yahoo and ETC.

Setting up polls for profit IS a long term strategy in CPA Marketing but if you dont have the poll working for itself and becoming viral then chances are you are going to be one of those marketers who watches their Adwords Account like a hawk just so you know you are beating the margin.

All references to offers and niches in this post are for example only