The following are criteria that I follow when looking at a CPA offer to promote. I will look at the advertiser’s landing page and see how they rank against the criteria below.

Headline
Clarity
Relevance
Scarcity
Social Proof
Call To Action

Also keep in mind that if you are creating your own landing page, the same criteria above should be followed.

Headline
Marketing statistics indicate that the headline is responsible for 80% of the ad copy. This means that you literally have only a few seconds to grab the attention of the prospect. Make sure that the CPA offer that you are promoting has a clear headline that captures the prospect’s attention.
Use a headline that taps into the prospect’s emotions because people generally make decisions based on their emotions rather than logic.

I have placed a link below to a killer resource that lists a ton of best headline words and phrases. This will save you time and go a long way towards helping you create killer headlines even if you suck at ad writing. You can download it for free from the link below:
http://www.payperclickformula.com/bestheadlines.html

Clarity
The landing page should be clear and concise. If you choose to promote a CPA offer that has a landing page that is confusing, you will lose the prospect. You want to make sure that the landing page has a clean design and is easy to read.

Relevance
You need to connect the dots between what your advertisement reads whether it is a banner, PPC ad, text link, etc. to the landing page. Basically the prospect should know what to expect when they click on your link. If you are not relevant to what you promised the prospect in your ad, you will be wasting the click.

Scarcity
People generally will respond to an ad where they have something to lose more than an ad that shows them how they will gain.

People do not like the fear of loss.

That is why scarcity tactics such as a time limit or quantity limit work extremely well on a landing page. For example, if you look at some diet CPA offers, they have landing pages that indicate that there are only 75 free trial offers remaining.
A time limit such as “Expires In The Next 10 Minutes” also creates the sense of urgency for the prospect to complete the offer.

A great tool to use on your landing pages to increase urgency is IM Triggers.
IM Triggers http://www.imtriggers.com

Social Proof
Social proof works well in environments where people do not know what choice they should make. The use of testimonials or endorsements works well on landing pages because they provide that social proof. If you look at dieting offers like the Acai Berry offer on the next picture:















They use celebrity names like Dr. Oz and Rachael Ray to add social proof and credibility to their landing pages. People are more prone to fill out the offer because it appears as though a credible source such as Dr. OZ or Rachael Ray has endorsed the product.

Call To Action
Try to promote CPA offers that have the “call to action” above the fold. This means that as soon as the person sees the CPA landing page on the screen, the form which they need to fill in is right there. The call to action should clearly indicate to the prospect what the next course of action should be.


Your Own Landing Page

Now if you are using your own landing, you have a little bit more control over the look. A landing page is a bridge page between your visitor and the final CPA offer. Usually a bridge page will decrease conversions because you have now created an extra click process before the prospect reads the advertiser’s web site.

But if you can pre-sell the prospect on the CPA offer, it is possible to increase conversions with a landing page before you send them to the CPA offer.

The key to making this work is to continually split-test key elements of your landing page.

This could be such items as images, colours and fonts. But most importantly, you want to test different variations of the six criteria factors I mentioned earlier.

You will want to split-test headlines, call-to-actions, social proofs, etc. It is only through this tedious process that you will be able to make improvements and increase conversions.