CPA Marketing seems to be the biggest trend in Internet Marketing recently, if you look around you'll notice many people jumping on this bandwagon, the sad part is a huge majority of these people are destined for failure and here's why.
They have no idea how to promote an offer, let alone know what type of offers to promote and what traffic sources to use to get traffic. Certain offers work better on certain advertising platforms and not so well on other platforms.
The same offer that does well using PPC can do horribly on social networks and vice versa.
You need to make good use of your Affiliate Manager and ask them what traffic sources are good with a particular offer in their experience. They may not be able to tell you the exact details as they do not want to ruin it for other affiliates but they generally can point you in the right direction.
Another reason for failure is most affiliates venture off paid traffic right away without getting a good grasp of the techniques involved or they approach the game with little or no budget.
This is a surefire way to fail at paid advertising, understand that almost all of your paid advertising campaigns will start off losing money before you can begin to see what is converting and are able to optimize your campaign to become a winner.
This falls perfectly into another reason most people fail and that is they do not track any of their traffic or conversions.
If you want to be successful at marketing you must and I repeat must be tracking everything.
If you build a PPC campaign and load up a bunch of keywords most likely a major of those keywords are going to be ones that cost you money and make you none in return. Instead of just giving up on a campaign what you should do is track which keywords are converting and drop all the ones that do not.
Simply doing this can put you in the profit range and you would never be able to do this without tracking.
These are just some of the reasons for failure but there are many more and to stay on top of this game you must stay focused on the task at hand and have very good work ethics.