Interview: Peter Zou (YeahCPA)

We're very excited to present our 23rd interview with Peter Zou of YeahCPA. Peter Zou is the Founder and CEO of YeahCPA.com, which is quickly growing to be hottest CPA network. Peter own hasoffer.com which is a deal aggregator site at the same time. As a media buyer,social marketer, advertiser and affiliate, Peter has over 5 years experience in advertising business.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you?

I am 23 years old and just graduate from University of Arizona with Master degree in science. I was born in China and in 2008 I got full scholarship and went to USA to pursue my PhD degree in system engineering. However, I decided to quit PhD after two years study.

2. How long have you been in affiliate marketing and how did you get involved?

It is really interesting to think it now because I came into this business occasionally. On 24th March, 2006(I remember the date very clearly), I came into the affiliate marketing world. It was really amazing. I learned a lot and I thought i can make huge money with any methods like ppc or SEO. However I found, it takes a lot of time to really master a skill. At the very beginning, I failed many times. I tried many offers at CJ and Clickbank through PPC and most of them just failed. Big money came in when i tried social media. After that, i stick with it.

3. How long was it before you realized you could live off your affiliate income?

In 2008, I made good money through social networks and I knew I never need to worry about earning money for living.

4. What has been your biggest success to date?

To be honest, I did not think i have any impressive success yet. I am working on YeahCPA and I think it will be my first big success. I devoted myself to YeahCPA.com and I know we can keep growing since we always try to improve ourselves. I keep my eyes on the changes in our business and we try to give the best to our affiliates. We stand at our affiliate’s side since we believe best affiliates are the key to success.

5. What was the biggest mistake you made when you first started doing Affiliate Marketing?

I heard one story from my friend: One app company was very creative and they build over 100 apps which makes decent money for them. For each app, they earned over 10k, some even 100k. CEO keeps pushing the programmers to build more apps and they were all tired but happy since they were earning good money. Finally they were excited to hit their 200th apps. Finally CEO found it is impossible to manage so many apps and they were all exhausted. They decided to focus on two of their best apps and make them better. Finally those two apps became very popular and now their company values over 100million. This is a true story. I made the same mistake earlier in my career. I did not focus on the stuff I am good at, but just kept trying more. I have met many kinds of super affiliates and some of them are good at media buy, some of them are good at social media and some article marketing. They all are making decent money. Focus is very very important. Now I focus on YeahCPA.com.

6. Tell us a little bit about YeahCPA and what you do over there?

YeahCPA was online since Feb 2010. To be honest, it is hard to begin a new cpa network especially if you are not native American. But finally we made it. Now we are growing very fast. Thanks to the affiliates who joined us before and the ones who will join us :) Every day I ask myself how can we improve yeahcpa and how can we make our affiliates love us? Basically that is my daily work. Also I keep in close touch with affiliates and see what they want. We tried to pay our affiliates faster, we tried to help our affiliates choose the hot offers they want to promote, and we helped our affiliates to develop good landing pages. In one word, we continuously help our affiliates whenever they need help.

7. There are already so many CPA affiliate networks out there. What makes YeahCPA different?

You know I keep asking this question myself every day. To be honest, now we are not the best CPA network and even we cannot be top in 10 for now. But we are growing, we are growing very fast. I do search on all the CPA networks and see what their good parts are and we try to add those to YeahCPA. I cannot say we are best for now, but I am 100% sure we will be the best. Yes, because we keep improving ourselves. For now, we already have some features which many others don’t have:

1) We pay bi-weekly to all of our affiliates. You never need to wait net15 or net30.

2) We have about 50 offers we can pay daily. You cannot find this at other CPA networks. You earn $20 today and you will be paid tomorrow! it’s not like peerfly, we do not charge fee for daily payments.

3) We take very slim margin. So you can see you are getting very high payment on each offer.

4) We keep very close relationship with our affiliates.

They can get very quick feedback about their questions. We treat our affiliates like treasures (friends who need help). Also our programmer is developing one system, with which you will not need to create landing pages for offers by yourself anymore. We will have over 100 landing pages for our offers and you just need to click and choose and you will have your own over 100 sites. It will be free as long as you are our affiliate. More and more unique stuff you will see from YeahCPA.

8. Do you offer biweekly or weekly payment? If so, how much does one have to make to qualify?

We pay all our affiliate bi-weekly. Sure we do weekly payments if we are comfortable with affiliate’s traffic quality. The standard for weekly payment is, you need to get two payments from us first and you can hit over $1000 per week consistently.

9. How many incentivizable offers do you have? Do you have any exclusive offers that other networks don't have?

We have about 30 incentivizable offers now and we are going to add more. For exclusive offers, we have some. We are going to add several exclusive offers soon.

10. Which offers are performing well on your network?

Now YeahCPA is doing great on Education, dating, Entertainment offers and email submit. For different affiliates, you can see they like different offers. That is the beauty of affiliate marketing. Sometimes you will just be shocked by affiliates' creative ideas, all you can say is WOW :) So do not ask which offer is the best, you need to check which offer is best for YOU!

11. Which traffic sources prove to be the most effective for your top earning affiliates - E-mail, PPC, PPV, Facebook, Media Buying or any others?

We have super affiliates on ppc, media buy and offline marketing. But again with my former point, just stay focused, you can be very successful with any traffic source.

12. What are the criteria for a marketer to be accepted at YeahCPA? How does YeahCPA prevent and handle fraud?

We love good affiliates and we hate bad ones. Anyone is welcome to YeahCPA as long as he/she is doing legit affiliate marketing. We do not care where you from are? International affiliates are accepted as long as we can verify that you are legit.

13. For those who are interested in working with you and your affiliate network - What's the best way/time to reach you?

I work from 10:00 am to 2:00 am (Mountain time) and you can reach me by AIM, email and phone.

14. In your opinion, what are the best places for a new affiliate to learn affiliate marketing? What advice would you give for them?

If you are totally new, then you just need to sit down and choose one CPA forum and keep reading. After you are familiar with what is Email marketing, SEO, PPC, PPV, Media Buys and Article Marketing, choose one and focus on it. If you want something easy to begin, I would like to say, try facebook. With facebook, you can get free traffic from fanpages and groups. You can also try facebook ppc which is amazing.

15. In your experience, what are the three most critical elements of run a successful campaign.

Test. Except for doing basic research for campaigns, try to test as many campaigns as you can. You will ever know what will happen. A long time ago, i tested one credit report offer on social media. I thought it will be hard to convert, but the result is I made a lot money on that.

16. What's the difference between a Super Affiliate and an Average Affiliate?

In my opinion, there are four aspects: 1) Do you ever dream big or not? 2) Do you love affiliate marketing? 3) Do you focus? 4) Do you outsource? If your answers are all YES, I am sure you are or you will be a Super Affiliate.

17. What are the keys to building successful relationships between Affiliates and Affiliate Networks? What are some of the challenges of being an Affiliate Manager/Owner?

You do not need to try to build the relationship with affiliate network if you are legit and good affiliate. We will try to build good relationship with you. In order to be a good affiliate manager, you should answer the emails, AIMs and voice mails very quickly. Also always think as you are an affiliate and then you will know what your affiliates want. Like you can bump the payout for them before they ask it.

18. What are your hobbies/interests/passions? What's your favorite movie and why?

I am very interested in doing stock/option trading. For sporting, I play basketball 4 or more times per week. For movie, I am a fan of sci-fi movies. I think the reason why i like this genre is because I am sure the scene we see in sci-fi movies will become reality very soon.

19. Give us a little glimpse into what a typical day in your life looks like.

Very simple :) I get up at 6:30 am and do some day trading on stocks and options. At 9:00, I begin to reply the emails from both advertisers and affiliates. After that, I talk with our affiliate managers and discuss about how to improve YeahCPA. At noon, i take a snap and work for the whole afternoon. Then at 10:00 pm, I go to Gym and play basketball and come back at 12:00 am. After a shower, I do some reading on investment, stock trading or watch a movie. I go to bed at 2:00 am.

20. What is your plan for your business and your dream?

It is a big question. I think in order to answer such question, one should be clear on what is his core value and what is most important thing in his life. At the same time, he should find something he loves. For myself, I love online marketing and I am obsessed in creating new companies. But I know I need to focus on YeahCPA.com. So for plan of my business, I would like to make YeahCPA a huge monster in advertising. After that, I hope I can be an angel investor. I love to involve myself in the start ups. For my dream, to be honest, I cannot describe it in one word. I do hope someday I can make it easier for people who want to do international business between China and USA. USA and China are the two biggest countries in the world and there are huge business opportunities there.

Many thanks to Peter for sharing your time with us and for sharing some great insight tips here! If you have any experience with YeahCPA Affiliate Network, please write a review for them on the YeahCPA review page. Ps. If you are an affiliate marketer, AM or Network owner and are interested in answering a few questions about you, your network and affiliate marketing, please drop us a message.