Getting into Pay Per Call - Worth the try?

[rudyone]

Hi Builders,

Now that I moved away from providing services and into full-time Amazon affiliate income, I'm looking to diversify with another source of revenue.

I'm thinking about trying Pay per call affiliate marketing, and I'm clueless about it

- Does it work well with SEO traffic?

Now that AdWords has the direct call ads in SERPs, thinking of targeting related information keywords and include a big phone number CTA within the webpage. So for example instead of trying to rank for "breast augmentation Los Angeles", I would try to rank for "do breast implants cause weight gain" and push the reader to call a nationwide offer. is this a dumb approach?

- Do you know a reputable network that won't arbitrarily shave call income?

- Would you advise to try pay per call, or another form of 'passive' monetization like display ads, CPA ...?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Does it work well with SEO traffic?

Yes it works great with organic traffic. I sold some sites a few years ago that were nearly 100% pay-per-call (I had some Adsense on them too). I have a current site that I'm just letting cook that's getting calls for $350 per 3 minute conversion. It's not getting a lot of conversions (it broke even on the investment at least), but it is getting a lot of calls. You need a high volume of calls because the call center guys are really good at cutting off tire kickers before the time limit mark comes up and they have to pay you, especially on high paying campaigns.

Now that AdWords has the direct call ads in SERPs

I knew someone who was doing Pay-per-call in the SERPs with Adwords and doing straight click-to-call and targeting ridiculous numbers of lower volume keywords and making great money doing it. He didn't care if they went to his site or not, it was just another means of getting the conversion.

So for example instead of trying to rank for "breast augmentation Los Angeles", I would try to rank for "do breast implants cause weight gain" and push the reader to call a nationwide offer. is this a dumb approach?

I don't think that would convert well for you. It'd probably just burn up your PPC budget. You don't want to treat PPC like an SEO campaign or marketing funnel. You want to buy impressions in front of eyeballs that are ready to convert. You're paying to skip the funnel and get right at the bottom to the conversion. I don't think anyone could afford what you're talking about with PP-Click on a PP-Call campaign with valuable conversions. The bid competition is high enough as it is without trying to funnel people.

Do you know a reputable network that won't arbitrarily shave call income?

Honestly, no. Even with really sophisticated reporting, you don't know what the operator is saying. They could say "hey, one sec, let's hang up and I'll call you right back" just before you hit the conversion mark, so they don't have to pay you. And you don't have access to the recordings either. Your affiliate manager might be reviewing all conversions and tossing out bad ones from operators who entertained a tire kicker (which is legit for the most part), but they'll never hear the cheat ones if operators are directed to cheat. And the affiliate manager might shave too and you'll never know because you don't have access to the call audio.

All you can do is push high quality traffic and high volumes, get your conversions, negotiate for better rates. The best thing you can do is make sure you're not sending trash calls. If you're making a company money, they'll be more than happy to pay you for your calls and take care of you.

Would you advise to try pay per call

I like Pay Per Call, but if you're going to do organic traffic then you better know SEO and be able to get links and rank for these competitive niches. Same with CPA lead forms. If you have the money for Pay Per Click advertising and can fund the campaign till you get enough data to optimize, then rock on. If your goal is to use SEO to pull it off and you're newer to the industry, I'd recommend starting in easier niches (Pay Per Call niches with decent pay outs are extremely competitve).

 

[rudyone]

Thanks for the insights!

About trying to get traffic on information keywords instead of direct local keywords, I meant organic / SEO traffic (don't want to run any ads), converting readers to callers would depend on the niche.

Where would you recommend checking out offers and niches in the pay per call market?

 

[illmasterj]

@rudyone, how is pay per call going for you? Did you give it a shot?

Going from @Ryuzaki's feedback, I'm thinking it may be a good way to diversity website income.

On your previous example, maybe you do PPC for breast augmentation, but also Amazon associates for push up bras, etc?

 

[DKurtz.me]

- Does it work well with SEO traffic?

Oooh yeah it does, just be wary of what vertical you're going into, some of them tend to be a bit cutthroat. BUT, if you can get under H.A.'s skin and knock them out of the first page rankings, give it a whirl. Also, using a site like Answer The Public to generate queries and then writing content around them + geo terms & schema = call gold.

Now that AdWords has the direct call ads in SERPs, thinking of targeting related information keywords and include a big phone number CTA within the webpage. So for example instead of trying to rank for "breast augmentation Los Angeles", I would try to rank for "do breast implants cause weight gain" and push the reader to call a nationwide offer. is this a dumb approach?

This can be done, but I'd recommend following some of the stuff in the crash course. Make it brandable, not geo-specific.
Corner one market, scale it up, expand, build more content, etc.
Use something like Thrive to build it out to keep the metros and ideas where they need to be, or even go WPMU on it and corner markets that way with subfolders instead of subdomains, makes it all ideal but separate.
Make a few landers you can rotate within each metro site and let Thrive figure out the conversion rates and choose your winning landers for you.
Answer The Public can also be used here to find keywords, geo-fence your selected area, and run those ads for CHEAP.
Think $0.05 clicks, maybe $1/call, figure it'll take an average of $3-5 to get 1 qualified call coming in, so pick a niche that's worth it, something worth $100/inbound qualified call.
Pick up a local partner first, offering to work for $0 as a case study to get them leads. Track progress, scale up, turn them to a paying client, ask for referrals, rinse and repeat. This can be automated with some mail merge work and a good Google Maps scraper at your disposal.

- Do you know a reputable network that won't arbitrarily shave call income?

Nope. Check out as many as you can though. Invoca seems to be the "preferred" platform for this pay per call stuff on the big boy leagues, so might as well scrape their whole fucking platform and get a list of every major pay per call publisher on the market, right?

G search "site:*.invoca.net" (without quotes) to get a list of all their publishers, do some due diligence in reverse searching and try to get accepted to a few of them.
RingPartner is fairly simple, Palo is another good one, and I'll leave you to find the rest so you can price yourself and your services accordingly.
This will also give you a feel of how the big boys play and where you can be the David vs these Goliaths, offer higher quality, exclusivity, billable calls based on time, verbal qualifiers, what have you. They're different in every niche so there's no one size fits all without pissing people off.
Call a few people in the niche you wanna target and ask to talk with them for a few minutes, saying you're doing market research. They'll forward you to someone who can talk your ear off. Take notes. Find pain points. Do NOT sell anything on this call. They'll be ringing your phone back soon enough.

- Would you advise to try pay per call, or another form of 'passive' monetization like display ads, CPA ...?

I would say yes, if you're willing to put some hours in and do your homework to find people who can use your services once you've nailed down your formula that works.

Roofing won't be the same as AC which won't the be same as Disaster Recovery. Pricing is different, platforms for success are different, amount you can bank per lead is different.

If you can get a formula and a rhythm that you're comfortable with, you can absolutely crush it. Adwords/PPC will be your cheapest route of learning if you couple together the information I mentioned above, and you don't have to wait for SEO or content or any of that to finally hook in. Once you can prove concept and fire off those leads to a buyer, scale that campaign with them.

Ask for referrals, your roofing guy might have a commercial carpet cleaner friend of his, and that guy might lead to selling windows & doors, and so on and soforth.

Keep digging, keep crushing it, and get in front of people. Pick up the phone. Biz owners want help, but you'll have to sift a bit to get the ones in need.

Give 'em hell.