Insights and best practices for pay per call marketing from veteran affiliate manager and media buyer Gene Morris, creator of the Pay Per Call Blueprint course.
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Show Notes
- Work with a Pay Per Call Network to accelerate your growth.
- Look for the ability to direct with a Buyer.
- Have an upfront and honest conversation with your Affiliate Manager.
- Test lots of keywords, use Single Keyword Ad Groups and remove low-performing keywords.
- Tips for Affiliates: Have control over the IVR and a good relationship with your Network.
- Fail early and fail often!
- Don’t be a jack-of-all-trades. Focus on a single segment and become a wizard at it.
- "You don't find a winning campaign, you create it." - Charles Ngo
- It’s a lot harder to spy on mobile Click-to-Call ads.
- Quality assurance and listening to call recordings is crucial to success.
- Listen to call recordings to find keyword and targeting ideas.
- Ask your affiliate network what they have in place for QA.
- Adam: You need to build strong relationships with business partners.
- Adam: Most people are accessible and willing to help if you reach out and ask.
- Leave your ego at the door, be humble and grateful. People are willing to help!
- Only the hungry are going to take action.
- Adam: Losing money is part of the game. Failure is built-in.
- Adam: Get introductions to top networks at: www.PayPerCallNetworks.com
Gene Morris is a veteran media buyer, affiliate marketer and the creator of the Pay Per Call Blueprint. Pay Per Call Blueprint is a training course for marketers looking to succeed with Pay Per Call. Gene is also Affiliate Outreach Manager at PALO Media.
Website: https://paypercallblueprint.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQoSJ9uFWCUeo6L8RXSIW6A
Episode Transcript
Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Callers Show. My name is Adam Young, the founder of Ringba. And today, we have a special guest, Gene Morris. He's a veteran affiliate marketer and media buyer. He focuses entirely on pay per call. And he is the creator and author of the Pay Per Call Blueprint, a training course for learning pay per calls and affiliate marketer from start to finish. Thank you for joining us on the show today, Gene. It's great to have you.
Gene Morris:
Yeah, Adam, man. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Adam Young:
So I'd like to know how you got started in performance marketing and what drove you to focus on the pay-per-call space.
Gene Morris:
Oh, man. It's hilarious. So I started back in 2000-- I want to say '14, '15 as a-- I'm not going to say product owner, but I started a supplement company with a doctor friend of mine. And the whole idea was to take the supplement company online and just become kind of a supplement guy on the internet. And it was working well, and I was at the Traffic & Conversion Summit. And when was it, like 2016 when I was there? And they had some dude, some guy from ClickBank-- ClickBank was a big sponsor at the time. And they had some kid from ClickBank, a publisher, up on stage talking about making five figures a day. Yeah, I think it was four or five figures a day peddling ClickBank products as a performance marketer.
And I'm here with this supplement company, and I'm just grinding my life away trying to figure out how to make supplements work online and scale. And then this guy shows up, and he's running campaigns as a performance marketer. And I'm like, "Wait a minute. I don't want to be in the supplement business. I want to be in the performance market-- I want to make five figures a day. I want to make four figures a day." I said, "This supplement thing is bananas, e-commerce." And so that kind of took me down the path of, "What is this guy really doing with ClickBank?" Because I had got started, prior to the whole supplement thing, with the YouTube channel. And I was basically just ripping people's videos and putting my watermark on them that was redirecting to the affiliate [inaudible] on ClickBank, and I'm making money. And I'm like, "Well, I know ClickBank. I know how to do it with YouTube. But this guy's making like 4,000-- four figures a day. How is he doing it?" And that interest took me into kind of the performance-based marketing.
Stack That Money was the first real [inaudible] forum that I had got into. And then that started kind of opening my eyes to what's available in terms of performance-based stuff. I bought John Crestani's Super Affiliate course. It cost me $5,000 - had to take out a personal loan to buy it. It was a big commitment, but I was focused. I was like, "This is it." This is a get rich or die trying, the mentality I had. And so I bought his course. It was a great course, but what I discovered was that I just wasn't ready for it. It opened my eyes to everything, but I wasn't really able to put all the pieces together and actually make money with it. I had kind of spearheaded this mobile mastermind Stack That Money, and it was basically me and a bunch of newbies that were working together in a Skype channel trying to figure out how to make mobile display work and so forth using DSP platforms like Go2mobi and stuff. And so that was our introduction to ripping landers and ripping ads and trying to find [inaudible].
And then I found a guy who kind of came into the group through another guy who actually had experience. He was what you would call a super affiliate. He was a guy that was making 1,000 bucks or more a day. And he was capable of dabbling in any kind of traffic source. He had a good, strong understanding of how performance-based marketing worked. And I knew right off the bat. I was like, "I got to just be glued to this guy's hip, because he's the guy that's really going to teach me the details that I need." And sure enough, he taught me a little bit about a Nutra. So I got started kind of in the Nutra space, which is super shady. You're ripping Oprah and Dr. Oz landers, and you're selling middle-aged housewives in Australia diet pills. And that was like, "Wow, I'm making a little money here, but man, I feel just so greasy. This is just such a slimy way to make money on the internet." And I was telling them, I was like, "Dude, is this really what we're doing? Is this the future of affiliate marketing to me, just trying to rip people off?"
And then he introduced me to pay per call, and my eyes were wide awake [inaudible]. I'm like, "Whoa, wait a minute. This is something I could actually talk to my friends and family about with confidence and go, 'Yeah, I'm basically connecting nationwide businesses in the United States with phone call leads.'" And so this is a real business. This isn't trying to-- we're not doing any weird switcheroo kind of tricks with the landing pages. And I fell in love with it instantly. And then to add to that, Google has their click-to-call campaign. And so it was like, "You mean to tell me, I don't really need a landing page?" Because their click-to-call campaign, you just put up a very simple landing page with all the right stuff on it, make sure your phone number's on it. And then really, it's just all about, how good are you with understanding the Google Ads platform?
And I'm like, "Oh, this is something I could really wrap my head around. I can go deep into Google and just focus in the traffic source. I don't have to worry about my copyrights. I don't have to worry about big pitches. I don't have to worry about headlines. It's just focus on the data and focus on mastering the Google Ads platform," and that's where I really started to excel. So introducing Palo, which is one of those companies that I work really close with in pay per call, and I quickly became one of their better publishers. One was because I was just really focused on making things work, and I developed a good relationship with them as a result of that. And that just kind of pushed my-- that pushed down this app of accelerated learning through guys like my friend, Paul. This is the guy that actually brought me on board and kind of taught me some ropes.
He actually created a course called Call Academy during that period. And Call Academy was starting to get off the ground, but Paul was kind of spearheading the thing, and he had kind of a change of heart because [inaudible] with it and it all kind of fell apart. I did a lot of training at Call Academy. I was still new. However, I knew I needed it to make my successful thing happen. And so I had had a lot of [inaudible] in that course, and then Paul went ahead and shut the thing down. I'm like, "Well, that's a bummer." Although I really appreciate the learning experience and everything, it really didn't give you the-- it just didn't give me the fulfillment I was looking for. And so I'm like, "Well, I'm going to just start my own. So I'm just going to start Pay Per Call Blueprint, and I'm going to teach people how I was taught to do pay per call. It might not be the best way or the most quick way, but for a lot of good people that are similar to me, just didn't have a mentor or a guide, this is the perfect solution to their problem." So that's kind of the path I have taken. So I was using Palo and working with them, and then at the same time, building this course content to help people kind of get off the ground, and the rest is kind of history.
Now, it's just a matter of juggling campaigns, and then at the same time, trying to figure what to do with this Pay Per Call Blueprint because it's out of date now. And I'm like, "Well, do I do a version 2.0 or do I just get in there and just start updating content?" So that's kind of where we're at right now. That course is just heavily [out of date, I guess. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But another kind of deterrent for me was like, "Well, everybody's kind of stealing all my info and not really paying for it. So do I really want to keep updating it and so forth?" But that's good. I guess, that's to be seen, but yeah.
Adam Young:
So when it comes to the campaigns that you're running today, can you walk us through your research process for building out a new campaign? Maybe you see a campaign with a network that's interesting, a niche campaign or something. How do you choose your campaigns, and what's your process behind researching how to get started and target the right people?
Gene Morris:
Yeah, for sure. So one of the important things, I think, especially if you're kind of new to pay per call is I think you're really going to accelerate as a new pay per caller if you work closely with the network. So it's really important to kind of find a credible and reliable network to work with, maybe a couple, two or three. Because I can see kind of networks go in and out of phase with high-quality offers. And the more you understand what's going on with the network and the offers we're on, and how they're brokered, if there are multiple buyers kind of in the chain, and what payouts compare to networks and stuff-- your typical performance market stuff will be key to how successful you'll probably be. One of the things I kind of look for in a new offer on the pay-per-call network is basically, their ability to correct with the buyer. So the difference between running a generic auto insurance campaign and [inaudible], as an example, would be GEICO is basically kind of a homerun.
The problem is you just don't believe those campaigns anymore. So you're dealing with these kind of-- sometimes these anonymous buyers that don't want you to use any branding and really talk [inaudible] about getting back into these [inaudible]. I immediately look for offers that they pay out well, the duration buffers are relatively low. So anything over two minutes, I try to stay away from. And then something with lots of volume, because this day and age, it's just so competitive in click to call. I tend to just stay away from anything other than click to call. That means I don't run landing pages that people are actually visiting the landing page. You can do it that way, and a lot of people are really, really [inaudible] at that. But I feel like if I can just master click to call, I will probably be ahead of my competition who's kind of focusing on a bunch of stuff. So I always look for lots of potential in volume and a short duration buffer, if it's available.
And then have a nice conversation with their affiliate manager and really just try to catch them lying. That's my favorite part, just catch them lying to me. Because to be honest with you, you can look at an EPC, an earnings per click, on a pay-per-call network. And it may look really high, and you'd be like, "Oh, my God. They're just killing it with this offer." But that could just be one guy on the backend that's making it work. It doesn't mean there's a whole bunch of guys back there running it. So sometimes you just got to have a good, honest conversation with your affiliate manager, because they'll try to pitch you on things that you probably should be running. So having a good payout-- and this is common sense, but everyone needs to hear it. Having a good payout compared to other call centers-- I mean, other affiliate networks, and then short duration buffers, and then seeing if the offer's actually direct or if it's being brokered. If it's being brokered, that means there's more than one person taking a margin, and you see that a lot.
It's so easy for a network to just kind of pull syndicated offers, which means there's probably two or three middlemen involved. And by the time it gets to you, it's the-- I'm not going to call out any buyers, but it's like, man, there's some legal campaigns out there that pay eight or nine bucks on a call. And you're like, "This is legal. This should be four times more." And so there's little details like that that you just got to kind of keep an eye on and be careful about. But if I find an offer that's really decent, the thing I will immediately jump into [inaudible], and I'll just start looking-- well, actually, I take that back. I'll jump onto my mobile phone first, and I'll start looking at what click-to-call offers there are or ads they're running or the industry-specific keywords. And then I look for marketers. I look for marketers on my phone. I don't look for brands, right? So legal's a good example. It's like if you're looking for a [inaudible] attorney or something, you don't look at any brand that's running advertisements. I tend to try to avoid that. I always look for those guys that are like me, performance-based and they're running a legit pay-per-call campaign.
And then I'll use SpyFu, and I will look at both the organic keywords, and I will look at their paid keywords. And I'll go ahead and look. I'll just tap the phone, and check the search algorithms of words in a campaign. And then I like to run [inaudible] for the word "ad groups", and then it's just push as much traffic as I can. I'll usually lose a lot of money on the first week or two, and then just kind of dial up in the keywords in the ad groups that seem to work, and then pause it. Just delete everything else, and then just work from the small handful of ad groups that convert. But I would say, the real profit doesn't come from mastering ad words anymore, I don't think. I think it's just so competitive now that if you're a performance-based marketer running through an affiliate network, that you've got to get super clever with your traffic and how you're funneling that traffic. And I think IVRs, this day and age, is the way to go. Or having a good relationship with your network, and then having them create special IVRs at your request.
And so a good example of this would be-- and I use this example a lot, and you can test it. It was like a SSDI, so Social Security Disability Insurance. It's an offer, and it's relatively [inaudible] to pay 15 to 50 bucks on a [inaudible] long duration, which violates my policy of three [inaudible] buffer, like an offer on Palo. I know [inaudible] on Palo, but this is an example. Because three minutes on a-- three-minute call on a campaign, like 15 bucks or 16 buck or something. And you're like, "There's no way you can run a click-to-call campaign and can beat that, right?" That's normally what-- but if you would count when you start looking at [inaudible], you'd be like, "Wow, this is [inaudible] people typing in Social Security. They're looking for the Social Security Administration, and the click's cheap. Why do I sent people--" if you press [inaudible] for the disability side, and then if you press 2, you get SSA, Social Security Administration. And the trick is, "Well, why don't I just connect them to the Social Security Administration if you press 2?"
You're going to start creating these long durations in your campaigns. So you're running a conversion [inaudible] on your ad [inaudible], which you should. You're going to get a kind of [inaudible], so long duration which would still-- with Google, it's like, "Awe, man. This is good, pure experience for whoever is calling." So you're going to get some percentage that are actually looking for disability and just lazy, and they're just typing in Social Security, that they're go into that [inaudible] and going to stay out. And then you get a bunch of people that go through, actually looking for the administration. And you're [inaudible] the benefits of get into those long durations, and so your quality scores go. So that's just an example of, "Oh, let's [inaudible] for free to give [inaudible] kind of [inaudible], giving them what they want." And then at the same time, hopefully, there's enough-- there's a number of calls, two or three hundred at a hundred bucks a piece or something like that-- or $100 or [inaudible] a piece that are going to convert, that are going kind of help you become profitable.
And then if you identify that kind of concept of across offers, the networks, you can see where there's benefits everywhere - the Affordable Care Act, ACA. So it's help. There's 65. There's a bunch of people that are looking for Obamacare. However, it's a lot of people with money looking for under 65 type of Obamacare. So if one comes this way, and the other, this way, and then everybody's happy. And then you can optimize the campaigns from there. So that's what I've been doing lately, and it's doing pretty well. So it's one way of doing [inaudible] to like, "Oh, my God. Makes yourself so [inaudible]."
Adam Young:
And something I want to point out there, which is different than what I hear from most affiliates is, you're not looking for the cheapest way out. You literally said three times, "I'm probably going to lose money when I test a campaign. I need my own third-party tracking, which is going to cost me money. And then, let's figure out how to mess with Google's quality score by rerouting phone calls using that third-party tracking," which means that you're paying for minutes on phone calls you know you're not going to make any money with. And so what's important, I think, for the viewers to realize here is that you have to invest in finding the campaigns and finding ways to make them work. And just starting a campaign and expecting to produce a whole lot of profit in the first 30 seconds is essentially a unicorn. It's fallacy. It's not going to happen. And affiliates should be prepared to not only put in a shitload of work to find things like this that make them money, but also be prepared when they're testing a new campaign to invest in technology and just straight up lose money when they get started.
Gene Morris:
Yeah. I think the important thing though-- so one thing I like to do-- and this is not the cut the third-party trackers out of the equation. But again, it comes back to having a relationship with your affiliate network. And if you can get them to foot the bill, make them foot the bill. And a lot of times, they'll just foot the bill on it. They'll set up the custom IVR for you, and then they'll just kind of eat the expense of that call that's going to Obamacare or Social Security Administration or wherever you're sending it. Also as a new affiliate, I think more that it's better if you fail early and fail often. There's still something to be said about setting up campaigns properly. That way, the cards are kind of stacked in your favor. So even though you're probably going to start losing money over a week or so, these campaigns that are set up properly, you should see conversions coming in, really all [inaudible]. So having things set up properly and doing your due diligence in the spying will set you up, at least to just start seeing some conversions coming in. You can be like, "Okay, this has got legs. It's not profitable, and I'm losing money, but I'm getting conversions." And if I got two campaigns, and I'm testing the same thing, I'm going with the one that's actually bringing in the conversions, because that's where you want to put your time.
And so that's what it is important just to understand. So just really launch campaigns and spend some money. You don't have to spend hundreds of bucks at a time. In this case, put [inaudible] understand what you're doing. And then even the nuances of a very specific campaign, like a click-to-call campaign, it's easier to focus it and become an expert in the mathematics of that click to call, as opposed to display or you register for expanded text ads. You're trying to be a jack of all trades. It's like you can literally get into Google Ads and just from one little segment of the traffic offering and just become a wizard at it and make money from there. And then screw everything else, and just get good at one thing. Charles [Mills?] says it best. It's like, "You don't find a winning campaign. You create it. You have to make it." You could use your spy tools and use your experience to kind of get you 90% of the way there, but the rest of it is up to you to actually put the time in, collect the data, figure out what's working, what's not working, and then get profitable.
And then what's great about the click-per-call too is, these campaigns will stay running for-- I've got campaigns running. They've been running for years. And I've gone through overhauls with them, but I understand them so good now that every tweak I make is improvements. And it's lot more difficult to spy on click to call because it's a mobile, and there isn't a spy tool out there that I'm aware of that's actually kind of tracking that kind of stuff. So you kind of got to do a little mobile spying, and that kind of opens up opportunities for you.
Adam Young:
So how deep do you dig into the actual business model of the campaigns and the buyers? Are you listening to call recordings and taking the time to understand their business models entirely?
Gene Morris:
I'm really guilty of not listening to calls. It's one of those things, and it's because I kind of cringe when I hear some of the quality. However, you definitely expect-- I would say, get thee back from your affiliate networks. And this is more stuff that I've kind of learned too over the time, is don't just expect the affiliate network to just do all of the heavy lifting for you. Don't just expect because you're not hearing back from them that it's okay to just scale and blow something up, because I did this one time. I ran this water damage campaign, and I had actually created a video for it and everything. And I was going through this, and I found some keywords that were actually converting. However, what was converting was people calling the water company. They weren't working for water damage repair, but they're calling the water company. And when they would call and listen to the IVR, they key press 1, and then they'd go to the water damage people, and it would convert. And I'm like, "This thing's blowing up," and I didn't realize it was the actual water company. They were our company calls, and I ran that bill up to a couple of grand before they realized that, "Oh, man, it's not working right."
And advertisers was reaching out a little late, because they weren't paying attention to the traffic quality. The network was kind of sleeping on the traffic quality. I was looking at the numbers and was like, "This thing's working. Let's scale the shit out of this thing." And then I realized, "Oh, man, I've been sending the water company calls, and nobody was paying attention." And so yeah, a little trouble. So you have two ways to report it. If you have to report it [inaudible] listen to the calls. I just really think it's super important early on in the campaign. Luckily now, it's like I've got QA people that are paying attention and doing it for me, because I just can't do it. It just hurts my stomach when hear it - calls through. And I just prefer to just get feedback from people and fix the stuff. But if you're new, kind of keep the volume down and dial things in. Especially when you're new too, you don't have to budget stuff to kind of go on things. So it gives you a [inaudible] chance to really focus on the quality and understand what you're doing, and then ask permission to scale. And oftentimes, if the quality is good, the network will come back to you and go, "What can we do to get more calls?" And you're like, "Give me money." And--
Adam Young:
And that's a good way to way to protect yourself if you're new, is to listen to your call recordings. Not only are you going to understand the business better, but you'll know immediately if one of those water company calls comes in or a bunch of them come in. And you know the call center's going to figure it out in a matter of hours or a couple of days. And when that happens, the affiliate's not going to get paid because they're not qualified calls. They're not real. And so to preserve that advertising budget, you got to stay on top of it. And then, like you said, you have outsourced QA. Once you get bigger and understand the industry, getting outsourced QA is not complicated. You can do it on Upwork or Freelancer or find Remote Agent Steve and do it. It's not that big of a deal. But I completely agree with you; those call recordings are a goldmine for a new affiliate in the space.
Gene Morris:
Oh, man. And that's where you're going to find a lot of untapped potential keywords too, is having the ability to listen to calls. Because you'll listen to some calls, and you realize, "Oh, man, I had no idea that people were actually asking for whatever, XYZ," and you're over here targeting ABC. So having those calls is super insightful. And either you grab something like [inaudible] third-party tracking that records those calls for you or talk to your affiliate network and see what they have in place for QA. Because if you just request it and go, "Hey, can you guys listen to one of these calls and get a disposition, what's going on?" and if it's a good network, they'll do it for you, and they'll provide the feedback that you need. And I think a lot people use affiliate [inaudible]. I know I did. I'm doing it now, especially with legal. Legal is one of those-- I'm starting to discover legal is one those nichier verticals, where it's just-- you're dealing with lawyers, and they're going to find a way to game the system. I mean, it's just in their DNA. They will figure out ways of hanging up the calls before the duration ends so they can call back the caller. And you need QA. You need QA for that kind of stuff, because you're dealing with kind of market or a personality type willing to game the system. And you'll go broke in a really successful, high-quality vertical doing Legal Beagle. So there's compromises everywhere.
Adam Young:
And something you've touched on quite a bit on this show is the fact that relationships are important. I mean, we met in New York City at Affiliate Summit East, at a trade show. And I've been going to them for 15 years now. I know you've been going to them. And every really successful affiliate network person in performance, they all go to the trade shows. They all have really good personal relationships with people. And that's something that I can't stress enough and almost every single one of our guests stresses, is that our viewers really need to have good relationships with the pay-per-call networks, with their vendors, suppliers, companies like ours. There's just a lot of information out there, and most of us are willing to help. I mean, here's you on this show right now giving away some of you secrets in building campaigns. And I think that's the interesting about our industry, is most people are accessible, and they're willing to help if you just reach out and ask.
Gene Morris:
Yeah. That's so true, man. It's like that's your Pareto's principle, your 80/20 right there in performance-based marketing. It's like 20% of the effort that you put in, that's going to result in-- 80% of you kicking ass is going to be the people you hang out with. And a lot of things too-- I used to have-- kind of like if you're not making any money and you're showing up to Affiliate Summit West or East or LeadCon, you could check your ego at the door. I used to be afraid to tell people that I'm here, but I'm not making any money. I'm a newbie, and I'm losing money, and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And it was really hard when you get into a conversation with somebody who's making four figures or five figures a day. And it almost becomes-- you tell yourself this story, and it kind of holds you back. It's like, "Oh, I don't want to admit to somebody that I haven't made any money yet or I don't know what I'm really doing." And to all those people out there that aren't making any money, really just start going to the conferences and leave your ego at the door. Be super humble and grateful, and everything will [inaudible].
Again, it goes back to like you said. People are willing to help, and don't worry. It doesn't have to be a pissing contest. You're chapter 1; you're not going to compare that to somebody else's chapter 10. There's a lot of guys out there that are doing really good, and they love helping people. For example, you probably know Danilo Lee. Danilo is really big in the legal space. Danilo is a mastermind early on in the Pay Per Call Blueprint days. And Danilo just revealed his entire business model, and a mastermind to all of these guys. And he's like, "This is how I do it. Take it for what it's worth. Go use it." And his philosophy was kind of like mine. I'm like, "I could share everything, man." Only 1% are [inaudible], and only the hungry are doing to take action. You can reveal the blueprint, "This is the [inaudible] blueprint. Go do it," and 1 out of 100 will actually execute it. So you look great for just revealing all this value, if you will. And at the same time, it's like, "Ah, I'm not [inaudible]," that's because most people [inaudible] [laughter].
Adam Young:
Well, that's a challenge you just threw out for a lot of people watching. They need to actually take the information that they get and commit to building a business behind it. And that's going to be a lot of struggle and a lot of pain, and things like checking pride and ego at the door. But I'll make a commitment to our viewers. If anyone ever comes up to me at a trade show and says, "Hey, Adam. I'm not making any money. Will you help me?" I'll put you in contact with every major pay-per-call network, and I'll give you contacts everywhere, and I will actually help you build your business and make it grow. It's not complicated. It just requires commitment and showing up, basically, and creating the relationships. So I think that's so simple, yet so important. And maybe too simple, and people don't think it's that easy, but it really is. Asking for help is a surprising thing.
Gene Morris:
It's amazing. It really is. And I mean, I'm doing it right now. So I'm getting into natives a little bit. I know this is pay per call, right? But it's like I know a lot of guys in the industry that do natives, and I have stayed away from natives. But I'm in the Mad Society for Malan Darras. He's kind of a big natives guy, and he's a friend of mine. And I'm like, "Man, I'm at ground zero. I am a white belt. I'm just brand new in natives." And I'm in there like a dummy, just asking stupid questions about postback pixels stuff, trying to get tracking systems up. And I'm like, "I would've never done this a couple of years ago, but I'm so hungry and obsessed with trying to figure things out now. It's like I just got to throw away that kind of ego and just start asking for help." Even though I've been hanging out with these guys and making money in pay per call and telling them about pay per call for years, it's like I want to do something different now. And I got to [inaudible] my teachers. And asking a person anything is like, "Got to get good at just being able to ask questions." Stuff will not fall into your lap. You have to go out there and get it. That's the takeaway.
And then another thing too is scarcity mindset. People get scared when they spend $100 or $200, and they don't see a conversion. And I think I spent my first nine months, probably $25,000 of money just growing that traffic and making dumb mistakes and just wasting away. I had my day job and just trying to save up $500 every two week so that I could test traffic and watch it all disappear in like two days. And that's what usually scares most people. They're just like, "This is bananas," you know? But tells them the secret is to keep showing up, get smart about how [inaudible] set your campaigns up. And I guarantee you, every single time you launch a new campaign, it gets a little bit better and just a little bit better. You understand just a little bit more. You understand a little bit more. And then before you know it, you get really good with launching campaigns. And you with confidence can roll in and go, "Okay, I miss $100, but I bet I'll get a conversion or two, and I can see what's kind of working."
And that's where you want to get. You want to get to the point where it's like you made the [inaudible] campaign. You're probably going to get a conversion or two. It's not going to be profitable, but now you have what it takes to optimize and [inaudible] and get out. So all you new guys out there, just keep that in mind. Just keep that in mind. It's like you can spend your money and think you're losing it, but what you're really doing is you're buying yourself a serious education that's going to be better than any master's degree that you can afford. This is going to give you-- this is the kind of thing that's going to give you the freedom, the flexibility to fly to Maui for your birthday and still be turning out some decent revenue everyday.
Adam Young:
Exactly, and I'll corroborate that. The first time we launched this show and ran some YouTube ads for it, we messed them up. They didn't perform well, and we threw a bunch of money away on the promotion of this show. And it was a learning experience, and I'm not scared to say that. I don't think I've ever had a campaign in my professional career that I didn't lose a little bit of money on trying new traffic sources or optimizing, and so it's just part of the game. And that's the interesting thing about when you do, is failure is built in. And so if you're not comfortable with failure, performance marketing isn't a space for you ever. Because every single campaign is constant and perpetual microfailures and learning lessons that just compound and compound and compound. And so that's something I wish more affiliates would just take to heart and be like, "All right, no ego. I suck. I'm going to fail a whole bunch, but I'm going to put the time in and effort and figure it out."
Gene Morris:
Yeah. You nailed it, man. It's so true. I wouldn't have believed it, until it actually happened.
Adam Young:
I know, right [laughter]? Well, and one of the things that's cool about what you're doing is the fact that you're branching out in the native. I will make an assumption right now that once you really master native - and I have no doubt that you will - you're going to learn things that will translate back into pay-per-call campaigns. And the next thing you know, you might be running lead gen with pay per call on native traffic. And I know affiliates that are doing this, but you really need to understand how the traffic source works before you can translate it. And so I think that pay per call can work on just about every single traffic source if you put in the time to understand the campaign and invest in actually building that. And I mean, a display, search, native, pops, push notifications, Facebook traffic, email. I mean, I know guys that are doing email pay per call with no links in it, so they get inbox on everything, and they just crush with pay per call. But for them and everyone else, it's just a matter of putting in the time and effort and learning how it all works.
Gene Morris:
Yeah. And that's my blueprint. You were talking about it right there. My whole thing is to crack natives so I can figure out how to make pay per call work on natives, because that's where there's some serious volume. So as much as I love Google Ads or AdWords, whatever they want to call it these days, you're limited on volume - running a click-to-call campaign. You're just not going to get the kind of volume that you would get on a native platform. And I'm just like, "Man, these are there the guys-- the guys that I talk to that are doing 10K-a-day campaigns are on natives." And I'm like, "Okay, I'll never get ten 1K-a-day campaigns of pay per call, to be honest with you, using click to call, just using affiliate network offers." So I'm like, "Okay. If I can figure out where the scale and the volume is--" and the competition's been reduced significantly because if you're a [Paul?] and you focus on click to call, you have to [inaudible]. That's the only traffic source in town. You just can't go to [inaudible] and anything else and get decent traffic. You're stuck in one. So you have to get really good at click to call with respect to your competition or get into running landing pages as well. But you still [inaudible] expensive, but [inaudible] over in Google. You run a landing page in Google, you're still paying three, four dollars a click. And you're just bleeding money over there, right, as opposed to paying 20 cents a click on a native platform. So I'm like, "Okay, it makes way more sense." I'm getting so many more clicks to my landing page over at Revcontent, for example. If I could figure out how to bridge that gap, maybe get a [inaudible] going that way, then yeah. That's it, [inaudible].
Adam Young:
Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret here, seeing as I own the platform, so I have a little bit more visibility in the space with those people--
Gene Morris:
Oh, yeah. Do enlighten me, sir [laughter].
Adam Young:
Facebook, native ads, pop, push, everything I just described, we have clients that are doing those things very successfully in high volume in the pay-per-call space. And I think it's really crazy because the pay-per-call space seems really small. Everyone says it's a niche, but it's $68 billion a year that's spent driving inbound phone calls in the United States alone that results in $1 trillion in actual commerce. And so it's actually bigger than the affiliate marketing space. It's just fragmented so no one actually sees it, and it hasn't consolidated yet. And what that means for everyone listening, and you too as an affiliate, is there is just a huge amount of opportunity to go pan for gold on Facebook and pan for gold on native platforms and everywhere else to try and diversify traffic sources. And so I predict that the industry in the space is going to grow rapidly over the next couple of years. And not only is it going to grow rapidly in the United States, but we're starting to see people take these same campaigns over to other first-world countries, and it's starting to proliferate there. It exists already, but it's not really called pay per call. Again, it's fragmented, but you're going to see this everywhere.
Adam Young:
We're onboarding clients all over the world on a daily basis now, and so it's really exciting to see this growth. So guys like you can go, "All right. Well, I'm going to take this campaign that I learned in the United States and move it over to the UK or move it over to Australia, or get really ambitious and start translating these things into other languages, finding the backends, and building entire businesses around it."
Gene Morris:
That's exciting. That's really good news. That's really good to hear. And yeah, now that I think about it, I'm like, "Yeah. Here I am, focused on one geo, that's the United States." And it's a great geo. It's the best, obviously. But it's like, "Man, there's a whole world out there that's just not being touched by our campaigns as pay per callers." And yeah, that's really exciting. So really kind of dialing it in and being an expert in anything, but just pick a traffic source. If you're a Facebook guy and you wanted to get into pay per call, and you already know Facebook, man, you're 90% of the way there. All you got to do now is figure out how to get the phone ringing. And it's probably not as hard as you think. So absolutely right. I like natives, so I'm focusing on that and hope to make that work.
And then, of course, working with a really good network is super helpful. When they're willing to be flexible and build landing pages for you, and get things up and running for you, again like QA and stuff, it's like that's your team. That's your business development team. So it's like don't think you're just a solopreneur who's out doing this all on his own. It's like if you really start to partner up with a good network or two, they will do all the heavy lifting for you. And they take 20% of whatever they want to take, and that's their thing. And that's cool [crosstalk].
Adam Young:
And if any of our viewers want introductions to the top pay-per-call networks, you can simply go to PayPerCallNetworks.com, where Ringba and our team has set it up so anyone can get an instant introduction to the top networks in the world, get started, start driving calls. And so we've already done all the legwork for you. You just have to go there and start the relationships, hopefully show up at a conference, and put the effort in. Well, that was amazing advice. Thank you so much for your time, Gene. Happy birthday again. I hope you enjoy Maui, and we really appreciate you coming on the show today.
Gene Morris:
Yeah. It was fun, Adam. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.
Adam Young:
So if people want to do business with you or reach out, how can they get in touch with you?
Gene Morris:
Yeah, for sure. So man, there's been pressure to keep up with the Pay Per Call Blueprint, so I'm focusing on that. You can go to my website, PayPerCallBlueprint.com, and I got to be better with that too. But yeah, you can reach out to me there. And also, I work as an outreach manager for Palo Media Group. They're my favorite network. And if you want to get on board working with those guys-- I don't want to plug Palo--
Adam Young:
That's okay.
Gene Morris:
--but [inaudible] network. They're a great network. I love those guys to death. I work very closely with them. You can reach out to me, and I will connect you with them. Kind of give you some inside information, if you want, on how to get approved faster. Well, I mean, there's really no mystery. I mean, it's like this day and age with pay per call and fraud the way it is and just the things that are going on with people, it's really difficult to get approved on a lot of really good networks because they're just sick and tired of dealing with the minutia of fraud and publishers that just kind of gum up the gears. So when you're confronted with a publisher application, just fill it out as best as you can, as thoroughly as you can. Be as honest as you can. And even if you're new, it's okay. I mean, you can generate a zero money [inaudible] we would take. We prefer an honest, hardworking publisher over somebody who's just trying to throw a mystery [inaudible] traffic at the network. You're going to get caught anyway. I mean, anybody that QA's going to catch on. So just be good with honest application. Start reaching out, communicate, and get on board the good stuff. And yeah, it's about the best advice I can give to somebody.
Adam Young:
And it's amazing advice. Well, thank you so much again.
Gene Morris:
Yeah. Thanks, Adam. Really appreciate it. Take care.
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