Learn how Todd Stearn founded Aragon Advertising, a market leading Pay Per Call Network with deep roots in the industry.
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Show Notes
- With Pay Per Call, customers are ready to buy and have an immediate need.
- The ability to create a custom marketplace for Buyers and Sellers.
- Networks manage the entire backend with Geographic Coverage and Time of Day Coverage.
- Diversify your assets, stay on top of market trends and be prepared for unpredictable swings.
- Seasonality affects a lot of Pay Per Call verticals.
- Pay Per Call Campaigns are more white-hat, evergreen and long-term.
- You can build a brand around Pay Per Call!
- Managing Disputes: Talk things out and come up with constructive solutions to opportunities and threats.
- Why Aragon Advertising: Industry background, operational experience, compliance standards, consistency in customer and client support and the people.
- Pay Per Call is not for newbies! Networks are looking for dedicated, knowledgeable marketers.
- Be ready to fail and don’t get discouraged.
- Be patient, understand how much capital you need to invest and do your research!
- Take the time to do a lot of research.
- Understand how concurrency works (the number of calls that a campaign can accept at a single time).
- Networks have the buyers and coverage you need to make the most out of your traffic.
- Use your own call tracking platform to control the call routing for your campaigns.
- Recommended verticals for new affiliates: Financial verticals like credit repair, debt relief, loans, mortgage, etc.
- Recommended tech and tools: Lead to call automation tools like Drips.com and TeleDrip.com. Licensing out time to a Call Center on a per minute basis.
- Collecting data and generating your own interface.
- Your Pay Per Call data is an asset that you can monetize exponentially over time.
- Get distractions out of the way immediately.
- Outsource and delegate day-to-day tasks that are holding you back.
- Book Recommendation - “Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street”
About Aragon Advertising
Aragon Advertising is a performance marketing agency with global reach across all digital channels. Our core specialties are in the Mobile Content, Browser Extension, and Pay Per Call verticals, while keeping our eyes open for all types of other new and exciting opportunities.
Our offers are exclusive and direct and with a dedicated account team, we work 24/7 to ensure we are increasing your ROI while assuring all messaging maintains the highest degree of brand integrity.
Website: https://Aragon-Advertising.com
About Todd Stearn
Todd is an entrepreneur, digital marketing executive and a recognized leader in the Pay Per Call industry. Since founding Aragon Advertising in 2012, he has gone on to launch LeadSquad and The Money Manual, in 2017. At Aragon Advertising, Todd has created a global performance marketing company with a diversified portfolio of clients and core business lines.
In 2015 Aragon moved aggressively into the Pay Per Call marketing space, quickly becoming a market leader. By focusing on compliance, quality assurance, exclusive traffic, and pioneering technologies such as lead-to-call automation, Aragon continues to create partnerships with major US brands seeking high-value prospects for their business.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddjaredstearn/
Episode Transcript
Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Callers show, my name is Adam Young with Ringba, and today we have a special guest, Todd Stearn, the CEO of Aragon Advertising. Aragon Advertising was founded in 2012. They're based in Brooklyn, New York, and they're the winner of the Blue Books Global Pay Per Call Network Award 2018. They're an amazing company, a real big pay per call network, an innovator in the space, and I'm really thankful to have Todd on the show today.
Todd Stearn:
Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here.
Adam Young:
Awesome. Well I would like to learn a little bit more about you personally. And so what was your first job?
Todd Stearn:
My first job out of college was in the industry. I was a junior affiliate manager for Epic Advertising. And if people remember that name, they have a very long list of enemies, probably still to this day [laughter] from when they folded. But it wasn't my fault, I was just a little peon. But that was a great experience, bringing me into the industry and as you can see I've sort of doubled down on it.
Adam Young:
Amazing. Back in the day I actually worked with Epic and Azoogle in my parents' basement, running traffic.
Todd Stearn:
Wow.
Adam Young:
Yeah. I think Azoogle turned out more successful entrepreneurs than almost any other affiliate marketing company. I know tons of them from back in the day.
Todd Stearn:
I would say the same about a lot of the people that worked alongside of me as billing managers and account managers. Most of them are [inaudible] these days.
Adam Young:
So how did you get started in performance marketing? Did you just find a job post for Epic and dive in?
Todd Stearn:
Yeah, that was it for performance, but I was always interested in advertising and I went to school for advertising in Boston. And I was first interested in advertising when I was 16 and took a course on subliminal marketing. So for a long time I knew I wanted to be in advertising but in school, they taught us nothing about digital CPA or this affiliate world.
Adam Young:
You're going to have to tell me more about the subliminal advertising course because that sounds amazing.
Todd Stearn:
It was actually really interesting for a 16-year-old to be told how to look through magazines and find hidden imagery. The signals of [inaudible] in magazine ads featuring motorcycles, and phallic symbols in diet and weight loss and alcohol ads. It was really, really intriguing to see how clever some of these marketers were.
Adam Young:
A lot of that material is still very useful today, especially in CPA advertising and pay per call. Some really interesting stuff. What made you take the leap from performance marketing then into pay per call? How did Aragon Advertising start?
Todd Stearn:
So when we were fortunate enough to pick up our current business that subsided when Epic went under, and pick that up to start Aragon. That was about 2012 and since then we've been able to grow the company year over year. Again in 2014, 2015, we first found out about pay per call and really gave it a test. We hired a new team member who brought basically the business to us. And it was like anything in marketing, test it. And for us, we tested it and we saw how valuable it could be and we really invested a lot in it and it's over 50% of our business now.
Adam Young:
Wow, I didn't realize it was over 50% of your business. So tell me more about some of the value that you saw in pay per call and how it became such a huge portion of your business.
Todd Stearn:
I think one of the biggest things about pay per call is how immediate it is for consumers. You can find exactly what you're looking for. And if you are calling in to your phone number to speak to an insurance agent let's say, you're pretty much ready to get a policy. It's not like the people that fill out a little form on the web [inaudible] they'll get called [inaudible] several other callers that reach out to them before maybe finally answering any of one of the dozen or so buyers that need it [inaudible] pay per call, people pick up the phone, they're ready to convert pretty much. So you know you've got someone's attention. The other thing I liked about it was the ability to create customer placements for buyers and sellers at a particular vertical. You could really customize the routing. You can customize the call treatment. And it's like putting together a bunch of pieces to make sure that you have all the coverage possible for a given vertical to just making a campaign as valuable as possible for publishers.
Adam Young:
And so that's one of the really big benefits of working with a pay per-call network like Aragon is you guys do a lot of that legwork, setting up all of the buyers on the back end and making sure you have geographic coverage, right?
Todd Stearn:
Yeah. Absolutely. And it's geographic coverage and it's time of day coverage as well is the other big thing when it comes to pay per call management. People saying that they're available 24/7 is great if they actually are. And we test that. We make sure that people are answering phones. But yeah. Anytime you can create a phone-in larger target audience for affiliates or a large buyer base I should say, the campaign has much more opportunities for sale.
Adam Young:
And what were some of the early days at Aragon Advertising like? Was it the same type of atmosphere as Azoogle or was it different?
Todd Stearn:
Very different. So it was just me and my business partner, Jason. He and I left Epic together to start Aragon. And we both worked from home for the first year and a half, two years and it was very much-- as many affiliates can relate, you don't really have that [inaudible] your work and play when you're working from home. It all kind of mixes in and blends together, so we were working around the clock just hustling, and eventually we got an office together and we started hiring a team. We're at about 25 people now.
Adam Young:
Amazing. Did you guys live together at the beginning?
Todd Stearn:
Oh, no. No. I should say separate homes. Yeah. But constant Skype meetings to kind of keep things going on smoothly.
Adam Young:
And what were some of the most painful lessons that you guys learned?
Todd Stearn:
We were very big in international mobile content when we first started, and one of the things that we learned very quickly was that we have to diversify. Anybody that's operated in that business knows that there are waves that you catch with regards to markets that are up and then down, and for us, we were very top heavy in one or two markets, and when they ultimately had dips in volume and increased regulations, we weren't incredibly prepared to handle it. So now we're actually diversified in both the markets that we cover and the verticals that we operate in. It's just to make sure that [inaudible] market changes all the time so you've really got to have prepared multiple things in your back pocket.
Adam Young:
Do you see the same type of market volatility in pay per call versus CPA?
Todd Stearn:
In some cases I do because there is seasonality to a lot of verticals, but they tend to be a lot more for dare I say white hat, and a lot cleaner verticals we work in in pay per call. So insurances as you previously mentioned, com services, financial areas like credit repair and debt consolidation. These are actual tangible services that people are looking for and provide significant value to them. So in that respect, I'd say they're much more effort [inaudible] than a fly-by-night CPA offer. And you can build a brand around calls, which is fantastic if you're an affiliate looking to kind of really invest in your assets. You build that standard, that's your brand for auto insurance and say go out there and get traffic to your site. And Aragon is probably one of the dozen or so buyers that are helping monetize traffic to your site.
Adam Young:
And I think that with affiliates, building something of value, long-term value is new for a lot of them as opposed to spinning plates. I see you laugh right there, but [laughter] it's totally true. And when these guys actually build something of value it means something. It's an asset they can sell in the future, it's something they can count on. And that's what I really like about pay per call. My background is CPA too, and the fact that pay per call doesn't really require all of that plate spinning means that people can actually build something for their futures. And that's a really cool thing that I don't think affiliates realize.
Todd Stearn:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I think in this business, in digital generally speaking, if you don't have your own traffic, your own user base or your own data, you're probably working on something that is-- the ground's very unsturdy. So one of those three things I would definitely recommend to any affiliate.
Adam Young:
Well, I think that's one of the best parts about affiliate marketing and marketing in general, is there's almost endless opportunity. And so regardless of what you want to work on or what you think is right or wrong, there's something out there for literally everyone globally. And I think it's one of the last gold rushes that exist for someone to come in still today with no money in their pocket and overnight they literally can make millions of dollars. And that's something that's amazing to me. It's a phenomenon I've seen over and over over the last 15 years in my career, and it will never stop amazing me. And I love it. I meet new people at these trade shows every single time I go that are literally like, "I started three months ago. I'm making six figures now. I used to work at Walmart [laughter]. I don't even know what's going on in my life but this is great!"
Todd Stearn:
Some of the best stories ever are when people have successfully pulled themselves out of their 9:00 to 5:00 into full-time self-employment through affiliate marketing. We both know from experience, from seeing colleagues and peers what just making some money on the side can grow into. Multi-million dollar businesses people grow out of just starting as affiliates. It's fantastic.
Adam Young:
Now when you and your partner have disputes or disagreements, how do you guys handle that?
Todd Stearn:
Sometimes a good dispute requires a good yelling match [laughter]. No, look. If we were-- if we agreed on everything, we wouldn't really be good partners. So it's important that we do argue and we hash things out. And we also come up with constructive solutions to the opportunities and to the threats that face our business. It's really just not being shy about communicating with each other. And if there are issues, it's like a marriage. You really got to just make sure that your business partner knows who you are, where you come from, and he or she should do the same. That's the way to really make sure that you guys are [inaudible]. You both have the same exact goals in mind, because otherwise you'd be spinning wheels.
Adam Young:
That's amazing advice. I think it's important that people understand that when they start a business, that it is like a marriage. You're stuck with that person and disputes are going to happen. Like you said, if they don't, you're going to have more of a problem than an argument here and there. So amazing advice that people need to follow. And what's the difference between Aragon Advertising, and some of the other pay per call and affiliate companies out there?
Todd Stearn:
I think when the values of Aragon are compared to the rest, that one of the unique [inaudible] if you will is that we did come from that [inaudible] company background, which has given us operational experience that we used to have, even though it's a small company relatively speaking, we still have very strict compliance standards, operational guidelines. Everything goes through [inaudible], and I make sure that there is a consistency when it comes to customer client support, and that's most important to me. And I guess followed very closely by our people, because our team is very diverse. We have, about half of our staff is born outside of the US and that gives us a huge perspective difference than a lot of companies, and that comes into everything we do. So yeah, it's very important to have diversity [inaudible].
Adam Young:
I see it out there, too. You guys are heavily active in the Skype groups, Facebook groups, forums, all over the place. And it seems like you put a lot of effort as a company into making sure that people know they can talk to you and trust you guys and you're there for them, which is something that doesn't typically happen in pay per call or CPA. And so it's very refreshing to see it, and I commend you guys for putting in that effort.
Todd Stearn:
Thank you.
Adam Young:
What advice would you give to people just getting started in performance or pay per call specifically?
Todd Stearn:
Just getting started, and we actually, when we have people sign up for our network as affiliates, and we're very clear that this is not [inaudible] work for complete newbies. And we do that because we can't really [call?] everybody's hats, so when you go through our sign-up process on our site, we want to make sure that you can basically consent that you have certain amount of knowledge, six months I think it says and are ready to commit a spend of at least $2,500, up to $5,000 just testing. If you don't have that capital set aside it's very likely you'll have a few misses early on that will dissuade you from continuing. Whereas if you kind of push yourself a little bit more and are prepared to take on a few [losses?], you're much more likely to succeed because nobody gets their first campaign right. You might not get your first dozen right. So I would say patience-- or say understand how much it's actually going to take in terms of capital to get started. And research. There's tons of amazing resources, a lot of them free. Some of them paid for a very nominal fee that I would highly recommend. The [BizOut?} courses are probably not [inaudible] there but the forums are usually pretty good for getting started.
Adam Young:
And what's absolutely critical to get right in order to avoid wasting that initial budget for media buying?
Todd Stearn:
That's a good question. I guess it really comes down to taking your time and researching. I can't stress that enough. We turn people away who thought they knew how to get started just because we don't want to be the people that you come to and waste your beginning investment on. I feel really bad when I hear these stories of people who just got laid off after 40 years and want to get started in making money from home. We can't be that person for you, but we always show people the resources that they should go to and take the time to learn. It's a lot of free information. I would say research a lot, I think.
Adam Young:
And what do you think the biggest difference between say a CPA campaign and a pay per call campaign is for a media buyer?
Todd Stearn:
Concurrency for sure. You really need to know how many calls you can deliver on that confirmed basis, and that was one of the big early learning curves for us as well when we started pay per call is that its real time. There are people sitting in a call center ready to answer phones from your campaign. They might have so much volume coming in that there's no available agent to answer the phone. They might not have enough volume coming in that you're costing the call center money because you promised to send them calls and they're not getting any. But they're paying their call center operators an hourly rate. So concurrency is hugely important. It goes into what kind of commitments you're making to your network partners who are requiring a budget for [inaudible] that goes into mitigating your ad spend so you don't want flood a call center, because if the call's dropped, I mean you're losing so much money that way.
Adam Young:
And I think that's a really important point there, I'm going to stick with you, that hasn't been made public before, but on Ringba's platform across all of our clients, we have a 29% abandonment rate. And what that means is 29% of the calls that flow through our platform are actually dropped due to concurrency and capacity issues across the board. And I think that highlights how important what you're saying actually is. You need enough buyers to cover all of the marketing that's going through your campaigns and if you don't have them, you end up just losing all of that sunk cost. And on the other side of it, if you're unable to provide consistent traffic to your partners, they lose money because they actually have to pay humans that are sitting there answering the phone. So I think that balancing act is exactly right. That's the most complicated part about call and it's the biggest difference between pay per call and CPA. But I actually think that is a competitive advantage because if you get really good at the load balancing and working with multiple partners, and work with the right partners like an Aragon who's I'm sure exceptional at load balancing these calls between partners, there's a huge opportunity there because it requires some work, and a lot of affiliates are lazy. And something like that, they don't want to mess with. And that's why I think there's such high margin, good opportunity in our space.
Todd Stearn:
I agree completely. I think what Aragon does to further limit the impacts of calls dropping is we work with other networks for overflow, and they work with us too. And people wonder why networks have such cozy relationships with each other. They're all strict competitors. But one of the reasons we're so cozy is that when we help each other out-- it's so easy to lose an affiliate forever if you're not able to just accept a few extra dozen calls per day. But if we have a relationship set up with another quality call network just to take those overflow [inaudible], everybody wins, so.
Adam Young:
And we suggest to people that they work with networks all the time, which is a little bit odd because in my CPA background it was always, "Cut out the network, go direct. Make as much money as possible."
Todd Stearn:
Yes. That is another reason we like pay per call [laughter].
Adam Young:
Yeah. Exactly. Because without the back end buyers, and not one or two, you need tons of them to cover all the geographies and all the hours of operation, and then of course the human concurrency. There's an extreme value of working with a network and leveraging the network's relationships. So I highly recommend to everybody that is working in pay per call, unlike CPA you actually want to work with the networks. And this is a reason why Ringba maintains great relationships with as many networks as possible too. We don't even buy and sell calls, but our clients have the same problem that everyone else does, and we want to make sure that all of this concurrency gets ironed out so everyone can make as much money as possible.
Todd Stearn:
Yeah. And just one more thing on that note, Adam. That's why we always recommend affiliates use their own call-tracking platform like Ringba. They need to be in control of their own call routing. You really do. You can't put all your eggs in one basket, one network. And I'm the network, and I'm telling you that it's really important to have diversity. Things happen that are outside of our control, they're outside of your control as the affiliate. And if you have multiple networks ready to take calls at a moment, you're going to pretty much insure your campaign's longevity. And every affiliate knows what it's like to have to pause a campaign for no budget and get it started again in a couple of days or couple of weeks. The opportunity might have been missed. It might be difficult to get it back up.
Adam Young:
That's amazing advice. And most of the time it's not the network's fault when a campaign has an issue. Call centers are using all sorts of PBX platforms and different technology and god knows how many telecommunications providers. There's so many people involved in the pay per call stack, unlike CPA, that when bad things happen, you really need to be prepared and have the ability to reroute your calls. And so obviously I agree with you 100%, being a telecommunications tracking provider but whether someone's not using Ringba, or just getting started, they need call tracking. And so it doesn't matter whether it's us or somebody else. It's extremely important that they use it. What verticals do you think are really good for new and growing affiliates? I know you guys don't work with a ton of brand-new affiliates but what are some of these verticals that just seem to have endless capacity or large volumes of capacity that are a good place for people to start?
Todd Stearn:
It's a good question, yeah. We focus a lot on financial verticals. Sad to say it but the size of the debt market in the US is trillions of dollars and that just creates sort of an opportunity for marketers who can help people who are in debt or have low credit scores connect with people who actually provide services that help them with those issues. It's very personal issue to say you have debt. But with affiliates, it is very-- easy is the wrong word but it's very opportunistic to walk into one of those verticals because from a logistics standpoint, it's completely nationwide so you don't have to target specifics in terms of states. You can take advantage of the huge size of that market and if people are effective at creating CPA campaigns or Lead Gen files or anything for added verticals, all that directly applies to being called as well. It's just a matter of instead of doing [inaudible] for those leads or just selling them off to somebody that matches, you're going to find a way to turn them into calls yourself which is a huge opportunity for people with all the cool tech that's out there now.
Adam Young:
And what is some of that tech and tools that you recommend?
Todd Stearn:
For lead-to-call automation, we've dabbled with drips and tele-drips, and both of those have been strong sort of through varying periods of traffic. You can also very cost-effectively license out call center time. There are companies that do it on a per minute basis and while it's not most effective at scale, it's easy to get going with a call center if they're going to be charging you on the lowest possible basis. Yeah, I think that's what comes to mind for that for sure.
Adam Young:
And what are some ways that affiliates can gain a competitive advantage in this space?
Todd Stearn:
Going back to what I said before, I think it's collecting data and generating your own user base and if you have people that you're collecting leads on that your initial point in your [inaudible] is how do you increase your financial health? You're collecting data from people that are in all sorts of different financial quandaries potentially, or maybe they're not and they're just looking for valuable credit card offerings that you could send them as an upsell. But it's not just you have that data and that's your user base. You've got to keep mailing them or sending troops messages to them or calling them, whatever it might be. You actually have an asset. And then one of the many ways you're going to monetize that asset is by getting it to dial onto one of the call campaigns for debt consolidation.
Adam Young:
Amazing answer. How do you think a solo affiliate can really take their business to the next level? What are some tips and maybe some feedback and lessons you've learned that they can use to go from single affiliate to hiring their first employee and growing a business of their own?
Todd Stearn:
I would say get the distractions away immediately. And I don't mean your social life and your video games or whatever you do on your phone time. Keep that. I'm talking about the distractions in your day-to-day work experience, right? The accounting, the tracking and management, the creative, if that's not your specialty, but there's just-- you can outsource everything. And as soon as you do, you're not going to have a lot of those little distractions like the hour I spent today just going through mail or writing checks. That sucks, but unfortunately you can't give it everything all the time, but you can always minimize the distractions away from what your specialties are, what kind of raises money in. Yeah, it costs a little bit of money to outsource those roles but you will be so much happier that you never have to do that again.
Adam Young:
And they shouldn't give up either. There's a lot of ways to outsource. There's Upworks. There's Freelancer. There's hiring people remote on craigslist. And finding good people takes a lot of time and you're going to go through a few but they shouldn't give up. I completely agree with you. No company's going to make 100% perfect hiring decisions but once you find those good people, it really helps your business grow.
Todd Stearn:
Yeah, and it's-- we're talking about hiring. There's a book that I've read that I absolutely recommend to anybody. It's called [The A-Metric For Hiring?] and it's taught me so much about how to find the perfect person for any role that you are hiring for. So if you're looking to fill people on your team, I read it, I promise-- but it's a great book and I recommend it to anybody.
Adam Young:
Thank you. And what is the future holding for Aragon Advertising? What's your vision of where your company goes?
Todd Stearn:
See, Aragon's diversified quite a bit in the past two years. In addition to pay per call, we have spread our [inaudible] generation business. We have our own content play where we have a personal finance blog and great small websites for producing content from in-house editorial team. And we want to connect the dots between all the different business units and really provide a full spectrum of solutions to clients where we have our own traffic, we have our own reach-in pages where we can generate data through our own affiliate network, and we want to increase the buyer base that we have and show them exactly where your traffic is coming from. And just give them as much clarity and visibility as possible. And that's going to increase our ability to help brands who have traditionally been put off by performance get into the space more, and that's the end goal is to help huge companies with gigantic budgets get into performance instead of [inaudible] to branding and impression sell. All of this combined will help us do that better.
Adam Young:
Guys, I think it's important to acknowledge the fact that Todd just told you that he's working on taking his own advice that he gave you [laughter]. Build out that house value, provide value to your partners and build something that has enterprise value, something that you can sell in the future and grow a brand and a business with. So he's doing exactly what he just suggested other affiliates do, and I think that speaks a lot to the value of that advice. Well, thank you very much for joining us on the show. It was a pleasure to have you here. How can people get a hold of you if they want to work with Aragon Advertising?
Todd Stearn:
You can go to our site. We have a contact form which we recommend all of our prospective advertisers to sign-up through, and that will send a message directly to me and the sales team. We'll reach out to you in kind. And affiliates, there is a direct sign-up right from our website. It's Aragon-Advertising.com/Join, if you want to go directly.
Adam Young:
Thank you so much for being on the show today, it was a pleasure to have you.
Todd Stearn:
Likewise. Thank you for having me.
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