Part of the guide: Network Marketing Lead Generation
I don’t usually talk about business models, or ‘ways to make money’ as everyone already knows the most sustainable long term models out there.
You have offline clients (web design/SEO etc), private consulting, building sites, affiliate marketing, list building, product launches, blogging, Network Marketing and more (yada, yada, yada…).
However, the other week I started talking to an old buddy of mine. This friend had always struggled with Internet Marketing. He never really found his feet, he spent years constantly jumping from one opportunity to the next; but one day he disappeared off the map.
It was only the other week that he contacted me for a catchup. Fifteen minutes later my mind was blown (sort of). He figured out a way to go from earning $10k/year online working full time to over $150,000 working a mere few hours a day.
The model he was using was the pay per call model. The general consensus for ‘offline IM’ is that you should sell online marketing services to offline businesses. Building sites for offline businesses, leasing them or selling them SEO or other marketing services.
I’ve always thought offering marketing services to offline businesses was a smart idea to make some extra cash (why not). There are even countless Internet Marketing agencies out there making 7 or 8 figures a year dealing with big companies with in house teams.
Local businesses (small ones) have no idea how to market their businesses, most of them are stuck in the 80′s. So when an Internet Marketer approaches them and tells them they can generate them more business by setting up a website or SEO’ing their established site; they’re happy to make the investment.
However…
Small local businesses don’t want to screw around with marketing, they usually don’t like marketing at all. They are sales people if anything, not marketers and definitely not online marketers. They don’t want to know how you do SEO or social media; they just want more customers on a daily basis.
So as my friend (let’s call him Bob) was telling me; he started selling qualified leads to local businesses. The end goal of marketing campaigns for local businesses is to generate calls, to book appointments and send more people in/out the door. They want customers ringing them asking for their services.
You can sell SEO, social media and everything else to offline clients, but ultimately they only want more phone calls. So why not give them exactly that, why not give them phone calls?
Enter The Pay Per Call Business Model
The pay per call business model is exactly that, generating real-time phone calls to local businesses and charging them for each one. How you do it is pretty simple. You essentially build a lead generation funnel, consisting of one main website, some videos and classified ads.
What Bob was doing was picking a niche (like dentistry), a city (like New York), and building a website to rank for all of the local dentist related keywords in NY city (new york dentists, nyc dentists etc). This is what a lead generation site looks like:
Bob built simple sites like that designed to generate phone calls. He’d write up a basic home page, make the site look like a reputable company site, added a few articles and built a few backlinks.
Local keywords are very easy to rank for (there is little to no competition), so the link building he did was minimal (he doesn’t know much about SEO). Using a service I’ll tell you about in a minute, Bob paid for a US phone number for each site (costing about $2/month per number). Once the site started generating traffic, he would contact the local businesses (in this case dentists) and offer them the leads at a fixed price.
After several phone calls a business owner would agree to test the leads out for 1 week and if happy with them, pay $20+ per phone call received from Bob. Without being too technical. If your site targets a few keywords that generate a total of 1000 searches/month and your site received just 500, you might generate a conservative 50 calls. Billed at $20 a lead, that’s $1000 from 1 site, from 1 client.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Bob built over 150 of these sites and is continually growing his pay per call business. The cool part is the sites take hours to build, the clients are easy to find and there is a company/service that allows you to automatically bill/track calls/forward numbers and completely systematically the model.
Comments
Curtman40, January 16, 2013
This is pretty slick, but how much domain names would cost ? I understand the concept of building a network but how expensive it will be…
Sara Johnson, January 17, 2013
David, this model sounds very interesting and promising. I’ve been struggling with online marketing strategies, and this seems like a great way to generate leads. Do you have any recommendations for getting started with finding local clients?
Michael Smith, January 18, 2013
Thanks for sharing this, David. The pay per call model is new to me, but it makes so much sense. How long did it take for Bob to start seeing substantial income from this method?
Linda Thompson, January 19, 2013
This is a fantastic idea! I’ve been looking for ways to help small businesses in my area, and this seems like a perfect solution. Can you share some tips on building and ranking local websites effectively?
John Adams, January 20, 2013
Great post, David! The detailed explanation of the pay per call business model is very helpful. What are some common challenges people face when implementing this model, and how can they overcome them?
Emily Davis, January 21, 2013
Interesting read, David. I love the simplicity of this model. Just curious, do you think this model can be scaled up to target multiple niches and cities simultaneously?
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
I spent six years building a team before I walked away, so this pattern reads familiar: ‘my buddy Bob’ who’s unnamed, whose exact numbers we’re told rather than shown, and a business model presented as though the buildable part, a large number of local lead-gen sites, sales calls to convince skeptical business owners, an actual billing and call-tracking system running underneath all of it, is a footnote. It genuinely can work. It is also considerably more infrastructure than ‘build a site, wait for the phone to ring’ suggests.
The one part of this that’s genuinely well designed is the billing and call-tracking layer running underneath everything, forwarding numbers, tracking which call came from which site, invoicing automatically. That’s the piece worth studying regardless of what you think of the model, because it’s the difference between a pile of separate manual businesses and one system. Everything else here, the site building, the cold calls to local owners, is still fully manual in this version, which surprised me given how automatable the lead-gen side actually is.
I built two lead-gen sites for a much smaller local niche a few years back, same basic idea. Week one was picking the niche and city, easy. Weeks two and three were the actual site plus a handful of backlinks, also fine. Where it fell apart for me was week five, calling local business owners cold to offer them leads from a site they’d never heard of – I got hung up on more than I care to admit, and I never found the script that made that part reliably work. Two years later the sites still pull a trickle of traffic and I still don’t call anyone off the back of them, which is its own kind of answer about how much of this model was ever really about the SEO.
Kelsey’s week five is the same wall I’d have hit running the diner. When a stranger showed up wanting to sell me something that would bring customers through my door, the thing that mattered wasn’t the pitch, it was whether I’d heard their name around town before. Local business owners buy from people the community already half-trusts, and a cold call from someone with a website and no local footprint is starting from behind before the first sentence is even finished.
Birdie, this is very close to my own experience, though from cosmetics distribution rather than a diner – trust travels through the local community first, in my market even more than the reputation of the company itself. I am curious whether this model translates outside of the United States at all, since the post assumes a market where a stranger can rank a site and simply start calling. Here relationships usually need to exist before the first phone call, not after it, and I wonder if that changes which part of this plan would need to come first.
Fine, pay-per-call is a legitimate model. What’s missing is the part where you cold-call a skeptical local business owner and get them to trust a lead from a stranger.
Marla’s skip is the part I’d sit with too. There’s a character question buried in ‘build a site that looks like a reputable company’ for a dentist’s office – it’s not the site’s job to look reputable, it’s the dentist’s actual practice that has to be. If the leads are qualified honestly and the calls are real, that’s fair trade. If the site is styled to imply credibility the business hasn’t earned yet, that’s a different thing wearing the same description.
Hollis, I think what’s being missed here is that the ‘reputable company site’ concern only bites if the leads themselves are misrepresented. A basic, professional-looking site for a real local business isn’t a costume, most legitimate small companies have exactly that. Where I’d want more from the post is what ‘qualified’ means before a lead gets billed to the dentist – that’s the point where honesty either holds or doesn’t, and the article never defines it.
This whole model runs on cold-calling local owners repeatedly until one says yes. That’s the actual skill required, not the site-building.