How to Do Pay Per Call Affiliate Marketing and Advertising

Pay per call affiliate marketing and advertising is becoming the new craze in affiliate circles, and for good reason. Essentially, it is a form of CPA (Cost per Action) marketing, but instead of the action being a form submission, it is a call. In our opinion, it is one of the easiest ways to earn money with affiliate marketing. Here is our step by step guide on how to do pay per call affiliate marketing and advertising.

Step 1: Choose a Niche/Vertical

As most affiliate marketers already know, choosing the right niche is important to your success. With pay per call, there are quite a few niches to choose from. You can take a look at our local niche finder tool for some ideas. If you are unsure which niche to choose, we suggest starting with a common home service niche.

Step 2: Choose Pay Per Call Affiliate Network and and Offer

While there are many affiliate networks out there, not all of them are equal. We recommend joining as many of them as you can in order to test and find the best offers.

Here Is a List of Pay Per Call Affiliate Networks That We Work With:

1. 33 Mile Radius
2. RingPartner

You can find more affiliate networks by checking the pay per call section of OfferVault, or by looking in Facebook groups, like this one.

What to Look for in a Good Offer

There are a few things that you should look for when judging an offer. Here is a list of what we usually consider:

Duration Based Payout vs Revenue Share

There are two billing models which affiliate networks usually use to calculate payouts: duration based payouts and revenue share based payouts. Duration based payouts are those that pay once the call exceeds a certain duration, usually around 90 seconds. Revenue share based payouts means that you get paid when the network gets paid.

Overall, we have found that it is almost always best to negotiate a revenue share type of deal with the affiliate networks. This usually will get you a higher payout and a larger coverage map because the network can sell leads to their downstream partners if they do not cover the area your leads are in.

The Coverage and Consistency

While some offers may have a great payout, it may just be to make up for the campaign’s lack of coverage and consistency. For example, there are some offers where almost every week the lead buyers in certain areas pause their purchases, requiring you to constantly be on the lookout and changing your targets. This will make it difficult for you to drive a large volume of calls. Obviously, the best coverage you can have is nationwide or what is sometimes called “All US”, but having at least 40 thousand zip codes or more is also decent.

Network EPC

It may be tempting to look at a network’s payout as the main metric for determining if an offer is good, but the network’s EPC (Earnings per Click) is a better metric to look at. This will help you understand how well an offer is converting.

Accepted Promotional Methods

While most pay per call campaigns allow for the use of search engine promotion, like SEO and SEM, many of them will not allow you to use channels like Craigslist. Depending on how you plan on promoting the offer, this may not be an issue for you. We prefer when a campaign accepts Craigslist because it is a relatively easy channel to generate calls from. At the very least, it makes for a good supplement to the campaigns that you run on other traffic channels.

IVR

IVR stands for interactive voice response and it is the automated menu that plays before a call. The caller will need to navigate through these in order to be connected with the service provider and for you to get your payout. In general, shorter IVRs lead to larger rates of success. You can simply do a test call to check how the IVR is on an offer. Oftentimes, when it is more than one step and asks for more than a zip code, the customer becomes impatient and suspicious, leading them to hang up.

Niche Volume vs Payout

Niches have different amounts of volume, so just because one offer has a lower payout compared to another, it does not mean that that offer is less profitable than the other one. You should consider both the average volume and average CPC (if you are running paid traffic) when determining whether an offer is good or not. For example, water damage restoration has a higher payout than plumbing, but it also has a higher average CPC and a lower volume. Therefore, it may be more difficult to be profitable in that vertical.

Step 3: Promote the Offer

There are many ways you can promote pay per call affiliate programs. We recommend that you use what you are good at while not being afraid to try new lead sources. Below we outline some promotional methods. While you may be familiar with some of these already, exploring the ones you are not familiar with can be a good chance to learn and refine your skills. Some promotional methods include:

Craigslist

This is probably the easiest way to promote home service affiliate offers. You can do it simply by creating an account and paying $5 per post in the services section. The biggest tip we can give for creating a good craigslist ad for services is to have a simple and grammatically correct ad, combined with a ton of keywords.

SEO

While SEO might take a little longer to build up and has a steeper learning curve compared to some of the other traffic sources out there, it often has a high profit margin once you get it working. You can learn more about creating call generation SEO websites by reading our local lead generation article or by checking out our course with Chase Reiner. We also have a fully done for you local lead generation website set up service.

SEM/PPC

Like Craigslist, this is one of the more immediate ways to start getting calls in the door. That being said, similar to SEO, this traffic source has a steep learning curve. If you are new to PPC advertising, we recommend learning the fundamentals by purchasing a course on Udemy or another course platform.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to promote pay per call offers because it is underutilized and cheaper than PPC search ads. Facebook ads are one of our favorite ways to promote offers. While it may take some testing to find the right ad company and the right vertical, when it’s set up, it can be quite lucrative. Also keep in mind that social media ads work great with special offers and coupons, so ask your affiliate manager if they have any for the offers you’re running.

Direct Mail

Who said that you only have to use online methods to promote offers? Direct mail ads are becoming less and less competitive as more and more advertisers are moving online, so it can be a good opportunity for getting calls. These campaigns tend to work great with coupons, so ask your pay per call company if they have any special offers that you can use.

Local Newspaper

This is also a great place to run ads because like previously mentioned, many advertisers have moved away from it. Simply Google your local paper’s name + advertising to find out how you can contact them. It should cost you less than $100 per week to get a simple ad posted in the paper, so we highly recommend testing this for your niche.

Directories

Directories like the Yellow Pages are still used by many people and are an underutilized channel for getting calls. It may be a good idea to give these a try to see how they do for you.

Display Ads

Display ads are the ads that show up on banners of websites that are running Google Adsense. Although these ads generally don’t convert as well as search ads, they can still get calls. An important part of utilizing them comes down to how your targeting. Our favorite ways of targeting these ads are with remarketing audiences and with relevant blogs. We recommend that you have a remarketing pixel for both Google and Facebook installed on your website to make this possible.

Blogs and Other Content Websites

Take a look around the web and see if there are any how to blogs in your niche. Reach out to them, and chances are that you can find some that are willing to let you run banner advertising for relatively cheap. The bar set by Google Adsense is pretty low, so you should be able to offer more at a relatively low rate.

Publishers

Last, but certainly not least, you can actually get your own affiliates or publishers that you pay on a per call basis to run offers for you. You can do this by advertising on OfferVault and posting in relevant Facebook groups. If you structure the deals correctly, there is little to no risk for you as the middle man because you will only need to pay them when you get billable calls. We recommend creating unique phone numbers for your publishers and giving them access to their calls via a platform like CallRail. Just keep in mind that this works best if you have some sort of exclusive offer or payout that other affiliates may not have.

How to Do Pay Per Call Affiliate Marketing and Advertising Summed Up

Running the various campaigns mentioned above can be very profitable for many affiliates if done correctly, but when starting out, there can be a learning curve. Regardless, we recommend giving pay per call a try to refine your marketing and advertising abilities.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Let us know in the comments below or in our Facebook group.