When you are working with a company on a private lead generation campaign, the company will sometimes need to receive the leads by phone calls.  Obviously its much easier to track online leads, but call tracking is not as hard as you might think.  There a variety of paid services available to track and log phone leads, but now you can do it for free with Google Voice.

Here are the steps to track phone leads with Google Voice

1.  Set up a Google Voice account for the campaign.  The phone number you choose is the one you will advertise in your ads.

2.  Set up the forwarding number to the business.  This will automatically forward calls from the Google number to the business phone.  You can also set up groups if the business has multiple phone numbers or departments to take the lead calls.   Be sure you turn off call screening so the call goes right through.  Your call conversion rate will drop if customers have to listen to the Google Voice prompts.  You want a seamless call for the end user.

3.  Start the campaign.  The company will now get their calls directly from the ads, and you can track each call from your computer in your Google Voice account.  Each call will generate a log entry in your call history section along with the time, date.  Each entry is essentially a conversion.  Assign your CPA price for each call.  Then you can export this for your reports and billing invoices for the customer.

Some businesses might want to use the voicemail option after hours to capture calls when no one is on staff to answer the phone.  Those can be transcribed and read from the Google Voice panel.   You can do things like offer the customer a reduced CPA rate for voicemail calls to still capture some revenue on those leads.

This might not be the most robust method as far as analytics, but its a solid way to track all calls generated from an ad for billing purposes.  You don’t have to rely on a busy company to track their incoming calls manually and report to you the totals.  The data is all in your control from your Google Voice account.  Best of all, its free!

I have been posting a lot about the benefits of running private offers lately. That may have given the impression that I think there is no value in running network offers.  But there are definitely positives and negatives to both types of affiliate marketing. Which one is best for you? Let’s take a look 7 main criteria for running an offer.

Upfront work:

Advantage – Networks.  Running a CPA offer on a network is as simple as picking the offer and setting up a campaign.  They have negotiated everything with the merchant, the landing pages are set and ready to go.

Backend work:

Advantage – Networks. They handle all the lead or sale tracking, lead scrubbing and confirmation, and merchant billing.  Everything is taken care of for you.

Types of offers:

Advantage – Private offers. Network offers are mostly limited to the same type of offers on all the networks.  A lot of re-bills and other low quality offers are common.  With private offers you are unlimited in the type of business you want to promote.  As long as you can find a company and sell them on your affiliate services, you can enter virtually any niche.

Payouts:

Advantage-Private offers. This is one of the biggest benefits of running your own offer.  There is no middleman to take a percentage of the profits.  You negotiate and set your own payment which is usually higher than a network can offer.

Longevity:

Advantage-Private offers. Offers on networks can have short life spans due to many factors beyond your control.  Offers that you have privately set up can be more stable and long term.

Competition:

Advantage-Private offers. With the ease of start up and almost zero barrier to entry, network offers have tons of competition.  Private offers (especially locally targeted) often are much less crowded.  This leads to lower bid prices, and higher conversion rates.

Risk:

Advantage – Networks. CPA networks assume most of the risk with running offers.  You will almost always get paid by a network, regardless of the payment status of the merchant.  They also assume some of the legal risk for you.  When you are running a private offer, you take on more risk.

Summary

Your choice to run network or private offers depends a lot on the amount of work you want to put in upfront and on the backend.  It also depends on your risk tolerance.  Both types of affiliate marketing offer the chance for great success.   Its just a matter of what fits best with your business style and plans.  Often, affiliates will start on network offers then transition to private offers.  But the choice is up to you.

Local lead generation is still not widely talked about on  most affiliate marketing blogs, and one topic that I have never seen addressed is how to get these local customers.   As with any business, finding customers is the key so how do you find local businesses interested in your lead generation services?  Here are a few ideas:

• Your blog or website. Not all of us are lucky enough to have a widely viewed website, so this probably won’t work for most people.  But if you do have a website you can advertise your services there.
• Weekly mailers.  Sometimes called value mailers or coupon shoppers, these are the little 20 page junk mail flyers you get every week.  There are always tons of companies offering things  like carpet cleaning, house painting, dentists, flooring, etc.  These companies are shelling out a lot of money for a very low return form of advertising.  They are desperate for new customers.  All you have to do is show them how much cheaper your performance based advertising is, that is also fully trackable and more effective.  These are a great source of new customers.
• Referals.  Satisfied customers like to tell their friends.  If you are doing a good job for a client, encourage them to tell their colleagues.  This can spread like wildfire throughout a local community of professionals or businesses.  Everyone wants to get in on a good thing.  Soon you can come to own a certain business niche in your community, and the more work you do in it, the better you will become.   You really only need one good niche to make a great living doing online lead generation.
• Trade shows.  Instead of going to Internet Marketing trade shows only, branch out and go to a trade show for the niche you are promoting.   If you are doing well promoting plumbing services leads, go to the national plumbers trade show.  Sure, it might not be as fun as say an Affiliate Summit, but this is about business.  Talk to the attendees and tell them about your services.  Maybe even rent a small booth and hire some people to hand out information for the day.   You could launch your lead gen business to the next level from just one show.
• Professional Organizations.  Most types of businesses have a local professional organization.  You can usually advertise on their website or get a list of members to contact.  There are also networking events you can attend, which are a great place to get the word out about your services.

These are just a few of the many ways to get customers for your lead generation business.  Do you have any creative ideas for finding customers?

Affiliate marketing definitely has its downsides. Crowded niches, low payouts, offers ending, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use your internet marketing skills to promote your own “offer” in a niche you created? Well you can.

One of the very successful techniques we use is our own lead generation websites. It became very clear to me early on that the skills learned marketing CPA offers can be leveraged with your own lead capturing websites. I’m not talking about running lead generation offers on networks, I mean creating your own site to capture leads then reselling them to local business. These sites can be built in virtually any niche where businesses need new customers. Some of the advantages of creating your own lead sites: you have total control, conversion tracking/analytics are a breeze, PPC campaigns have great quality score, you collect exactly the data you want, make your own landing pages, and set your own prices.

Many companies are used to buying leads. Real, estate agents, lawyers, financial planners, are all buy expensive leads. Those are very competitive niches, even locally, so I wouldn’t suggest them. But virtually any business can be sold leads. One of the first small niches we tried 2 years ago was personal training. We ran a site that captured local leads for people searching for personal trainers, and offered discounts for training services. The leads went to a local personal training business who paid us a per lead basis, and allowed the customers the discount our site promised. It was a win win for everyone. We pushed traffic to the site through local PPC, social networks, and SEO.

Do you have to keep it local? Of course not, you can sell leads to companies wherever you want. Its usually just easier to use your local knowledge and proximity to clients in your area.  If you live in a decent sized city you probably have access to more business than you can ever handle.

Getting customers:

This is probably the hardest part to get started. Expanding into B2B lead selling will take you out of the comfort zone that you enjoy as an Internet marketer. You actually have to contact businesses and sell your product to them. Again, you can probably use your online marketing skills to get some customers, but you may have to resort to old school techniques. Once you have a few customers in a certain niche though, word of mouth can quickly spread among business owners and professionals.

Pricing:

Customer acquisition costs are high and most companies know what that average cost is to them. Once you research the going rates for leads, you can usually undercut the established rates due to the low cost of operating online. When you are setting up your contract with the company buying your leads, everything is negotiable. You can sell leads at a flat rate fee, a percentage of sales from lead, by monthly subscription, using a sliding scale based on lead quality, etc.   Just make sure everything is very clear in your contract.

This topic is so huge its a whole industry in itself.  I haven’t even scratched the surface.  My point of this post was only to get the ideas flowing and let you realize you probably already have the skills to do this.  If there is interest though, I can dive into this topic more in future posts.  Good luck!

So you say you don’t like the niches and offers that your affiliate network has? Then make your own!

Once you have been doing PPC and lead generation for a while, you have a valuable skill in the general business world. Believe it or not, there are a ton of companies that still have no presence in search engines or PPC. Your skill at driving targeted leads and sales via PPC is highly sought after. Its just a matter of packaging your pitch in a way to promote yourself and what you can do.

Here’s an approach that I have found effective. Companies love PDFs with percentage and charts. So throw together a some graphs and charts from your Google analytics. Show how you can effectively convert xx% of clicks at a cost of $xx dollars. Show estimates of the sales or leads that you could bring the company each month. Give them a bit of your background and success in previous campaigns, by showing actual figures and sales generated for other companies with specific examples.

You will be amazed at how successful a pitch like this can be. If you structure your fees so the company has no upfront cost, and only pay out on a performance basis, you have a very compelling offer. So if you have the skills but are tired of the same old offers, make your own niche in an area you love and expand your business while your at it!

I have mentioned in a few other posts how a big percentage of our income is from private offers. Some people are wondering what this means so I thought I would give an example of one of our biggest money makers.

How it came about:

A friend of mine from I.T. days went to work last year for a mid sized investment services firm as a network admin. This company does a lot of business all across the U.S., but is still mostly old school offline with it’s marketing. They were looking to increase their online presence and my friend gave me a call to see if I would be interested in helping. I had a few calls with their marketing department to find out their goals and what I could help them doing with paid search and lead generation. Basically, the main goal they wanted was to get customers into their sales funnel via their qualified investment lead form.

The setup:

I helped them setup a backend system to track the leads coming in through the page. We both (myself and the company’s accounting dept) have access to the stats for the leads. It’s a simple script that were able to have a php developer build in only 3 hours. But it works great, and lets me track down to the sub id. I then consulted with their web designer to totally re-do the form page and make a few landing pages for my campaigns.

The payment:

We then worked out a payment plan where I am paid a CPA action for each lead, as well as a percentage of any final sale that is derived from that lead. The CPA part is important because it helps by set bid prices and know my profit margins. The secondary payment is key because it gives me an incentive to find better leads, and makes the client feel like its more of a partnership. Not to mention a great money maker for me

I run PPC campaigns on all the networks as well as now some media buys for this offer, and the traffic just keeps increasing. A great benefit is that I am the only person running ads for the company. Obviously there is other competition in the investment services niche, but not for this specific company and group of services they provide.

Replication:

This kind of setup and arrangement could be duplicated in almost any niche. It’s a pretty easy sell to the small to medium sized business that doesn’t have an internet marketing team in house and doesn’t wand to hire someone. The benefit to the company is that you front all the advertising costs and risk. They only get the benefit of a performance based system that delivers leads or sales. The possibilities are really endless.

You can even be proactive and sell yourself to companies that you know you could drive leads to with existing campaigns and keyword lists. The best deals and partnerships are not always going to fall into your lap, or be offered on your favorite affiliate network. Sometimes you have to work for them. You could research a list of companies in a niche you are good at then send an email to their marketing department. Tell them you are an established online lead generator, and can provide them with risk free leads. Throw in a bunch of impressive RIO stats from your previous efforts, and you would be surprised at the response you get.

It’s just another way of thinking about applying skills you have learned with CPA networks to more profitable relationships and campaigns. I see this as a much more stable and long lasting income source than network based offers.