Your Questions, Answered

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Adam Young 00:00:00

These type of questions annoy the shit out of me because you're basically telling me and signaling to me that you don't want to show up, you don't want to give it your all, and you don't want to do something great. How do I make a hundred thousand dollars a week? Okay, I need to go do that. And it's not systems and processes, it is not an organizational and operations work. I don't have a COO or like any operations people. Do you know why? Because we don't do operations, we don't care about bureaucracy. And then ask yourself why you are not focused on a 10 times bigger result than you're focused on today. If the answer is yes, great, how do we make it better? The answer is no, and I would fucking destroy all of you.

John Casto 00:00:55

Hey, what's going on guys? I'm here in the Philippines, but I still wanted to make sure to share this really awesome video where I sat down with Adam, the founder of Rainbow, and we talked about not just how to succeed with paper call, but also how to win in business and life in general today. So check it out, let know what you think in the comments, okay? Okay, so these will be the ones that I said, Hey, I'm with Adam, ask your questions, and then I got a bunch of other questions they've asked me that I've answered, but I want to share your response. Okay. Question number one, do any paper call offers allow SMS traffic?

Adam Young 00:01:31

Yes.

John Casto 00:01:33

Explain a little bit more on that. Just

Adam Young 00:01:35

They do

John Casto 00:01:35

Tips. Okay, beautiful.

Adam Young 00:01:39

You said short

John Casto 00:01:40

Like I'm

Adam Young 00:01:40

Replying to a text message.

John Casto 00:01:42

Okay,

Adam Young 00:01:44

Hold on. Just ask.

John Casto 00:01:47

Okay.

Adam Young 00:01:47

And never send SMS traffic without approval first,

John Casto 00:01:51

Perfect answer. Why are some networks leery of live transfers? I got a network that will sell you live transfers but won't buy them. My assumption is they're overseas spam calling people on DNC lists and want to pass along the risk.

Adam Young 00:02:08

Yeah, I mean, look, the liability is so big on transfers that people aren't going to take 'em through a publisher that doesn't own the call center where they don't know where the data is coming from, who the call center is or how it was generated or called because it's too much of a risk. The publisher likely will have an indemnification clause in their agreement, which says they'll pay the legal fees if there's an issue, but actually getting those legal fees from some random pub or affiliate is probably not going to happen. And so the contract doesn't mean shit, right? It doesn't matter how much someone owes you, it's how much you can collect from them. If they don't have any money, you can't get it. And so the risk is too great for them to take the transfers. So I mean, I'll give you a longer answer here on how to do it if you want.

Yeah, sure. So if you want to be a publisher that's selling transfers to a network or direct buyer, you need to be able to document in detail how you are generating the leads and how the calls are being transferred and show that to the network. But look, here's the deal guys. Outbound transfers are dead. One-to-one is coming in January. That shit is game over. There's no more age data, there's no more buying data, dialing it and transferring the phone call somewhere. You can only generate data for one-to-one consented buyers and then they are the ones that sell over the phone. So you might as well forget about this shit or figure out what inbound to transfers are and move on with your day because you're thinking about an industry that's over not worth the time.

John Casto 00:03:57

How quick or hard is it to be able to get affiliate network to approve you for their campaign when you're completely new in the space? For example, who do I speak to or network to get into touch with a network manager to send my email? What would it take me one to six months to be able to land a campaign?

Adam Young 00:04:16

Well, that's because you're focused on the wrong things. The network manager sees your message, you know who to contact. It's not that complicated. You go on LinkedIn, you contact the network manager, publish your manager, CEO, whatever. The problem you have is you're not presenting yourself properly. Your LinkedIn is not done with a professional headshot and photo. You don't have a website that is well done and well-written. Doesn't look like you outsourced it on Upwork for $22 with 4 0 4 pages or a splash page that says YOLO affiliates with a picture of a fucking Lamborghini on it or something like you need a website that shows who you are, where you're from, who your actual name is, a real email address with a signature in it, a nice logo, business cards.

They reply to what looks and feels like a legitimate business that will be around and can be held accountable if there's a problem. The reason that the biggest companies in the space exhibit at trade shows like our friend John is because he's signaling subconsciously to the biggest companies that he's going to be around no matter what. Which means if there's a problem, they will pick up the phone. If you are not presenting yourself like you are a professional affiliate, then they won't reply. It doesn't matter whether you're new or not. If you present yourself as a professional affiliate in a well done professional way, they know who you are, they can see your face, it's real, you're not hiding. Then you can reach out and be like, Hey, I run a bunch of calls. I do a lot of leads. We also do clicks and other things.

I see you have this campaign. I think I could do really well on search traffic with it. We have experience with search traffic. We've done a little bit of testing and I think we would be able to scale this profitably in a compliant manner, and I would love to talk to you about that opportunity. If now's not a good time, please let me know When is I will be at affiliate summit and leads con, if you prefer to meet in person, I would love to grab 15 minutes on your calendar. Please just let me know when you or someone on your team will be at a trade show and I will make the accommodations so that we can meet in person. I'd really love to work with you guys and if that takes time, that's okay. I appreciate it if you'd reply to me either way and I really look forward to meeting you in person sometimes. Thank you. My real fucking name. Anyways, I already answered this question in my book and my class, and so you guys are asking easy questions. The answers are already out there. There's a reason why they're not working with you.

John Casto 00:07:23

I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask it. Can that said publisher create success and opportunities without going to trade shows in your opinion?

Adam Young 00:07:37

Sure. It's not the easiest or best way if you want to make it harder on yourself. I don't take phone calls from people I don't know. I don't reply to emails from people I don't know you ain't going to get me. You show up at a trade show and you call up and shake my hand. What you're telling me is I'm willing to invest in my future and I'm taking this seriously. If you're not willing to come to a trade show, maybe you're foreign and it's expensive, and I understand that and you're going to have to figure that out. It's a different challenge. But if you're an American and you won't show up to a trade show and you're like, I'm new and I promise I'll do a great job or whatever, you've already told me that you don't have the resources, you're not going to make the investment to give a shit. And so why would I make the investment of spending my time, which is valuable in helping you or working with you as a network owner or a manager? I wouldn't when I was in my parents' basement, oh no, even before that, okay, so I got a sensor part of this story. I actually told it to Kim the other day.

The first time I went to a trade show. I was 18 years old and I had a really good friend, my best friend and his sister was dating the son of a very wealthy, famous banker. And this guy was just super cool and he was great at business simply because of his father and learning and all that. And my friend and I were trying to start a business and knew nothing about what we were doing. I think it might've been 17, but I was turning 18 and he was like, guys, I see what you're doing here and this is cool. You've actually figured a bunch of this stuff out, but you don't know how to actually make money in this industry. You don't know how it works. You don't know anyone in it. You haven't seen what's happening. And so he said to me a very valuable lesson, he said, anytime you want to get started in an industry, the first thing you do is look up the biggest trade show in the world for that industry.

And you go there, you go to the sessions, even if they're boring, you talk to all the speakers, even if it was boring, you talk to every single booth, even if it's not relevant and you try to see what's going on and get a feel for the industry. And he goes, so listen. And he's typing on his computer and he prints something out. He says, listen, if this business goes anywhere, I own 3% of it, I'm going to pay to fly you guys to Las Vegas for this trade show. He literally googled it and was like, I'm going to put you up. You're going to share a room in a shitty hotel. You go to this trade show, you're going to have to figure out how to pay for your meals, expenses, whatever. I'll get the flight in hotel deal. And we go, okay. And he goes, and if you figure it out, you're going to need more money to probably do it.

I'll help you out with that. We're going to have to talk about a little bit more percentage here, but this is how business works, okay? He wasn't worried about any of this. He was just trying to show us. And so we went to Las Vegas and we went to all the sessions. It was nuts. I had never seen anything like it. There were thousands of people there all making money in an industry and I didn't know how it worked. And I was like, man, I want to make money. I want to do this. And so we tried. We failed. Didn't go anywhere, but I learned a lot, a lot from just showing up and going. And we sat up in the hotel room with notepads and we're just brainstorming all night and we were geeked and there were so many ideas and it was just an amazing experience.

And we bought cheap food and didn't go out, couldn't party. I was only 18. I couldn't get into any of the parties, and that was my first trade show and it was an incredible experience. And years later, in 2012, I emailed this guy, he actually owns and runs a very prominent hedge fund in Hong Kong now probably a billionaire. And I said, Hey man, I don't know if you remember me, but you paid to send me to that first trade show, and I can't tell you how impactful that was on my life and business career and I never did anything in that industry, and it's not like I burned you on the contract, but I just wanted to let you know that you made this incredible impact in my life and I'm grateful for it. A couple hours later he replies, says, that's awesome. Glad to hear. I think he said something silly like, glad to hear you're rich.

John Casto 00:12:14

Give me my 3%.

Adam Young 00:12:15

No, no, no, no. He said, I'm running a hedge fund in Hong Kong. If you would ever like to invest in Asia, please give me a call. Fortunately, the Chinese market was destroyed at the time, but I think it fund was up a couple hundred percent three years later. And so I really wish I would've sent him that letter, I got to tell you. But look, that's the thing. If you're not going to show up, you're not going to be taken seriously. If you want to do anything amazing, you have to show up. And so these type of questions annoy the shit out of me because you're basically telling me and signaling to me that you don't want to show up, you don't want to give it your all, and you don't want to do something great and so great people don't vibe with that. That is actually a signal that we don't want to interact. And so I know that may be harsh for your person in your community, and I'm not going to apologize for it. I just really hope that they listen to what I'm saying and change their mind because if they do that, then great people will want to interact with them and they have a higher chance of being successful in any industry, and that's what I want for that person. I want them to be successful, and so I need them to change their mind and their perspective.

All right, how many more questions we

John Casto 00:13:28

Got? We can do as many as you want.

Adam Young 00:13:31

Keep 'em coming. Cool. Hopefully they're not all

John Casto 00:13:37

This one's bad.

Adam Young 00:13:37

How do I succeed without doing anything?

John Casto 00:13:40

This one's good. I think there's, it's a lot of bullets to it, but it's a big question.

Adam Young 00:13:46

Hit me.

John Casto 00:13:46

I'm going to read the full thing. I think you'll appreciate some of this.

Adam Young 00:13:49

Okay.

John Casto 00:13:50

Hey John, big fan of your YouTube channel. I've been watching for a while, community. Feel free to chime in here. I'm new to Paper Call Space and really excited to dive in. I've read the paper call revolution, watch countless interviews on paper call affiliate marketing. I've taken a course, I've been exploring affiliate marketing and will learn more about how experienced marketers in the community structure their business, especially when it comes to systems processes. I'm currently using clickup to set up my workflows. A few questions I have. How do you typically, you can answer these one at a time because they might be yes nos. How do you typically set up your paper call campaigns? That's not a yes no. Do you follow a specific process from testing to scaling?

Adam Young 00:14:32

I mean the process for testing a paper call campaigns no different than testing any other type of offer. You're basically going to choose a budget by traffic source and what your conversion cost tolerance is. If the payout's $50 and you can't generate a conversion with three, that $150, you're going to have to rethink your targeting or your ads. If you're talking about social traffic sources that are video, most of that is going to be your creative 80%, the ad creative video, 20% maybe the landing page creative copy. I would spend the time optimizing the ad creative versus the landing page. You're going to get more bang for your buck there across the board. And then if you're generating calls and they're not converting, then you need to figure out what the messaging is to prime the consumer for intent. And so anytime you're building out a paper call campaign, it's no different than an affiliate campaign.

You just have more data and metrics to do it. And so you really have to look at conversion rates, call length, time on page, using number pools. That's the time to call if it's really long or really short, that can be indicative of consumers not understanding what's on the page. If it's just a landing page tells 'em to call, it's not a lot of text or a quick survey, you qualify, call whatever it is. If they're sitting looking at that too long, they may not understand it. You need to look at the device types that are resulting in calls are the user agents all iPhone or Android? Because if it's one or the other or one's worth more money, you can start to target and do exclusions by that for search traffic while and any other traffic source, you need to listen to the calls every single one of them so that you can understand where the consumer's head's at.

If a consumer calls and they don't understand why they're calling, well that's the reason why you're not getting any phone calls. If the consumer's calling and asking the wrong questions, maybe you're not qualifying them properly or steering their intent. If you listen to a call and it's search traffic and they're calling for customer support or something else, then you need negative keywords that are blocking out the things that are not resulting in conversions or quality calls or whatever the case is. And so you start with, can I get people on the phone somewhere in the neighborhood of the payout or double or less hopefully

John Casto 00:17:31

Cost per call around the payout to start? That's the

Adam Young 00:17:33

Target. And then you need to generate enough phone calls even at a bit of a loss, like not huge loss with a bit of a loss so that you can collect the data to understand what you need to optimize next. And the hardest part about this is the time commitment to listen to a phone call. It's a lot of work, but if I were in this person's shoes and I were doing this myself, and this was my business and I were starting today, I would listen to a thousand phone calls in a vertical until I had understood everything about the sales process, about the backend conversion rates, about the consumer intent about everything. I would know the campaign better than the buyer. And once I did that, then I would start to look all over the place for where are more consumers like the ones that I want?

And since I know how they think I can go find them in places that other people aren't like not Facebook ads and those type of pockets are the most valuable. You can find insane margin like calls if you understand the consumers and can figure out where to look and where they're collectively aggregating on the internet. But you can't do that if you don't understand the consumer and you don't put in the work. But when you do go find those other places to generate the calls, whether it be paid or organic or whatever it is, they're not going to be unlimited scale. They're going to be like, you can get so many of them, but if they're super high margin, you're going to go out there and find a bunch of pockets dads together, and if you can find a 60% margin phone call versus a 15% margin phone call, you don't need to generate nearly as many to make the same amount of money and then that's going to provide more ad budget for you to go work on paid media, but for paid media, you got to listen to the calls. That's where it all starts. And that's the difference between pay call versus an affiliate campaign where once the consumer gets to the advertiser, it's off your plate and most affiliates don't take the time to learn the backend. They should, frankly. But that's how you win in paper calls to generate the calls, listen to the calls, optimize to listen to more calls, make sure that your new optimizations type consumers a little better, and you're moving the needle, moving the needle, moving the needle.

So if it were me, I'd be like, all right, we're going to listen to a thousand dentist calls until I figure this out fully. And then all day, every day there's just going to be calls playing like going crazy, and that's how you do it. That's how you learn. And that's the cool thing about paper calls is the consumer is telling you how to win. It's just most people aren't listening.

John Casto 00:20:29

It's less of a black box, whereas a leaded, you cross your fingers of weight

Adam Young 00:20:35

And there's more sunk cost to it. You got to pay me and you got to buy the media and you got to do these things. And a lot of affiliates aren't used to that. They're like, what? I got to pay per minute. I got to pay for this shit. This is silly, but it's not. And the reason you're paying for it is because it gives you the answers and that's the value. And then once you have the answers, it makes you more money automatically because you can't do what technology can do. So yeah, great question. I think it still boils down to you got to do the work.

John Casto 00:21:16

He then asked, what tools or software do you rely on for managing inbound calls, tracking and campaign optimization

Adam Young 00:21:24

Ring?

John Casto 00:21:26

How do you structure your team? Do you outsource certain roles such as media buying creative specialists, or do you handle the most of it yourself? And this is in context for someone new?

Adam Young 00:21:36

Well, if you're new, you do all of it yourself until you're highly competent in all these tasks. Here's the thing, if you don't know how to media buy and you're new and you go hire a media buyer, you expect that person to respect you. You expect to be able to lead that person. No, you are relying on that person, that person leads you and so they can burn you or if they don't perform, you won't know if what they're telling you is real or not or whatever. And I'm not saying that everyone's dishonest or whatever, but you need to understand what you're doing and how it all works. One of the reasons why ringa is successful and why a lot of people trust me with their business is because I have done what they do. I spent 10 years in the trenches as an affiliate.

I've run every type of campaign that allows me to know how to design the software for media buyers and design the software for people need. Also at Ring ba, my team knows that I am a software architect. I can write the code, I can do the math, and so they respect me on a different level and I'm able to add value where they don't expect it. I know how to go and do a conversation and just know that they can do better and that I can help them find better solutions and that I can ask the right questions to lead us there. And if someone gives me an answer, I know when to agree with it and when not to agree with it because I understand how to do what they're doing. And you don't have to know how to do everything. That's not possible. You have to have an understanding of what everyone is doing, especially when you're new or you're going to fail because you won't know how to hire or test people to make sure that they are the right fit. We have a media buyer at Ringa who does the book campaigns, and Chad interviewed a bunch of 'em, and then I interviewed the final candidates. I bought a lot of media. I was like, walk me through your process.

John Casto 00:23:45

What were some of the answers we got good and bad?

Adam Young 00:23:51

Well, when they walked me through their process, it tells me how they think, and these were final interviews. I don't think there were really any bad answers, but I was able to assess how creative they were going to be and how they looked for opportunities, and that's really important with media buying. And so I want to understand how they think. And then I also wanted to understand who they previously worked for because that's going to tell me what type of person they learned their craft from. And so those were the questions I asked is tell me about the last person you worked for and what it was like and how he was involved in what you were doing and how did you learn what? And Zach on our team had done a lot of media vying for information products and books. Perfect. And the person he worked for before seemed like a micromanager that was all up in his shit all the time, but was really amazing at media buying and it probably drove him nuts, but he cut his teeth that way, really good then.

So when he got to me and I was like, listen, I'm not going to micromanage you at all. I'm not even going to bother you. I just expect these results and go do it. If you need me, you know how to find me different vibe, but that's better for him now that he had spent years and years and years learning his craft, right? He's like, I can do it, but I was able to assess his talents and then trust him because I knew how to do what he's doing and had done it myself. And that makes it easier to find the right people and when you know that you're willing to take bigger risks, which means paying more for high quality talent, if you don't know and you're new and you're trying to hire a media buyer and you're worried about the money and you don't know how to interview or understand if they're good or bad or how to verify it or whatever, you're fucked.

John Casto 00:25:50

What's your approach to keeping your operations lead while scaling? One, starting

Adam Young 00:25:56

Lean while scaling? I push people to find solutions that are not obvious and when they present their plans to me, I challenge every part of the plan and ask, how do we get the same result without spending any money? Which results the most important to us? What work and what we're working on? What gets us to the next stage? We need to get to the fastest with the least amount of resources, and then we brainstorm on that and then I'll ask questions. How do we do it 10 times faster? How do we do it for free? Do we need this?

When you're in the beginning, it's not about process or structure. You don't need tools, you need results, and so your focus should be aggressively on results and results only. It does not matter how you get to those results, what tools you use, how whatever, none of that matters. What matters is you achieve the results. You're going to put in the processes and the systems later when you need to scale your team, and if you try to put them in place now so it's organized while you scale your team, you're not going to be able to understand how your team needs to function. Then whatever you're doing now and putting all this effort into your tools and designing your organization process, SOPs, all this bureaucratic bullshit, it's all going to change when you see success because you're going to be like, oh, I got to redesign the whole organization.

This is going to happen over and over and over and over again. As you scale, the CEO of Toyota said, every time your business scales 300%, you have to throw everything away and rebuild the whole thing. And so if you're new, wherever you're at today, 300% is not that much. And so why are you thinking about what software you need to organize your workflows? What the fuck's a workflow? What are the results? Are they what you want? No. Okay, how do we get those results? Like SOPs, how do I make the cash register ring to get me here? Because in business and in startups, a hundred percent of them fail because they can't sell their products and services. If they could sell their products and services, they wouldn't fail. Even if they screwed everything up, they'd be like, we got the money. We'll hire people, we'll solve it. Problem is they're focused on everything else except winning. Winning is the only thing that matters. Winning is the only thing you focus on because if you're not fucking winning, you are

John Casto 00:28:38

Losing,

Adam Young 00:28:39

Right? Does it matter what your organizational software is if you're losing? No, it doesn't because it doesn't matter, especially when you're small. If you're a team of one or two, fuck who cares about any of that question is, all right, I'm making a thousand dollars a week. How do I make a hundred thousand dollars a week? Okay, I need to go do that. And it's not systems and processes. It's like I need to find creative ways to get competitive advantage to renegotiate everything and scale my business and do that. It's all in that type of work. It is not in organizational and operational work, we have 75 people at Ring ba. I don't have a COO or like any operations people I should at this point, but we don't. Do you know why? Because we don't do operations. We don't care about bureaucracy. I don't want an HR department or paperwork or follow these 200 page SOPs to whatever.

No. All they care about is results. Are customers making more money when they work with Ring Bot? Yes or no? If the answer is no, that's bad. If the answer is yes, good, keep it that way. Are we providing great support, right Answer, yes. Cool. How do we make it better? Answer no fuck, how do we make it better? That's it, right? We're engineering products and services. Are we making the best technology that exists in the space? Yes or no? If the answer is yes, great, how do we make it better and do it faster? The answer is no. Fuck. How do we make it better and do it faster, right? These are the only questions. These are the only questions that matter, like, do we use Jira or Trello? I don't care. All I care about is the result. Focus on the result and then ask yourself why you are not focused on a 10 times bigger result than you're focused on today. That's it. What are the results? Am I hitting them? Why am I thinking so fucking small? That's how you do it.

John Casto 00:31:01

Any tips for someone just starting out of the space on managing multiple campaigns efficiently? I'm currently building my system through scratch and would appreciate any advice or insight.

Adam Young 00:31:15

I mean, if you're a team of one and you're building systems,

John Casto 00:31:19

Maybe let's answer the first part of that with assuming they're running traffic with multiple campaigns.

Adam Young 00:31:29

I understand the appeal of running multiple campaigns, risk diversification. Sometimes you find pockets of wins. I've run multiple campaigns before. I'm not going to lie about this as an affiliate. When I was running multiple campaigns, I also made the least amount of money

When I ran one campaign that I knew was scalable to numbers that I thought were incredible, that's when I made the most amount of money. The focus, do you want to be a flashlight or a laser? If you're a flashlight, you got some dim light, but the battery will last longer. Maybe it's not as scary, right? Because you can light up part of the room, a laser that's a little scary might burn something, can't really see. It's not going to throw off enough light, but you can drill a hole with it, right? You focus like a laser on the single campaign that's scalable and become an expert at that one thing and learn so much about it that anyone else knew coming into that campaign cannot compete with you until they put in a year's worth of effort and listen to a thousand call recordings.

Now you have something that's defensible, takes balls to focus, and at first it might not seem like it's the right thing to do. However, it's much easier to make a lot of money as an expert at one thing than it is to try and spread your energy around to all these different things and chase every single opportunity that you see. And Harrison's father pointed this out to us a long time ago. Harrison and I are notorious serial entrepreneurs. I love going zero to one. I'm great at it. It's one of my favorite things to do is start a business that limited my success in a really big way. If I'm not a hundred percent focused on what I'm doing, I cannot be my best self and generate my best results. And so the moment I accepted this and then started saying no to everything and my role, I am entirely focused on rba.

We own some other businesses and Harrison runs those for the most part, and he's focused on them and they're growing to doing one. I don't really participate unless he needs technology advice. Obviously I'm the guy to call for that, but I leave him alone. He leaves me alone. He runs that shit. I run this shit and I'm focused on it, and that's how we achieve the best results possible. And so I had this conversation with another industry person the other day. I'm not going to say his name. Good guy. Been in the industry a long time, and I said to him, you will never achieve your full potential unless you cut off all this other nonsense shit that you are chasing and focus on your largest opportunity just because you can do this side hustle that makes five grand. It may sound like a good idea, but not if you want to actually build something big and make real money.

And real money is not a hundred grand a year. Real money is not a hundred grand a month. Real money is like tens, hundreds of millions of dollars or better yet billions of dollars. And the companies that do that are entirely focused on one thing. Oh, we do health insurance. Oh, we own 3000 coffee stance, right? Starbucks is not a coffee and oil change company. Starbucks is a coffee company. They've simplified coffee into their product and they sell cakes and other shit, but it all goes with coffee. They are not going to open up a tire changing business or get into anything that doesn't vertically integrate with their business. They may buy real estate that they occupy smart, or they might buy the coffee roasters that roast their coffee. Makes sense, vertically integrate, but they're not going to open a chain of lobster sandwich food trucks doesn't make any sense. And so I know as affiliate, it's hard and it's hard to give up on things that make a little bit of money, especially when you're new. But if you want to think long-term, you need to focus your energy and do it. I don't have advice for how to run multiple campaigns. I think it's not the way to make the most money and I don't focus mental energy on anything I don't believe to be the path to the greatest amount of success.

John Casto 00:36:31

I dunno if you could name, if you'd be willing to name some names, but someone asks, which networks should we join? Just want to throw out a few.

Adam Young 00:36:39

Yeah, I don't name names because that's a recommendation and then whatever happens, you're going to blame me for it. So listen, they're out there, find it, seek them out. It's easy. Okay, here's how you figure it out. Is there LinkedIn there? Do they exhibit at trade shows? Have they been around for five years? Cool, those are your answers.

John Casto 00:37:02

Here's a technical question on calls. This person sounds like they're actively running campaigns.

Adam Young 00:37:09

Cool.

John Casto 00:37:10

And my first few calls, or maybe not in my first few calls, some calls were dropped at 0, 0, 0, 0 0 1 second and a few others were not connected. I sent around 20 calls in total, almost 60%, not a lot of calls. Almost 60% of the calls went like this. Is this normal in the industry or what could that be, I guess would be a better question?

Adam Young 00:37:32

Yeah, I mean

John Casto 00:37:34

Without seeing ring

Adam Young 00:37:34

Normal doesn't matter. I mean if you're using Ring, but you look at the event details to see what happened on the call, who was the call connected to the target? Who hung up the caller or the target? Is there a consistent pattern that shows the target is accepting the call and hanging up in two seconds? Because if that's the case, maybe they're harvesting caller IDs from you. I don't know who you're working with and I'm not claiming that anyone's doing anything malicious, but that could be one reason. If it's a small buyer and whatever, and that keeps happening, great, maybe they drop the calls when they don't have available agents and you need to ask the buyer if it's the target that's hanging up, if it's the consumer that's hanging up, that doesn't make a lot of sense and I would need more data. So the key here is to look at the data and try and figure out who is responsible.

Maybe if it's the same target, they have some sort of telecom issue. If you look in the event details and it says that there's an error, it's likely that they have some type of issue. It could be their receiving phone number, might have a misconfigured carrier issue, which we wouldn't see. So could be that if you're our customer, hit up support, provide them with some ring, but call IDs and they can take a look and maybe give you some insights on what's going on. But without more information related to what happens specifically, it's hard for me to tell you. Now, there will be dropped calls, usually if it goes to a hold queue, a consumer's only going to wait for a specific period of time before they're going to hang up the phone. That's what I would be looking for. If it's the consumers hanging up most of the time I would be looking at the call lengths after the connection, the connected call length and seeing like, oh, are they sitting on hold for 30 seconds or 15 seconds and then hanging up, and then of course listen to the recordings on those and see what the consumer's hearing.

And so you just need to dive into the data and first figure out who's responsible for the hangup. That's step one. And then what happened on the calls? Once you know who's responsible for the hangup, that's step two. And then step three is take what you learned there and if it's on the target side, talk to the buyer and see what's going on there. And if you think that they may be harvesting caller IDs to call the consumers back without paying you, easy way to do that is to simply call the consumer because you have the caller ID and ask them, Hey, my name's Adam, and you reached out for an advertisement of ours that was on Facebook for pots and pans, and I just wanted to see if you had a chance to speak to an agent and get your questions answered because I noticed the call disconnected. Did someone give you a call back? I just want to make sure you were taken care of. Oh, they did. They did give you a call back. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I hope you have a great day. Appreciate you. That's all. That's all. Okay, cool. Yeah, have a great weekend. Bye. Call seven. Oh, same story.

Anytime you have an issue, you have to dig into why, and once you find the why, then you can resolve the issue. If the scenario I just described to you is happening, what's your contract? Say, oh, you don't have a contract. Great lesson. You just learned it. Go get a contract, find a new buyer. If it's technical ring, the support can help or the buyer can help. Yeah, you got to figure out what the problem is. First,

John Casto 00:41:13

This person asked, I'm going to reframe their question. They first asked, does anyone use Ring the conversion event to scale? I want to ask you though, what do you see if you do see, or in your opinion, do you believe is the best event to scale call campaigns with? If we're talking about Facebook?

Adam Young 00:41:31

Oh, you mean the event passing back to Facebook

John Casto 00:41:33

Or a custom conversion that you generate with a Ring book or a postback web hook to red track?

Adam Young 00:41:41

That's really hard because it depends on the type of campaign. What I would say is that you should test the different conversion events independently of each other to figure out what's going on. You can also upload your caller ID data to Facebook to create targeting and lookalike audiences, which is really useful. I haven't looked in a long Facebook still do value-based conversions.

John Casto 00:42:07

Think so,

Adam Young 00:42:08

Yeah. So if Facebook's doing value-based conversions, what you can do is export your converted call data above a specific call length that you want, and then use the seconds in the call length as dollars and upload that as a value-based lookalike with a caller ID column and a dollar column using the seconds of the call. And then Facebook's AI will essentially optimize for the highest value call. It's thinking it's dollars, but it's the same thing because it's the longest call. And that's really a great way to create value-based lookalikes and don't underestimate the power of retargeting as well. And so if you have a routing plan in Ringo that has more than one buyer, hopefully lots of buyers, and you use our duplicate routing settings to send callers to different buyers, then what you can do is retarget those consumers, and I would suggest doing it in a way that is ethical and supports long-term relationships with your buyers.

So retargeting them 30 days later, buy the caller ID and just directly retargeting them to call in and route them to another buyer. And so you'll see low cost of acquisition on that and hopefully still the quality you're looking for. I would be careful with that strategy related to certain industries depending on what they are selling. And if you understand what I'm saying, you can figure that out on your own, figure out what you're most comfortable with or what your contracts say or what you think will be in the best interest of the long-term relationship of your buyers. But on Facebook, you can directly retarget based on caller IDs, I believe for up to 365 days. And so that data is useful for a really long period of time.

John Casto 00:43:55

Off of all question.

Adam Young 00:43:56

Okay,

John Casto 00:43:57

I'm new to affiliate marketing, could use some advice. I come from a different industry and published hundreds of books of nonfiction across platforms. Cool. Like digital books, Amazon, audible, Barnes Nobles. So I checked that Offer Vault and saw an offer for an LLC setup service. Sounds like that's the offer which perfectly fits with one of my top selling books on Amazon. However, my application to promote offer, that's a good question. My offer was an eye within a minute, and I'm not sure why. Are there any tricks or best practices to improve my chances of getting accepted for affiliate offers with offer volt?

Adam Young 00:44:33

If you're a foreign affiliate, it's harder

John Casto 00:44:37

Think he is.

Adam Young 00:44:38

What I would say is do not make the mistake of pretending to be an American. Do not use a non-American name. Be transparent about who you are, but you're going to need to be significantly more thoughtful about how you communicate. If you do not write in complete sentences and spell your words correctly and communicate like a professional, then you will be automatically denied and you're going to have to live with that. The way you present yourself as a foreigner to an American is you adopt our communication style and business communication language and then act like we would expect you to act. Now you also can open up a US entity. You can have a US address, but I still would not lie to a network about where you're at now. What's happening when you apply is you're likely being automatically filtered by IP address restrictions.

Do not try and bypass this with a proxy because your goal here from the sounds of it is this is a great opportunity for you and you know what you're doing. And so this is the type of person that that network wants running this offer. And so you have to understand that 99 out of a hundred people that are coming in the way you are as someone outside of the United States especially, and if you're a high risk country like India, Nigeria or China is, you're going to be immediately judged and they're going to automatically filter you because it's just simply not worth the risk. But if someone comes to me and is like, Hey, here are the results I've achieved for these other campaigns. Here are the other networks I've worked with. Here are the affiliate managers at those networks that know me. I really want to work on this campaign.

I believe you did not accept me because I am located in India or whatever it is, and I would really like to work with you on this. Here are the traffic sources I'm working on. Here's why I think I would be really great at running this offer. Here's why I think it would be successful. Here's a link to the hundred books I've authored and their reviews. Here's a link to three of my other landing pages that I run with other networks, and you can see their tracking links on those landing pages. And then this is going to be a long email.

I'm not going to give these people an opportunity to say, this person doesn't know what they're doing. They may still say no, but I'm not going to give them an opportunity to say that I am not a legitimate business person that knows what I'm doing, that I have achieved past results that can show you. I'm the person you want to work with. They may still say no, and you have to live with that. Doesn't mean you can't keep asking. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go on LinkedIn, I'm going to find the network. I'm going to send that message directly to the CEO, I'm going to find all of the head people there. I'm going to send that message, I'm going to send that message, and at the top of the message to the other people, I'm going to be like, Hey, I sent this to your CEO.

I dunno if he's going to reply, please read it just like I'm persistent. I apologize in advance, but I'm going to keep coming and then I'm going to find their email addresses. I'm going to reach out to them. I'm going to try and find them on Skype. I'm going to reach out to them. And again, I'm going to communicate politely in every channel using perfect English, perfect spelling. I'm going to put commas and periods and good grammar, and I'm going to show them that I'm a serious person. I'm not going to abbreviate words. I'm not going to communicate in a way that's normal in my culture as the foreign person. I'm going to communicate in American business culture as best I can. And that's how I would approach it. And I think that's probably the only way that he's going to bypass this. He's going to have to really seek these folks out. It's hard for the foreigners because there's a lot of fraud and there's a lot of problems. There's a lot of great foreign affiliates though.

John Casto 00:49:09

Or go to conferences.

Adam Young 00:49:10

Go to conferences, of course. But the people they're looking for at that network might not be going to the conferences he can go to or she based on where they lived.

John Casto 00:49:18

Sounds pretty specific offer too.

Adam Young 00:49:20

So if that's the person I'm hunting, I'm going to try and find them, or I'm going to make a video, like a Loom video. I'm going to make sure my background is great. I'm going to make sure that it's clean in my office, that I'm well dressed and groomed and presented, and I'm going to be like, Hey, Dave, I'm here in Bangalore and I totally get why you just automatically denied my application. I get it. But I really want to run this offer and I want to show you why I think we can make a lot of money together and why I'm going to be good at it and my traffic's compliant and we can work together for years. And I'm going to screen share. I'm going to be like, here's my a hundred books I've written. Here's my landing page. If I click it, you see it goes through Max Bounty or whoever. Have a great relationship with them over there. I work with whatever her name is, pop the face and the LinkedIn profile if you like. I can get an email together that intros us and she can tell you, we've done business for years or better yet here. Lemme just log into my account. Look at this. I made $29,000 in Max Bounty over the last 36 months.

Here's how to hit me up. I'm going to chase the opportunity. I'm not going to fill out the form.

John Casto 00:50:44

This is a broad one, but I would like to hear your opinion on this. How to lower cost per call. Let's do Facebook traffic,

Adam Young 00:50:55

Creative optimization, landing page optimization, backend optimization, retargeting, creating lookalike audiences, segregating ad formats, different hooks, break all my creative into hook story offers, mix and match the different videos, and then test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. And that's the only way.

John Casto 00:51:21

If you feel like you've exhausted the majority of those multiple times and the economics still did not back out, would you then look at getting paid more,

Adam Young 00:51:32

Getting

John Casto 00:51:33

Getting paid more like a better biz dev deal or a traffic source, another traffic source.

Adam Young 00:51:40

This is not an either or. You got to do everything. I mean,

John Casto 00:51:45

And

Adam Young 00:51:46

Yeah, this shit's cutthroat.

John Casto 00:51:47

Yeah,

Adam Young 00:51:48

You got to do everything. If you're not doing everything, you're not going to win. There's no solution over here and neglect over here. It's like all of it

John Casto 00:51:58

While the testing is going on, you're awesome.

Adam Young 00:52:00

Yeah, at all times. Working the backend relationship, working the front end relationship, optimizing, optimizing. I'm talking to the account reps. What's working for other people? What are the top people doing? They may not show you, they shouldn't, but they might say, oh, they're doing X, Y, or Z or this video format, or actually their YouTube is better than Facebook. I would ask them, where are you seeing the highest CPAs? What traffic sources are working the best? Is it long form? Is it short form? Help me scale this campaign. Give me a little bit of information. And then on the front end, I'm like, okay, cool. I'm testing based on what this person's telling me, and then I'm testing what he's not telling me. He says that 12 minute ads on YouTube work the best. I'm like, cool, I'll take that advice. I'm also going to test one and two to see if he's wrong.

John Casto 00:52:59

And this is why focusing on one offer vertical makes the most sense is you could go deep. This

Adam Young 00:53:05

Is

John Casto 00:53:05

When you're juggling six plates instead of one spitting plate.

Adam Young 00:53:08

You can't do it. It's not possible. Not in any reasonable scale, not in a way that you can create competitive advantage. If you're running as a single affiliate, if you're running eight campaigns or whatever, you're not turning ads for all of them or really spending the time to optimize it or figure it out. And if you're working in one of the biggest traffic source pools, how are you going to compete with a guy? Some of our friends who have 40 person creative teams? You're not going to. And so that's why the laser focus. You find a campaign that's winning and it can have huge scale. You got to ignore the other stuff. Just let 'em ride until it's not profitable anymore. Don't spend any more time trying to optimize it. Just focus on the one that can be the biggest win.

John Casto 00:53:54

What's your research process for deconstructing an offer?

Adam Young 00:54:04

My research process for deconstructing it all? I mean, look, I want to know everything I possibly can about everything when I'm doing it. It's like negotiating the person in the room that knows the most is generally the person that's going to win the negotiation. And so I'm going to deconstruct both sides. And what I mean by that is I want to understand, let's say I'm working with a network. I want to understand how the network is operating and making their money, and then I want to understand how the buyers they're working with are operating and making their money. I want to understand how all my buyers are operating and making their money, and the same with publishers as well. And so to do that in any industry, the first thing I'm going to do is let's pick one that runs on Facebook or social. I mean it's OEP right now, so we'll just say health insurance calls.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to use tools like SimilarWeb or something to find the top 500 websites in the health insurance niche based on the traffic they're monitoring. Now, some of that's going to be like Anthem or Humana. That's not interesting. I don't care about the carriers. I want to find the websites that are the highest trafficked, that are not the health insurance companies. And I want the top 500 of those. And I'm going to start at the top and I'm going to go down every single one and I'm going to call every single phone number I can find on all of those so that I can understand where those calls are going. I'm going to find more buyers. Then I'm going to look at the phone numbers. And if they're not like BU phone number, which is eight hundred eight two four 5,000, then it's very possible they're in a pool using Ring BA or something. And so I'm going to look at the source of all 500 and I'm going to see if there are number pools or JavaScript tags or some indicator of tracking on the phone number. And if that's the case, I know that media is probably going to that website, hate media or organic traffic, that's going to be interesting to me and I'm going to start to deconstruct how traffic is getting to that website.

John Casto 00:56:49

Does that signals to you that they're built for call volume?

Adam Young 00:56:52

Well, that they're selling the calls, and what I want to do is find the websites that are receiving the traffic that are not receiving it from Facebook and Google or organic. I want to know where the people are making their money, where people like you don't exist. This is a long research process. I'm going to spend days locked in. I'm going to go through the top 500 websites myself. I'm going to learn everything about how those websites are receiving traffic, and a lot of the websites are going to be receiving traffic from places you don't know or understand. That's where I'm going to make my money. I don't want to compete with you. I don't want to compete with the affiliates. I don't want to compete with anybody. I want to own the whole fucking thing. How am I going to do that? I'm going to do the work you are not willing to do, or he's not smart enough to do and I'm going to do it until my back breaks and I find all the answers to the questions you wish you knew, and then I'm going to go do it and you can't replicate it.

That's how I'm going to deconstruct the front end, especially if my budget's low. If I don't have any money, what do I have? Time? Time, right? Adam has money now time's my most valuable asset. So how would I do this? If it were me today, I would go hire some paralegals, people who do legal research, who do research for a living, maybe former analysts from hedge funds or banks, research scientists, anyone who specializes in analytics and research, and I would hire a couple of 'em and I would say, hi, go through the top 2000 websites and health insurance, and I want to know this information. I want to know which ones do this, which ones do this? Which ones do this? Why that's there, crawl them. I want to know what data is on them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's your dude Bill. Bill's a developer.

He's going to make crawlers for you. You guys need to figure out first what information you want. He can crawl tell you what all the tags on the pages are, which is going to tell you where the traffic's coming from, and then I want to figure out all the referring for all the traffic. Just go find the tools that are tracking all this, and I want to know where all the inflow of the traffic's coming from to these websites. Every single tag on the websites, who owns the websites? Who owns the places where the traffic's coming from. And then I want you to find the business development people at all those companies. And then I want you to get me their name, their address, their phone number. I want to know what they're interested in, what trade shows they go to, what conferences they're going to be at. Do they speak yes or no? If so, where did they used to work? And who's connected to me on LinkedIn? That is one connection away.

And then organize that all for me into a SQL database. And give me the username and password. I'd like a spreadsheet of this, this, this, and this. And then I want you to try and figure out how to handicap how many users are coming to each site from each traffic source. And then I want you to call all the numbers over and over again to figure out who all the buyers on the backend are. Then I want you to repeat the business development process on the backend side. I want you to find me all the contacts, where they go, what their numbers are, what their email addresses are, how much you think they're paying out, how many calls they are, do the research into the scale of their call centers, how many agents are in them, who the business development people are there, how many locations they have. I want to know how many agents they have. If they're public, I want to know how many employees they scale up on the backend during OEP and a EP. And when. I want to know how much they're paying on commission, how much their LTV values are, and if it's public, I want to know what partners they're working with and where all their buying goes and who their backend carriers are.

And I would fucking destroy all of you.

John Casto 01:01:03

Boom.

Adam Young 01:01:04

Yeah.

John Casto 01:01:07

So here's a question that I think what you just answered is probably going to be a part of this. If you wanted to move vertically, integrate into an offer and go from pure affiliate to if not writing, if so to the level just outside transferring to direct buyers, what would you do in addition to what you just explained? Or if you wanted to write, if wanted write and build a floor and you're starting from scratch, would you learn the vertical and then transition as quickly as possible to owning the offer? Why?

Adam Young 01:01:48

I want to know own as much infrastructure as possible. So you can't compete with me. I can't guarantee I'll out negotiate you. I'll probably figure out a way, but I can't guarantee it. And so if I own more of the value chain, it makes it much harder for you to take my business away from me. And it makes it much easier for me to negotiate you with the same companies, because if I have something you don't, then I can win more business than you. And the bigger my business gets in something like healthcare, the more likely a large company is to work with me. There is an intrinsic risk in working with a small company. They may out of business, they may be greedy, they may make a mistake and need to make up some financial something to pay their employees. And so the bigger I get and the more stable I get in that business, the more power I accrue and the more buying power and negotiating power I accrue and the more data I have.

And if there's a downturn, I have more resources and options, and I'm less likely to be the first one cut, whereas you're going to get cut first. That also allows me to present myself in a different way in the market. I'm going to build a brand. I'm going to build a product. I'm going to show up at all the trade shows with the most professional team in the industry. I'm going to innovate in every marketing process I have that is marketing to the big companies. And then I'm going to hire people from public companies that are running 500 plus seat or a thousand plus seat call centers, and I'm going to offer them a deal they can't refuse. And I'm going to look for people who have worked for more than five years at the same company, and someone that's ran a thousand person call center at a major US company is probably making like two 50.

And I'm going to come in and be like, all right, well, I'm going to give you a 400 base and complete autonomy, a multimillion dollar budget it, and you can hire all your friends and give you stock options in that side of the business equity and bonus based on profitability. So he can make up to, I don't know, maybe $750,000. It's an offer he can't refuse. I'm going to poach him, and then I'm going to have him go poach all of his friends from that same center he is worked with for the last 10 years or whatever. And I'm going to kick off my call center with unfortunately large budget of payroll, but people who can actually scale to a thousand heads. And then I'm going to think about where it's going to be located, the population density of where it's going to be located, what the costs are associated with that, and then figure out the way to get some sort of real estate deal done that allows me to start at maybe a hundred seats, but gives me the flexibility to then scale out to a thousand. And whether that be a lease with the buyouts or a real estate company that owns enough real estate that they'll allow me to jump from building to building without paying a penalty as long as it's their building.

Or I would start really small, and then once I prove it out, I'm going to go move those people to a larger building. And I'm going to look for a building that can be really cool, but super cost effective and easy to reorganize like an old Kmart or something. Because in that case, I can run all the wires on the ceiling and drop them down to the computers and reorganize the layout on the floors any which way I want to because we're probably not going to get it right the first time. And I mean, we can get into the technical details of all of it, but I'm going to think through how I get to the thousand on day one, and then I'm going to let those people go do it.

John Casto 01:06:14

That was a fucking cool answer.

Adam Young 01:06:15

Yeah,

John Casto 01:06:17

That's all I got, man.

Adam Young 01:06:18

Okay. Yeah,

John Casto 01:06:21

I know we could keep going, but

Adam Young 01:06:22

Yeah. And so I think, look, the summary of this whole thing, all the questions your people are asking is how do you think as big as possible? And a lot of the questions that people asked are, unfortunately, how do you think as small as possible? And the thing is, life is really temporary, and I'm probably older than these people that are asking the questions. And I want everyone to know that as you get older, you're going to start valuing things differently. And your time is your most valuable asset. And so it takes a great deal of effort to suck at something, and it takes a great deal of effort to be great at something. If you're going to put in the time and do something, you might as well put 110% into everything you do in your life because the time is so precious you're not going to get it back. And so asking questions, how do I do the least possible?

That's not the kind of person you want to be. That's not the kind of person real people respect. You want to think about how you do the biggest thing you possibly think you can and try to do that because there's no reason anyone in your chat room can't work their ass off and learn and grow and buy one of those yachts down there. Those people are the same as us. They're just people. The only difference is for the most part, is they think bigger than we do. They believe that they're capable of doing more. And so figure out how to make your vision as big as possible and crazy as possible, and then chase, and you'll have a much higher likelihood of succeeding. And if you chase a billion dollars and you fuck it up and fail, and all you get is 50 million, you're fine. If you're chasing a hundred thousand dollars a year and you fuck it up and you make 50, that's an existence in suffering. So you have to think bigger. And so I'll end with if you believe you can or you can't, you're absolutely right.

John Casto 01:08:43

Cool. Boom. You enjoy answering these questions.

Adam Young 01:08:54

Yeah, it's fun. Also, some of those people are going to think I'm a psychopath. They're going to be like, I never want to compete with that.

John Casto 01:09:01

They're like, I'm going to stay affiliated with my Gmail. Yes.

Adam Young 01:09:06

Or they're going to listen to, how would you do my business? And I'm just like, I like holy. That's all I got to do. Shit. He's nuts. That's literally what I would do. Just figure it out. More information. All right, I got to stop talking or I'm not even going to be able to hang out. So tonight here, we got to take a

John Casto 01:09:26

Break. All scared.