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Question to all PPC veterans
I read this book where it suggest you can walk up to a niche(very niche, e.g sea wall repair) companies that are usually bad at marketing and give them a business proposal. You give them leads through google ads and in return they give you a share of the profits for every paying customer you bring in. Then after a while after you gain their trust, they pay you a monthly retainer. Apparently you can make decent cash doing this.
I only just started out so I know very little, but why don’t more people do this? I hear many in here who are skilled and work for a low paying salary while generating millions for companies, why don’t you use this strategy? It seems like there are thousands of businesses out there who are desperate for your skills and are willing to pay big. What am I missing?
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1 Reply
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Theory is one thing; practice is another. Have you tried this strategy yourself?
In practice, of course there are many ways to make money in this world. But it’s not as easy as it seems in the book.
PPC itself is a very niche vertical. I’d argue that many PPCers are actually very well paid in comparison to other industries, so many folks will be perfectly happy collecting a nice paycheck without the risk. And that’s fine. If you’re underpaid: well, this is PPC – join a company which can pay better!
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It’s called affiliate marketing.
1. You can generally only do this with businesses where you trust the owners. After all, you have to trust that they’ll pay you the agreed upon commission, since they’re the ones who communicate with the client, not you. And don’t kid yourself, a lot of these manual labor businesses are shady, and wouldn’t think twice to screw you over.
2. Many small businesses are frankly terrible at sales. They’ll claim that your leads are bad, but when you listen to the phone calls, you realize they lack basic customer service skills. I’ve heard calls where people literally answer the phone with “HELLO?!”. The worst part is that they refuse to accept that they’re doing a bad job, and expect a lead to call and say: “let’s do it” on the spot.
3. There are no guarantees in PPC. Everything can work fine for 2 months, then suddenly a competitor swoops in, which requires you to significantly increase your budget, or you won’t be able to compete.I tried this, and realized very quickly how shaky those grounds are. It makes sense if you have enough money to “throw some away”. All it takes is 1 or 2 jobs a month per client to earn a pretty good living, but you could easily end up spending money on ads for a month or more, and not see any return. Especially when you consider that so many people lack the most basic sales skills.
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Long story short, this approach worked very well about 10 years ago. Now it is saturated with agencies and consultants. Most experienced and successful people are going to move upstream either as a consultant or an employee, which means you aren’t working for mom-and-pop anymore.
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A lot of what everyone else said, but also as someone that’s been doing this for a long time, the work is just more fun at a larger scale. Going to businesses around town and building a relationship and managing small budgets just gets old after awhile.
At least for me, working on large scale projects with millions of dollars in money management is just more challenging and enjoyable, and not something that can easily work in the freelance world.
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If you could call businesses you will experience rejection. If you work a google ads desk there are salespeople to do that for you. I’d say that’s the main benefit of the job route, way less rejection, but there’s also stable income, benefits etc.
The run your own agency route pays way better if you’re good enough to make it work, but you’re only as rich next month’s invoicing and you’re on your own for everything from accounting to hr to benefits to all the things, on top of any selling and managing accounts you might do.
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Lead arbitrage is just like any other arbitrage business.
Needs upfront investment, with a healthy dose of risk associated to it, plus a willing buyer that doesn’t back up the second your results weakens. Depending on your sales skills the risk vs return is not worth it.
Paying 300$ for a lead, and selling it for 400$ is often not worth it, since you definitely need to be able to sell 75% of all your generated leads to the buyer to even break even. If the buyer is not able to close a considerable amount of your leads, it may not be profitable for the business owner as well. Leaving you with a) an unhappy client and b) a potentially lost client.
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One tough issue is how do you verify? Can you reliably verify they became a customer, and trust the org to tell you how big of a customer they became. I’m not suggesting everyone will try to rip you off, but once they land a new lead/customer, their priority is not you, but converting that lead and making their own money. It also puts your pay in their hands. What if you are great at getting leads, but their sales team is terrible?
We moved to a retainer model a long time ago to remove all the gray areas and risks.
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Being a salesman and convincing someone of that type of deal is entirely different than being a “data scientist” for lack of a better term to differentiate.
I’m willing to bet many of the experienced media buyers in here who could return the results you’d be promising are more comfortable managing multi-million dollar ad budgets behind a screen than making all the sales calls required to do this full time.
It’s like asking a software engineer why they don’t just build their own Facebook instead of working there.
I’d rather work for a big company with big budgets and real expectations and cash my low-mid six figure check and play with projects maybe like this on the side.
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