Yesterday I was talking about how we’re often asked to increase website traffic for our new clients but did you know that there are other ways to increase your sales without ever driving visitors through your website?  Since most of our efforts focus on getting people to visit our clients’ sites, it almost sounds like something that violates our values.  However, this technique has proven to be very successful for our own business as well as some of our clients.

If you’re educated at all in Internet Marketing, you’re probably thinking that PPC means pay-per-click advertising.  It does.  But it also stands for pay-per-call advertising.  They’re both pay-for-performance where you only owe money if they deliver, but one delivers click-throughs to your site while the other makes your phone ring.

How’s pay-per-call work?  It’s pretty simple.  You just set up an account, fund it with money through your credit card and write your advertisement.  Let’s say that you sell copy machines.  Once you have your PPC campaign set up, your ad will begin appearing on a number of large website directories like yellowpages.com.  However, your ad will have a random 800 number on it.  It’s not your phone number.  It’s a tracking number that forwards to your number.  That way, when someone calls that 800 number you can see how long the call lasted, who called, when they called, and of course, they can charge you for the lead.

When we first tried it a couple years ago, we were just testing it out so we funded the account with $50.  After the third call, we landed a $20,000 contract.  Not a bad return on our $6 investment.