Jan 19 2007

2006 Was The Year Of Ringtones - 100,000 Ringtone Leads

By Jeremy Schoemaker 48 comments

Its been over 6 months since I have done anything really different in the ringtone industry so I thought it was time to sell off some websites that were driving leads. Of course the buyers are interested to see the exact financials so I had to go through all my affiliate accounts… I honestly never really look very hard at overall numbers just really pay attention to day to day figures making sure we are growing and maintaining profitability.

So looking over 2006’s affiliate only alone we drove 1,503,351 Clicks that converted to 79,391 leads for an EPC of .65 cents. Now about 50% of those leads were driven by pay-per-click advertising but the average cost was about 6.8 cents. (I still laugh when I hear people say you can’t get volume with longtail cheap keywords). Yes it was an amazing time in 2006 for ringtones. I shared my start in pay-per-click with my experiments and a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and those that killed it good for you too ;). I should have probably shut my mouth but I never am very good at that.

Anyway a really interesting thing I came across was that this week I had pushed my 100,000 ringtone lead. Between the 18,278 we pushed in 2005 and the 1331 we have pushed so far in 2007 we have reached the 100,000 milestone. Its pretty amazing to think we have driven that many leads… especially when I think we did not even discover pay-per-click until april when we did the ringtone ppc experiments (see part1 and part2 ) and we have not done ANY ringtone really since last August. Those few months though sure were amazing….Now I think its fun to call myself the king of ringtones but seriously there are MUCH bigger players then me. Its no wonder why this is such a zillion dollar industry.

Right now everybody and there mom is pushing ringtone affiliates… killing themselves for these ringtone companies. What a time to be them
Edit: I just wanted to add that a fun fact is when we started in ringtones in 2005 the first offer we did we got 5$ per lead. Currently we get over 15$ per lead. I think I might make a post soon about how ringtone affiliates work and what makes the pricing go up and down like it does and also why/how they have tracking issues.

pluto said on January 19th, 2007 at 11:13 pm

holy f**king sh(t no wonder you leverage a higher payout

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james said on January 19th, 2007 at 11:14 pm

ShoeMoney-

You honestly changed my life. I would offer to buy you a drink but with the money I have made off your advice from ringtones alone I should buy you a beer truck

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ToddW said on January 19th, 2007 at 11:16 pm

Wow, congrats!

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SonicReducer said on January 19th, 2007 at 11:18 pm

Get ready for the second wave of the great ringtones gold rush after that post

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CPA Affiliates said on January 19th, 2007 at 11:45 pm

More like the third or fourth wave. Everytime a bump in payouts come from the networks (or shoemoney makes a post aobut ringtones) a new wave of people jump in. While you can and people do make money form tones and sure its worth a shot…. look to other sources they can make just as big bucks but with less competition.

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Paul said on January 20th, 2007 at 1:11 am

Not gonna lie, I recently fell victim to ringtone affiliates :). I threw up my first test page tonight, and I hope it does well. My max bid is $0.10/click, and I just have to work on building up more longtail keywords now.

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Matt said on January 20th, 2007 at 3:39 am

Agreed

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Noah Robinson said on January 20th, 2007 at 3:59 am

Flycell is paying $15 CPA through Glispa

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SearchTheWeb2 said on January 20th, 2007 at 8:02 am

So, you dropped Nicole for shoemoney logo on your MyBlogLog. A good thing you did at last!!!

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Shawn said on January 20th, 2007 at 8:37 am

So, an average payout of $12.30 per ringtone lead in 2006 on a 5.2% conversion rate, not bad shoe

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Nils said on January 20th, 2007 at 9:06 am

100k..damn, congrats dude

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Cas Thompson said on January 20th, 2007 at 9:44 am

Truely inspirational. I have purchased over 100 ringtone sites in the past year and because of Shoe, the $$$ has been great. Keep spreading the gospel cause there’s still more gold in them hills!

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rog said on January 20th, 2007 at 10:21 am

12$ is where they start… with this volume I am sure shoe is getting 15-20$ per lead.

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Shawn said on January 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am

1,503,351 clicks with an epc of around .65 is $977,178 in revenue on 79,391 leads works out to $12.30/lead.

I am just basing it off the math shoe stated. He also stated his avg. cpc is .068 so $102,227 in ppc costs - nice profit shoe

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ShoeMoney said on January 20th, 2007 at 11:13 am

That seems right… over the last 2 years we ringtone offers have paid out more and more. We started in 2005 I think about at 6-7$ with Jamster/CJ and currently I think we get about 16$ with Dadamobile/AzoogleAds

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Miles said on January 20th, 2007 at 11:15 am

I still find it amazing that you didn’t even discover PPC until April…you’re doing quite well for yourself.

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Blue said on January 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am

Shoe I think its awesome you shared with everyone exactly how you did it. You totally gained my respect with those posts. While I was late in the ringtone industry I took what you said and applied it to other markets. Thank you for taking the time!

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paully said on January 20th, 2007 at 11:22 am

shoeman its funny whenever I hear someone talk about ringtones I think of shoemoney I think you will always be associated as being the king of ringtones even if you are not

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Gopi said on January 20th, 2007 at 12:29 pm

I generated much more than 100k ringtone leads in 2006 but the ROI is nowhere even near you

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Christoph said on January 20th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

Impressive numbers. Congratulations

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Ajedrez said on January 20th, 2007 at 6:15 pm

Hi Jeremy

Congratulations!

Please write about how ringtone affiliates work.

I read your blog from Argentina

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Agro Fund said on January 21st, 2007 at 1:45 am

awsome..
this is inspiring :p

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StrangeProgress said on January 21st, 2007 at 5:23 am

Nice work Shoe, those are some badass figures.

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Dave White said on January 21st, 2007 at 5:54 am

IMO everybody who buys or owns a cell goes for a ringtone of his choice. This is why the business is always in full swing.

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anthony greene said on January 21st, 2007 at 11:28 am

This guy really has his finger on the pulse of the web!! Cangrats Shoe and here’s to a much more productive 2007.

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Yamalyan said on January 21st, 2007 at 11:54 am

Good stats Shoe, I wonder if you got a reccuring revenue share deal from your leads. In UK most of the people promoting ringtones do this under white label accounts and get revenue share for life of the subscriber (not just $10 or $20 bucks per lead) since in this business the brand dosnt matter so much - its like with the cd sales - if you buy from Virgin or Walmart - its just different price.

Thats really good stats, but to be honest I expected more reading your 10K experiment posts.

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Allan Stewart said on January 21st, 2007 at 12:23 pm

Hey Shoe, just wanted to introduce myself. Congrats on the web blog and ofcourse the radio show, I’m a big listner and think that you do a great job. Got ranking for one of your terms the other day “Shoemoney seo” didn’t mean to was just writing a blog post on some of the stuff you were saying as I wanted to throw some more people your way, strange twist of irony I though. Anyhow, hopefully I’ll be getting in on the blogpsphere with you guys soon, time provided. Need a few more UK based web master back in the throw me thinks. Oh BTW, I got a question. In the affiliates scene what is your number 1 tip?

Cheers

Al

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morinsight said on January 21st, 2007 at 12:43 pm

Shoe,
Have you ever thought about Mortgage leads? One lead can be sold up to for times at $42 a pop and there are market places were they facilitate the sale for you.
Just curious.

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John Loch said on January 21st, 2007 at 10:09 pm

Pimpin this stuff again Shoe ?

Watcha got goin this time ?

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steve said on January 22nd, 2007 at 11:14 am

Do most affiliate programs pay per lead or per sale of the item you are promoting ?

Thanks

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steve said on January 22nd, 2007 at 11:18 am

Do most affiliate programs pay per lead or pay per sale of the item you are promoting ?

Thanks

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Matthew Berman said on January 22nd, 2007 at 1:05 pm

hey shoemoney,

i tried doing this but i could never figure it out fully. i bought traffic from google and sent it to a full page ad site. no one ever entered their information and i lost money in the long run. what did i do wrong? is it still possible to make money from these types of sites?

also, how did you figure out what keywords to use? i always have a problem with that.

thanks

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fthead9 said on January 22nd, 2007 at 9:40 pm

Hey Shoe thanks for the great info and of course congrats on the profits. Curious did the organic traffic and PPC traffic convert at similar rates or did one perform better than the other?

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fthead9 said on January 22nd, 2007 at 9:42 pm

Hey morinsight, what affiliate programs allow you to sell a lead 4 times? I’ve only seen one shot deals. Thanks.

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sharky said on January 23rd, 2007 at 9:02 am

Shoe,
at $15 CPL being a ringtone company sucks. What they do is charge the customer a $9.99 subscription, which lasts about 3 month on average. The carrier get’s a cut of 40%, leaving about $18. Minus $15 CPL leaves $3 to cover all expenses related to the music industry, operations, customer care, etc. Also, the carriers make the ringtone companys eat any non-billables - and there are quire a few of those.

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sam said on January 29th, 2007 at 1:43 am

nice bussiness.. congrats

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morinsight said on February 8th, 2007 at 11:40 am

There are two marketplaces where you can sell the leads through, up to 4 times. Obviously they take % of the pie but… Check out Lead Point and Root Exchange.
you do need your ducks in a row to sell through marketplaces though.

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Jay said on April 1st, 2007 at 1:03 pm

Ok I admit it .. I’m hooked.. where can I learn more about doing affiliate sales.. writing ads landing pages etc.. I do alright doing content sites but this just seems like a much bigger pie.. Anyone have any forum or book recommendations ?

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Jay said on April 1st, 2007 at 1:07 pm

I think its mostly a volume business with alot of firms competing for market share.. They pay out more in order to sign up more marketers eventually if they aren’t making enough to pay the bills they will scale it back but till then whoever can last the longest wins…

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Jay said on April 1st, 2007 at 1:09 pm

I can’t pretend to know all that much about affiliate marketing but I can say reading this blog and others it would seem like you have to do alot of experimentation until you get the right mix..

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coop said on April 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

i would like to see some recurring payment options..

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coop said on April 27th, 2007 at 3:43 pm

dood… leads man.

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Steve said on June 28th, 2007 at 8:42 pm

Shoe,

I am launching a new ringtones/lyrics website next month. Its just about done. It is database driven and has over 400k pages (song/lyrics entries) all rewritten to be search engine friendly. We are hoping to get a decent flow of organic long-tail traffic. In you opinion, what are the most important things we do to get decent keyphrase rankings? (of course your going to include linkbacks as a priority)
What are your favorite ways to establish links? (paid,manual,bot generated,etc)
What other methods/tips can you share?

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Aditya Kumar Singh said on September 11th, 2007 at 12:42 am

Wow congrats for the wonderful achievement

I am learning these things (PPC, Affiliate marketing) etc. though i loosed a lot of money already

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John Vanhara’s Blog » Is Jeremy Shoemaker a.k.a. SHOEMONEY scam? said on January 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 am

[...] One of my friends sent me another link to the articles asking me if I still think that Shoemoney is B.S. You can read the article here: 2006 Was The Year Of Ringtones - 100,000 Ringtone Leads [...]
Making Money with Ringtones; Are Ringtones Dead in the Water? at I Am Searching For said on April 6th, 2007 at 9:11 pm

[...] shoe’s recent post “2006 Was The Year Of Ringtones - 100,000 Ringtone Leads�? he stated he had 1,503,351 Clicks that converted to 79,391 leads for an EPC of .65 cents. So [...]
Do You Think Another Tech Bubble is coming? - ShoeMoney® said on January 20th, 2008 at 11:01 pm

[...] it just rises and falls and it happens all the time. For instance If you look at 2006 we drove over 100,000 ring tone leads. But in 2007 a lot of people got greedy and the ringtone market went to crap due to consumer [...]
Making Money with Ringtones; Are Ringtones Dead in the Water? | hotinformation.daq2.info said on January 26th, 2008 at 3:41 am

[...] shoe’s recent post “2006 Was The Year Of Ringtones - 100,000 Ringtone Leads” he stated he had 1,503,351 Clicks that converted to 79,391 leads for an EPC of .65 cents. So [...]