The Affiliate Marketing Show: What to Expect From Each Episode

Picture this. You're driving your kid to school or you're on the treadmill trying to burn off last night's pizza, and you've got twenty-five minutes to kill. You could scroll Instagram. Or learn something that actually moves the needle on your ad spend. That's the gap I built this show to fill.

I've been in the pay-per-call and affiliate world for more than a decade. I started Ringba because I got tired of watching smart media buyers fly blind on their call campaigns. Somewhere along the way I realized the same problem existed with information. Lots of noise in this industry. Not a lot of signal. So I started recording conversations with the people actually running traffic, running networks, running call centers. That's the show.

What the format actually looks like

Each episode runs 30 to 60 minutes, pretty standard for this niche, but I don't pad for time. If a guest gives me a great answer in four minutes, I move on. If we're onto something that needs twenty to unpack, we take it. Nobody's listening to this show for polish, honestly. They're listening because they want to steal an idea for their next campaign.

Most episodes follow a loose shape. We open with what the guest is working on right now, this week, not some case study from three years ago. Then we get into the mechanics, how the traffic gets bought, how it's tracked, where the money actually gets made or lost. Usually we close on something tactical the listener can test the next day.

I record on a weekly or biweekly cadence and post to YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Want the back catalog? My Spotify page has the full run.

Guests you'll actually recognize if you're in this business

This isn't a show full of mainstream entrepreneur types who wrote a book about hustle culture. My guest list looks like a who's who of the pay-per-call and affiliate infrastructure world: founders of ad networks, people running call centers with two hundred agents on the floor, SaaS founders building the next piece of tracking tech. You're hearing from people who've actually deployed six or seven figures of ad spend, not people theorizing about it.

I've had traffic buyers on who live and die by Google Ads policy changes. Guests who built their entire business on native platforms like Taboola and Outbrain, and they'll tell you exactly what CPMs looked like last quarter versus this one. Network owners who explain, in blunt terms, why a call that lasts 90 seconds pays out completely differently than one that lasts six minutes.

That last point matters more than most people realize.

Why pay-per-call gets its own conversation

Pay-per-call marketing isn't the same game as standard CPA affiliate marketing, and treating it that way is the single most common mistake I see new affiliates make. Compensation is tied to live call duration and quality, not clicks or form submissions. That changes almost everything about how you optimize a campaign.

Think about what that means in practice. In a normal CPA funnel, you're optimizing a landing page, a form, maybe a thank-you redirect. The moment somebody submits, your job's basically done. Pay-per-call doesn't work that way. The moment somebody dials is when the real work starts. Did the call connect? Did it last long enough to qualify for payout? Did the caller actually match what the buyer wanted, or did your targeting send junk traffic that gets flagged and unpaid?

I built Ringba specifically because affiliates kept losing money in that gap between "call happened" and "call got paid." Without real call tracking infrastructure, you're guessing. You don't know which traffic source sent the call, which publisher gets credit, or why a buyer is rejecting 40% of your volume. So on the show, call tracking isn't a footnote we mention once and move past. It's a topic almost every episode touches, because it's the central problem in this business.

If you want to go deeper on the mechanics, I wrote a lot of this down in The Pay Per Call Revolution, which walks through the infrastructure and strategy in more detail than a podcast episode allows.

Where the stories come from

A good chunk of my guests I meet at industry events. Affiliate Summit, Leadscon, DMS, these conferences are where the pay-per-call and affiliate world actually shows up in person, and I've recorded live episodes on the show floor at more than one. There's something different about a conversation you have standing next to a booth at 4pm on day two of a conference, when everyone's tired and being more honest than they'd be on a scheduled call three weeks later.

I remember one conversation at a DMS conference a few years back where a network owner told me, on the record, exactly why he'd stopped working with a certain traffic source. Not the kind of thing people say in a polished LinkedIn post. That's what comes out when you catch someone between sessions with a coffee in hand. Those are the moments I try to bring back to the show.

The kind of listener this show is for

If you're brand new to affiliate marketing and just want the basics of what a landing page is, this probably isn't your show. But if you're already running traffic, even a small budget, and want to hear how people at higher volume are solving the same problems you're wrestling with right now, this is built for you.

So here's my honest pitch. Subscribe, but not because I'm asking nicely. Subscribe because the next episode might save you a wasted month of ad spend on a traffic source that isn't going to work for your vertical. That's the actual value proposition. I'm not selling a system. I'm showing you what's working and what's flopped, mine included.

You can also follow along on Instagram and X, where I post shorter breakdowns between episodes. And if you want to see what we've built on the tracking side, Ringba's still the best place to start.

What's the one traffic source you've been afraid to test because everyone online talks about it like it's a myth?

FAQ

How long is each episode of the show? Most episodes run between 30 and 60 minutes, matching the typical length for interview-style shows in this niche.

Do I need to already understand pay-per-call marketing to follow along? Some background helps, but I try to explain jargon as it comes up. If you've run any kind of affiliate campaign before, you'll follow fine.

Where can I watch or listen? The show is on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, with new episodes on a weekly or biweekly schedule.

Are the guests mostly big-name entrepreneurs? No. Guests are typically founders of ad networks, call centers, and marketing SaaS tools, people actually operating in this space rather than outside commentators.

Does the show only cover pay-per-call, or general affiliate marketing too? Both come up regularly, but pay-per-call gets more depth since that's where compensation models and tracking get the most complicated, and where I've spent most of my career.