So I’m working at my computer the other day and the phone rings. I look at the caller id and don’t recognize the caller but I pick up, “Hello?” CLICK. Hmm? They hung up.

I check the caller id and search for the number using Google. Apparently other folks get called by this number and caller id description, and they also get hung up on when they call the number back. And there in lies the beauty of this. Why?

I put my internet marketing cap on and started thinking.

Disclaimer: I have not done the process outlined below, it’s just an observation. If you decide to proceed with something like this, you’re on your own. I don’t even know if it works. There could be many bumps in the road when setting something like this up.

1. Phone Numbers – The goal here is to call out with as many phone numbers as you can over time. You can start with one phone number and build it up to hundreds and even thousands. You do not need a handset for the numbers to call out because no one will be answering if anyone calls back.

2. No Bells and Whistles – Make sure these phone numbers don’t have any bells or whistles on them. If there’s voice mail, make sure it is full so when someone calls the number they hear, “Voice Mail is Full” message.

3. Grab Their Attention – Make sure you pick an attention grabbing id that will show up on a person’s phone along with the phone number like “Health Care”, “Political”, “Credit Card”, “Debt”, etc.

4. Drive Traffic to Your Website – The sole purpose of these numbers is to phone out to a person, grab the person’s attention and get them to browse to your website.

And guess what, they don’t even have to answer the phone. You just want them to go to your website. That’s what this is all about. Nothing else. Driving traffic to your website.

One note here, if the person answers, the information you’ll be tracking is actually the fact whether they answered or not, because then you’ll know they got the call and you won’t bug (call) again at least for maybe a year.

Remember, you’ll be dialing a huge amount of phone numbers, as many as there are people who own phones. So no need to call the same person over and over, just put them in a list that gets activated every x, where x is one month, one year, etc.

5. Auto-Dialing Software – For this step you’ll need some kind of auto-dialing software (maybe caller id spoofing software) that will dial out using your reserved phone numbers.

The attributes of the auto-dialing software might include things like checking the National Do Not Call Registry.

This step is huge and would play a big part of the process. Many details would need to be ironed out.

6. Setup a Website – Okay, time to setup a website and a simple website at that.

You can use WordPress to setup one page per phone number that you’re going to use to call out. But first setup one page with all the phone numbers that will dial out and make each phone number link to its own page.

On the page with all the phone number could be something like, “Did you receive a call from one of these numbers?”

On each page will be a phone number with a short description like, “This number calls me and then hangs up.” or any other description you can think of that people would say to themselves if someone called and hung up like, “Who is calling me all the time?”

When a visitor clicks on the phone number link they will be directed to a page with more complaints or reports (WordPress comments) about the phone number.

7. Making Money – Now that the website is setup and running with a phone or list of numbers you’re
going to use, slap some Adsense ads on the site or ads that are targeted to a niche.

So for instance, if your first phone number that dials out is going to have something to do with credit card debt on the person answering’s caller id, then tweak the site with keywords and keyword phrases that will display the correct Adsense ads or place ads on the site for other products and/or services that have to do with credit card debt.

The keyword phrase and other phrases associated with “credit card debt” pay quite a bit.

8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Now, you’ll want to somehow (and that’s a big somehow) rank in
the search engines for not only the keywords and phrases that are related to the caller id description but also for the phone number.

So when people get a call from that number, they will go to Google and search for that phone number or phrase that showed up on the caller id description.

You want to come up on the first page of the search results for that phone number or phrase.

Note: There are a ton of techniques for trying to rank high in the search engines and is something that takes time and is beyond the scope of this article.

9. Demographics – If you’re going to do something like this, you might be in a position to pay for your demographics. You’re looking for people with demographic attributes of owning a phone, a computer, people who have credit card debt, concerned about healthcare issues, a voter or politically involved person, etc. You can come up with common scenarios on your own too.

Also, you could even have a service answer the phone and ask a valid question like, “What’s your position on the Healthcare debate?” People like to talk about their opinion. Heck, you could possibly sell the answers to the questions for research purposes. But, that’s a whole different business and we don’t want to go in that direction right now.

10. That’s It, Or Is It? – To sum up then:

• you’re calling out to a ton of people
• they are seeing your message and phone number on their phones
• they are answering and your hanging up when they answer
• they could call back and if they do they get a message that says, “Mail Box Full”
• they enter the phone number that called them or some phrase from the number’s caller id description into a search engine like Google
• they get your webpage as a search result and click on it
• they see that other people have had phone calls from the same number
• they have the opportunity to leave a comment, or…
• they even have an opportunity to report it as spam with a form, but…
• when they do report it as spam, they are reporting it to you because you provided a link to a
• form on your website to report it as spam
• you’ve placed Google Adsense or some other ad product and/or services on each and every web page.
• over time, with tons of people coming to your site, it makes tons of money. To the tune of approximately $300,000.00 a year.
• Oh yea, people will view your website as so helpful, they’ll write about it else where and link to you. Even sites that are highly regarded and have tons of traffic themselves. Links are gold to the search engines. In fact, you could create a bunch of smaller sites that link to this site to helpbuild traffic to it.

Look at this. Estimated Data about the website that lists the phone numbers I’m talking about.

What Have We Learned?

Well, besides feeling a bit scammed, there’s a lot here. The off and on-line marketing tactics. The fact that you’re actually getting people to go to your website just by using the phone.

As people arrive at your site Google sees the traffic building to your website and starts ranking your site as an authority for reporting phone numbers that are bogus or seen as “scams”.

If you owned a site like this, you can also drive traffic by commenting in forums and on blogs on how to be safe and check for these numbers that are calling you by pointing to your own website.

You’d be helping others so they don’t fall for these phone scams. And who knows, you could even list other phone numbers that are related to legitimate scams.

So, the next time you answer a wayward phone call and the caller hangs up or there’s no one at the end of the other line, think about why that happened.

What do you think? Have this ever happened to you? Someone calls and there’s no one on the other end? Tell us about it in the comments.