Today we bring you an interesting interview with Carlos Corona, co-founder and CMO of Unik Media Group, who shares his incredible story. He started out as a young immigrant from Cuba and worked his way up to become a successful entrepreneur in the pay-per-call marketing vertical.
With a strong love for tech and a drive to succeed, Carlos built an 8-figure affiliate marketing business while helping others do the same.
He talks about his early experiences, key moments that guided him to pay-per-call marketing, and the strategies and mindset that helped him reach the top in his industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Let's get into it.
Q: Carlos, Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
I'm Carlos Corona, I'm the co-founder of Unik Media Group, which is a pay per call marketing agency, Unik360 which is an all-in-one SaaS tool for pay per call marketing, and the Paid Per Calls network where we educate people how to get into the industry and make a living from doing pay per call.
Q: When you were younger, before you went on all these different paths, would you have ever guessed you would be doing this online stuff?
From a young age I knew I was going to be working around computers. I came to this country when I was 13 in 1998, but I was born in Cuba. And when I was in Cuba, I used to make the line to be able to use the computer. So nobody had computers. So you had to go to an office type of library that you would use computers there. And you had to make a pretty long line to be able to do that, right?
And then as soon as I moved to the US, I started cutting grass for the neighbors so they can pay me $10. And I would cut the grass and then I saved enough money. And I went to a Salvation Army and then I bought a whole bunch of old junk computers and made a computer, put a computer together.
So I've always been around computers. I've always been - you know, computers have been my main essential tool that I have used all my life.
Q: When did you learn English? And how old were you?
So I came to the US in 1998 when I was 13. By 2003, I graduated high school. 2008, I graduated college. And I never had a formal job, man. That's - dude, I never had a formal job.
I remember I was a sophomore in college, right? And at the time, it was - I told you, it was dropshipping perfumes, fragrances from New York. And then - I look up - not from China, from China. Let's be very clear, these are the real ones. This is real dropshipping from New York.
Designer brands, right? So I was looking at my QuickBooks and we had generated $368,000, to be exact, from doing this dropshipping. I'm a sophomore in college. You know, I just came to this country five years ago. I was like, "Wow, this is - this is pretty legit."
So I told my mom, "You know what? This college thing - forget it. I'm not doing it." And then she went nuts. She's like, "You're going to finish school." And then, "Mom, I'm going to graduate. The best offer that I have is from Chase, and they want to pay me $60,000 a year. What am I going to do with that?"
And mum was like, "No, you have to finish college." She's actually the only one in the family that had graduated college. She's a chemistry teacher. And then I'm - big on education. Big on education.
Interesting fact - I never went to pick up my diploma.
Q: How'd you get started doing what you did - what you do today or what you did before?
I got into this industry by mistake. So when I was in college, I had this idea of building websites. And then instead of them paying me for their website, just pay me every time you receive a phone call, like it's 25 cents, okay? Nobody bought into that idea. So I was like, "Forget it, I'm not gonna do that."
Instead, I built brick and mortar companies around the media that I was buying. So at the time, I started buying perfumes and selling brand name perfumes, fragrances, drop shipping. This is 2006, 2007, early dropship. Yeah, early dropship. And I had to send a pick and slip literally to the distributor so they can pick the products, run my credit card, and then ship it, dropship it white label to the customer, which now the companies - Fragrance X, I don't know if you know about them, but they're huge now. And that's how it started.
And then I was like, "This is pretty good money. I'm gonna go ahead and build a logistics company and buy trucks and forklifts and warehouses." And I did that. And then I hated it. It was like the worst thing I could possibly do.
And I sold it and I said to myself, "What if I buy a recording studio? That should be fun." And I opened a recording studio in Miami. At the time, we were starving. I mean, I ran through all my money, all my savings. I didn't have any more money. And I hit a depression, like, you know, "I failed. I burned everything that I created."
And a good friend of mine goes, "Hey man, can you make the phone ring for my company?" I'm like, "What is it that you do?" He's like, "Water restoration." I'm like, "What is that?" He goes, "Well, when people get water in their house, you know, they're doing an insurance claim." You know what insurance is. I'm like, "Of course." And that's how it got started.
The problem at the time was that it was only South Florida, and I wanted to sell nationwide. I wanted to expand. So he told me - you know, he's Cuban. He looks at me, he goes, "Macho, what you got to do is you got to find a company out there that will buy phone calls for you." This is 2017, 2018.
So I go into Google and I type in, "Who buys water damage phone calls?" And eLocal and 33 Mile Radius pop up. So I call eLocal and I'm like, "Hey, will you guys buy some water damage?" She's like, "Well, not really. We don't know who you are. I'm not doing business with you."
And then I called Tim McGill at 33 Mile Radius. I'm like, "Listen, man, I don't have any reference other than I have a client here in Florida that I'm generating these calls for. I want to go nationwide." And he gave me a chance. He goes, "Can you start with plumbing first? And if you start with plumbing first, I'll open it up to water damage." And I was like, "Okay, great. I'll do that."
Then, long story short, I sit down, I'm like, "Where can I run plumbing calls? Like, what city will have the worst plumbing infrastructure ever?" Well, Vegas - it's a freaking desert, right? They gotta have shitty plumbing. It's a desert, right? That's what I thought.
And I started running there. And you know, $2,000 first week. And then $5,000 and $10,000. And it kept growing and growing and growing. And I'm like, "Wow, this is now - the idea of selling phone calls for 25 cents, now it's a multi-billion dollar industry that I wasn't aware of." And that's how it got started.
Q: What made you fully commit to affiliate marketing in 2018 when you were doing a lot of different businesses?
I think that when I saw that there was an industry out there, and when I saw that there were affiliate networks and there were companies, then it all made sense. Why are there so many call centers trying to get in contact with people? And then I had that moment, it clicked on me like, "Oh wait a second."
And then I started promoting home services. So I started promoting plumbing, like a lot of plumbing calls, water damage, mold remediation, pretty much anything that was because of a water problem at your house - carpet cleaning, biohazard cleanup. So I started doing that.
And that was doing pretty well. It was nothing groundbreaking, but it was doing pretty well. And from there, I shifted into other verticals. So I was like, "Hmm, let me try running dental. Let me try running other things that will also make money, like emergency."
And what really changed everything was literally one campaign. You know how they say you have one campaign, one funnel, one email, one phone call, one everything, one meeting away.
So it was literally one campaign that changed my life totally, and it was a flight campaign.
Q: Tell us about this campaign.
One day I was taking my daughter to a pediatrician appointment, and at the time this was kind of recently, like 2020. It was COVID and it could only be one of us up there. So I was like, "You know what, I'll stay in the car," like usual. And then I stay in the car.
When I was in the car, I was watching a YouTube video about flights, about flight calls. And they were mentioning that there's volume in flight calls. And then that actually made me look into it and I was like, "Oh, that's interesting, flight calls. Who really books flights?"
Then by coincidence a friend of mine called me and she's like, "Hey, can you generate some flight calls?" And I was like, "Interesting, I just saw a video about it. I don't know where, when, I just saw a video about flight calls. Who buys..."
Answer me this Tina, her name is Tina, "Answer me this Tina, who buys a plane ticket over the phone? Who does that?"
She’s like, "Everybody..."
I'm like, "Don't you use an app? That's what normal people do." She's like, "No, just look into it please." And I was like, "Okay cool, I'll look into it, no guarantees. I'll look into it and I'll let you know."
So I go ahead and set up the campaign. And then I set up the campaign, it took me like an hour or something like that. And then I turned it on and it was sent to review. And I forgot about it. I forgot that I set up the campaign.
And then like four days later, I see a huge spike in phone calls coming in and all the phone calls were dropping. They were not connecting. I only set up the frontend part of the campaign.
I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. And I forgot to actually connect it to a target, to a call center, so the call would route properly.
I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. And long story short, that campaign generated like a million dollars in revenue in 4 months.
I had done seven figures before, but not so fast, not in one campaign, you know. So that was a campaign that I truly got to scale. The traffic was like 100% mine. I was the only one generating the calls for that.
And it was a way that I did it that later on I broke it down and I made it into a course. Like people can now watch and do it. But it was the way that I did it that wasn't what everybody else was doing. And I wasn't really looking like, "Oh, I'm gonna do that." I was like, "Let me see if this works." And that was really what pushed me.
But after that, I had a moment that kind of changed everything. Because what I did is I created a challenge where I partnered up with the flights agency. And it was a challenge where I will go ahead and go on YouTube Facebook Live for three days. And I would show people exactly step-by-step what is it that you need to do to generate phone calls. And whoever wins the challenge at the end of the 30 days, meaning whoever generates the most revenue, gets $10,000 dollars.
So that challenge brought in like a whole more people that I was expecting.
Without promo or anything, I just put it out there. And the challenge brought in a whole bunch of people. But up until that point, and I'll tell you why the story of the challenge, because up until that point, I was generating the traffic like pretty much all by myself. I was doing all the media buying, all the creatives, everything I was doing by myself.
And then when I created the challenge and I pretty much grabbed like, "Look, this is how I do it. This is a formula, this is a step-by-step." You know, record it for the first time and now you guys can do it.
It took us 10 days to generate 7 figures, where it took me 4 months to do it on my own. And that's usual, because a lot of people want to do it on their own. They feel like, "Oh, I did this." But when you work with a team and you let people come in, that's where things change.
Q: So what happened after that first big win?
So after that, I looked at my business partner Clayton and I'm like, "Bro, we just got to tell everybody how it is that we do it. If we see people as competition or haters or anything, we're really not going to get to the next step. How we're going to get to the next step is by winning them with transparency and with trainings and education. Because if I bring you into the business, I'm transparent with you from the beginning, and I show you exactly what I know, with the end goal that I will buy your calls or that you will buy my calls."
A lot of the other companies are not doing that. They don't want to share with people what they're doing because they don't want competition. So I always tell them it's like Michael Jordan being like, "You know what, I don't want anybody else to know how to play basketball because I only want to play basketball." You know, it's never going to work. It's not going to be a game.
So I tell people, "Yeah, you need somebody to come in and challenge you and your skills to see what you come up with, what solution do you find." Because if you're a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, your main skill is solving problems. Every business owner that I know, they can tell me they're great at whatever it is - solving a problem.
Q: So was this a way of you scaling that opportunity?
100%. I think so many times people, when starting great companies and you do really good in the beginning. You get the feeling of like, "I want to get to the next level, I want to scale." And you know, I know, and you feel like you can get some form of complacency from it, like "I know everything, I've made the money, there's no one else that can tell me what to do."
But so much, I feel like that's where entrepreneurs fail, because not only are you solving problems, but you're really in a position to be as resourceful as possible. And humans are the best resource, because if you don't got no one to bounce ideas back and forth, whenever you're stuck, you're stuck for sure.
Q: I know you help a lot of people. You've been coaching for - when did you first launch your course? Why did you decide to start coaching?
So I first started coaching in late 2018. And the reason why I did it is because I was surprised that not enough people were doing pay per call. And even though it's still a relatively small industry, it was smaller back then.
So I was surprised that people were not really doing pay per call, and they were doing all this other hard stuff to make an income online, which I was like, "That makes no sense." So I decided to start teaching and coaching people on how to do what it is that I do.
And so far, we have taught a little over 1,400 people. And a lot of them have grown to be six, seven, eight figure players in the industry. You see a lot of them in this room here today. And that, to us, is really rewarding - to grab somebody that had no idea what pay per call was, and then now to see that they're running a team of 10, 15, 20 people in this industry doing this, it's amazing.
Q: What are the habits you see of the ones that have the most success versus the ones that don't succeed?
Well, the main habit that I see is the ones that have a lot of success are obsessive. They're obsessed over the business, how things are done. And they don't give up. They're persistent, right?
And the ones that don't succeed, they see it more as a hobby. And maybe this is a cool side gig. "I'll maintain my 9-to-5 job. I'll still be an architect and I'll do this on the side to see what can happen."
But that guy that built something before and failed and hit rock bottom and wants to build something new, those people usually tend to take a business opportunity a little bit more serious. And they come in with experience of previous businesses. So they apply all that into something like this, and they can see a return on their investment and they can see success rather quickly.
So to circle back around, I see people that - I immediately know when somebody joins our program are going to be successful. Because one, they watch all the videos. The questions that they're asking are very elaborate questions. And they're applying what they're learning. They're executing. They're not just sitting around and absorbing theory without putting it into practice.
Q: What are the things you focus on and obsess about that make you successful?
I am obsessed with a lot of things, especially with the heat right now. I am obsessed with a lot of things. But one of the things that I really, really I'm obsessed about is integrations of systems and connecting different systems together to perform certain activities.
I'm also quite a bit obsessed with AI at the moment and using AI to do a lot of analysis and data handling for us.
And I'm also looking into building a complete funnel and move from just being a network, a lead generator, a media buyer, and to also servicing - and to also move into servicing some of the leads that we're generating.
Q: So bringing some things in-house, correct? With your own call centers, call centers, agencies, and issuing and buying your own policies? Where'd this hustle come from?
I think it comes from being born in a country that - it's a communist country, that you don't have any opportunities. There's no future. There's nothing to hope for. And then, you know, life will change you.
And then my parents were lucky enough to move to this country, to the US. And then I see all these opportunities that were never an option for me. And I was like, "Man, I'm just going to hustle and I'm going to design the life that I want to. I'm going to build the business that I want to. And I'm going to live life on my terms."
And to me, this is the greatest country, the only country I think that you can do that in. So a lot of the hustle came from that. You know, imagine somebody that comes to this country with 50 cents in their pocket. You know, they got more dog in them than most. Correct. To have to learn the language, the culture.
Q: What advice do you have for someone looking to get into the affiliate space today?
There's endless opportunity. I mean, I think that pay per call is going to continue to grow as, you know, pay per lead and lead forms are going to continue to decrease in demand. I think that inbound consumer-initiated warm transfers are also going to be the future, because a lot of regulations are going to be stopping people from outbound dialing and using these predatory approaches, especially with the senior demographic.
So they're going to turn into having an inbound call that is going to be pre-qualified, either by human or AI or some other type of business intelligence, before getting to an agent, which no longer needs to be under the same roof. It could be somebody working remotely anywhere.
So we're seeing - we're definitely going to see that, I think, in the near future, where we're going to become a lot more efficient in the way that we handle and process calls.
Q: What are you most excited about today?
A lot of things. I like the fact that we're helping out people at the end of the day, you know? People are calling and they're getting the products or the services that they need. So I like that a lot.
And then I also like that I can scale this business, because I leverage my partners' resources in the sense that if I am generating calls for a Fortune 500 company that has a thousand, two thousand agents on the floor answering these calls, then now I can operate at that scale. Whereas in a traditional business, I would have to have like 2,000 agents working for me, and it would be a big overhead to be able to do that. Yeah, correct.
Another thing that I like is I'm able to be nimble and adapt really fast. So I could be running home services today. And if that vertical, for whatever reason, is not performing, I can adapt and switch over to a new vertical and be running e-mass tort or some type of insurance or some type of legal service rather quick. Where you can't really do that in a traditional - if you're running a restaurant, you can't just tomorrow say, "Hey, we're going to shut all this down and I'm going to have a salon up and running," right? So you can't do that. But you can do that in pay per call. So that's something that I really like.
And the other thing that I really like is the community and the industry and the culture around this niche of performance marketing. And you see, it's kind of a team, collaborative - correct, it's a team kind of vibe. Because everybody collaborates, everybody wants to kind of help each other out, even though they're competing with each other at the same time. So you don't get to see that in many industries, but you do - people don't open up as much. Correct.
Q: So what do you think the future of AI in pay per call in 10 years?
I think that salespeople will always be there. I think if we look at 10 years, I think a lot of what we do is going to be automated heavily. I think five to seven years from now, a lot of things we do will be automated.
I think a lot of the repetitive entry level stuff is going to be done by automation, artificial intelligence. And the manual labor is still going to be manual labor. I don't see anywhere in the near future a robot replacing a water heater or a toilet or a furnace.
But I do see robots doing health insurance enrollment or auto insurance enrollment. And I do see in the near future where it's going to have a disclaimer that you're speaking with artificial intelligence. I see that happening.
And a benefit to that is there's no bias. The robot doesn't have a bias. So if it's giving you the best option, it's truly giving you, based on the data set that's been provided, the best option. It's not giving you the one with the most commission. So I think it's going to actually be a more honest society in that way.
Q: When you first started doing pay per call in 2017, could you have predicted where you would be in six years, having this kind of success like owning your call centers, agencies, and issuing and buying your own policies?
No, it's evolved. It's just been a complete evolution as you've - I thought that it was BS, to be honest. I honestly thought that I was not going to - I look at my dashboard. And for the first week, I think I spent maybe $150, $200 on Craigslist ads, right? And my payout was like $2,800. And I was like, "There's no way these people are going to pay me. This is BS. They're not going to pay me. Watch, this is going to be a whole scam." And sure enough - hold on. And then I went crazy.
But I had no idea that it was going to turn into a - that it's going to turn into an 8-figure business.
Q: So what I find most interesting too is you're very personable, you're very charismatic, you're great - just like you're a great storyteller, you're great to talk with. But you also have that side of the brain that's very technical. You seem very system-oriented. Where do you think that comes from, where you get - you kind of have the best of both worlds with how you interact and think?
I think there's - I'm a Gemini. So one side of me is the very communicative, storytelling side. And then the other side is just the geek in me, right? So I want to learn how to code and I want to write this on my own and I want to build websites on my own. What's open? I want to do everything on my own, solve problems, right?
And then the other side is, "Well, how can I communicate what I'm solving with other people?" So you mix them both. It's a good fit.
Q: What advice do you have - I want you to answer this question for two different types of people. Someone that's thinking about getting into the affiliate pay per call space, and someone that's in it already. What's the piece of advice that you would give to them today?
Okay. To someone that is new to the space, that wants to get into the space, my advice would be to try to find a niche that you want to concentrate in and become an expert on it. Meaning, learn as much as you can from that.
It's a big difference from somebody that knows everything about the product or offer that they're promoting and somebody that wants to promote that offer and product to make money, right?
And what I mean by that is that whatever offer you decide, "This is the one that I want to run and I want to promote," you should have very extensive research and wide knowledge about it. You should be able to speak in depth about that offer. Because that's going to allow you to be a better media buyer, a better negotiator with your advertiser, and a better performance marketer overall.
If you're just picking an offer because you're looking at what is paying the most and you want to run that based on what is paying the most, chances are you're not going to have much success, alright? So that would be my advice. Be fully invested in whatever it is that you're running.
And then understand that everything is a process, right? So understand that - in the case of basketball, we can probably dribble and play basketball, and we can probably do a mediocre, a good job at it. But there's no way that we can play basketball with LeBron or Michael Jordan, right? Because they've been doing this for a lot longer. They have more experience.
So understand where you are at in your journey and then set expectations based on that, right? So don't be too hard on yourself and don't compare yourself with the greatest, because the greatest have been doing it for a while to have acquired the experience, which is the only thing you can't really buy - experience. And that's why they perform at that level.
Eventually, you can become one of them or even better. But understand that it will be a process for you to get there.
For somebody that is having success already - somebody that is having success already has to be on the constant lookout for improvements, running lean and efficient, right? So a lot of the time, somebody that is running successful already could be burning a lot of budget or a lot of resources and having overlapping roles, right?
So they could hire two, three people to do the same job, and it's eating away from their profits. Or having an outdated tech stack, right? And that could be not propelling them into other opportunities and other revenue sources.
Or analyze what is it they're currently doing in their business and how they can make more money from what they're currently doing. And an example of pay per call - unfortunately, a lot of us, me included, will look at the payout of the call as the end goal, without realizing that the money is on the data and the upselling and cross-selling and monetization of your data, which is the hard part.
Q: What else would you like the audience to know? And how can they learn more about you?
I would like them to know that there's a cool space out there that is called pay per call marketing, that is performance marketing, where essentially you will run advertisements and people will call those ads and you will get paid for phone calls that convert into billable calls. And you can make a great income, generate wealth, and work with some amazing people. That's the main thing that I wanted them to know, that there's something that is called pay per call that is out there. And then they can do it just like we do it.
And if you want to get in touch with me, my Skype is @305shark. And on YouTube, you can find me under Carlos Corona, which is my name. There's probably like a hundred hours worth of free training there. So that would be a good place to start.
