Google Voice Opens Today!

Guest Post: Dennis Yu

This is a guest post written by Dennis Yu.

Google Voice

Later today, Google is releasing a free voice service that ties all your numbers together, has free domestic calling and discounted international calling, voicemail transcription, phone routing, call forwarding, conference calling, call recording, and more. You get one phone number to control all your phones. Make all your phones ring at once or just one phone. If it’s someone you don’t like, you can even play them a wrong number message or opt to send them to voicemail, which you can listen in on as they’re talking.

In exchange for this free service, you must trust Google with your data. Most of us already are run our businesses on Google products– Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, Calendar, Chat, Local Business Center, Maps, and so forth. Soon, Google Wave will tie these services together. Watch this 80 minute demo that will blow your mind if you haven’t already seen it. Are you worried yet?

As an affiliate, you can use Google voice to do local lead gen. In other words, if you’re selling voice leads to insurance companies, cosmetic surgeons, roofers, or other professional services, you can get your free number and have it route to the client’s regular number. The call tracking will allow you to measure how many calls you generated from your campaigns, plus even listen in. No need to build your own Asterisk server and rent local phone numbers from icall or whatever service you use– it’s now “free”.

Just use AdWords to drive the traffic, Analytics to measure it, and Google Voice to handle the calls. Local lead gen in a box. That’s going to put a lot of software companies out of business. But at the same time, the barrier to entry to do local lead gen has never been lower. The yellow pages are going out of business slowly, and it’s time for affiliates to jump in for the kill. If you missed the panel on local lead gen at Affiliate Convention– and all of the panelists in the final super session agreed that local and social were the next big thing, ping me for the slides.