In short Solo Ads are advertisements on other people’s email lists in which you’re the only thing being advertised in that email. Within the ad are links designed to drive traffic to your website or sales funnel.
When it comes to Solo Ads, there are primarily two ways to make money: either as a buyer of Solo Ads and using them to help in marketing your product or service or as a reseller of Solo Ads lists.
Buying Solo Ads
To get a better idea of what they look like and how both the buyer and the seller use them, let’s look at a couple of scenarios. Firstly, imagine that David has just started an online affiliate marketing business in the health niche, offering various types of proteins and supplements. He’s managed to get his hands on a free report about supplements and protein intake and the value they have to offer, and he wants to give it away to people in exchange for their email address on an opt-in page.
So far, he’s picked up a small number of email subscribers from posting regularly in all the various health-related, gym and personal trainer social media groups along with targeting all his friends and family pages. But to succeed and build his business, he needs to ramp up the growth.
Finding the right partner
So after researching a whole host of online health influencers, he finds Isabel, a health coach who’s been in the industry for a few years. After reaching out to her, he finds out that she’s willing to send an email to her list of several thousand subscribers encouraging them to check out his opt-in page offering the free report because she thinks it’s a good fit and has value for her subscribers.
For doing this, David pays her a fee to get a minimum of 300 people to click on the link in her email to his opt-in page – every person that clicks on the link in the email is known as a “click.” Now, David has the email addresses for 300 people who are the perfect target audience for his proteins and supplements. So now he can build a relationship with them and start the conversion process of turning them into customers.
Selling Solo Ads
So that’s how buying Solo Ads you can make money, now let’s take a look at how by reselling Solo Ad lists you can make money. You can do this, a couple of ways, firstly let’s use our old friend David as an example, imagine his supplement and protein business is going well. He’s now got an email list of not 300, but 3000 conversions which he achieved through lots of hard work and buying high-quality solos ads from reputable list owners.
Building your own list
That’s 3000 people interested in staying healthy, taking proteins and supplements, and probably diet regularly, which makes them incredibly valuable to somebody who is offering a product or service that is relevant to them.
As a result, David can sell his list to any third party looking to reach this target audience. Just how it worked with Isabel, he can go ahead and sell a minimum number of Solo Ad clicks. Of course, because these ‘clicks’ are live customers, David can resell them for a far higher price than what was initially paid for the Solo Ads and pocket the profit.
‘Churn and Burn’
Doing it this way can take a bit of time and a considerable amount of money to build your Solo Ad list. However, if you don’t have time or the money to create a list, you can become a third party reseller. Some would argue that reselling is one of the fastest ways to enter the Solo Ads business without having a list of your own.
What does it mean to be a reseller
Being a Solo Ads reseller means doing precisely that, you are buying Solo Ads of an extensive third party list vendor, to create your own list and resell them at a higher price than what you paid for them. Typically, these vendors will charge you a monthly membership fee and charge a set price per number of clicks that could range anywhere between 300 and 5000 they will also include several free clicks as an added incentive.
Don’t take it personally people unsubscribe
However, whichever way you go about reselling Solo Ads you need to remember each time you mail your list, people will unsubscribe. So that means you always need to be adding new subscribers to your list to replace those unsubscribe. This never-ending process of continually adding new subscribers to replace those people who unsubscribe is why the solo ad business is often referred to as “churn and burn”.
Where can you buy Ads?
The great thing about Solo Ads is that list owners can buy and sell them via a wide range of places, including:
- Their website
- Various specialist online sites and forums
- Facebook and other Social Media Groups
- Udimi and others
Will they work for all business types?
Now we know a little more about how Solo Ads can be bought and sold; let’s dig a little deeper to understand what markets and sectors Solo Ads work well for driving traffic in and those where they don’t.
Without doubt, they work well and offer excellent value as a cost-effective marketing tool for growing and building mailing lists for companies with a broad market appeal such as;
- Online Courses
- Dieting
- Personal Development
- Dating
- Work from Home
- Forex Trading
- Crypto
- Internet Marketing
- Survival
They also work well for those marketers who have a limited budget or for those about to launch an offer led product or service that needs traffic sent directly to a web page promptly. And who doesn’t have time to produce guest posts, build an audience, or create any material that requires less than a few days before they see traffic.
However, for products or services in incredibly niche markets, say something like a consultant looking for clients for their marketing agency, or a freelance web designer, solo ads are not right. So the rule of thumb is that the more niche targeting your business requires, the less likely Solo Ads will work.
What else should you know?
As we mentioned earlier, Solo Ads do work well for driving traffic to a whole host of businesses. But, still, like any form of advertising or marketing activity, you need to keep testing their effectiveness and quality. To do this, you need to do a couple of things;
Always test the content of your email.
Firstly, test the content of your email, now depending on the market, you may be able to write both the content and the subject line for your ad, but in other markets, it’s standard practice for the email list owner to write the subject line and ad. If the list owner wants to write the copy, this can save you time and money on copywriting – but keep in mind; it’s the copy that’s going to make or break your Solo Ad.
So always discuss the ad copy with the vendors to ensure that it is a top-notch copy, but it’s relevant and delivers real value to your target audience before running the ad.
Don’t focus on anything else but driving traffic to your website.
Having said this, it’s essential to keep your Solo Ads, short and to the point, while sometimes longer ads do work, shorter is often better. Remember the Solo Ad aims to get them to click, you don’t need to sell, you can do that with a follow-up sales letter. Don’t focus on anything else but driving traffic to your website.
It’s essential to test a list before running a full ad.
You need to test the list quality; it’s essential to test a list before running a full ad campaign. You don’t need to try the full list, you can split test by mailing the smallest amount that the list owner will let you test to see what kind of conversions you get. This way, you keep the risk low and avoid spending all your money on a campaign that doesn’t deliver.
Start small and collect the data.
Start small, when you’re starting, you don’t want to spend all your money in one go. If your campaign fails, this can leave you with poor results and no budget left to run another more successful campaign. Start with 200-500 clicks; this will provide you with the relevant data without costing you too much money.
Less than 200 clicks won’t be enough to collect the data you need to determine whether your ad was successful. While the campaign needs to get you at least 200 clicks, you should be aiming to be closer to 500.
The Last Word
Solo ads are a great cost-effective way to kick start an online business that has a broad appeal. However, it doesn’t mean they’re the only way, and that you shouldn’t look at alternative ways to reach your audience. So it’s essential that you continually analyse how your marketing spend is performing and is it driving traffic and are you getting customer conversion, if not make the necessary changes.
Plus remember above all else the MONEY is in the follow-up if you don’t bother to follow up all the money you spent on Solo Ads, along with the time and effort are wasted.
