However, if used right Solo Ads can be very profitable for you and therefore it is (as always) important that you educate yourself on the subject before you start spending money on the traffic, to optimize your ROI.
Using Solo Ads as an Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is becoming ever more popular. The value of the affiliate marketing industry seems to grow by a billion dollars each year, which makes sense: the entire online retail sector expands rapidly.
When you consider the stats, you easily see there’s a lot of money to go around among affiliates. For instance, Awin distributed over $700 million among its affiliates in one year.
Impressive, isn’t it?
That being said, not all affiliates are equally successful. Success as an affiliate largely depends on the ability to drive an audience to your website and the skill to keep them there.
We’ll be talking about the former today. To be precise, we’ll talk about using solo ads to drive traffic to your affiliate business.
What Are Solo Ads?
This is what solo ads are: You write a good email marketing copy, and the owner of an email list sends it to the people in the list. Naturally, you pay them for the service.
Even though it’s a pretty simple concept, it can be an excellent alternative to targeted ads. It’s usually a lot cheaper than paying for social media or Google ads, and it can be a good traffic source.
How to Use Solo Ads
There are two options here.
One: You can pay to email a set number of users. This is the cheaper option, but you don’t know how many clicks you’ll get.
Two: You can pay for a select number of clicks. You pay the owner of the email list, and they keep sending emails until you get the agreed upon the number of clicks. This is a tad more expensive, but it has a predictable outcome.
Now that you’ve directed an audience towards your site, what do you do next?
Watch out:
Unfortunately, this rarely pans out. You might get a few sales, but it won’t make back the money you’ve spent on the ads.
This is because users have no reason to click on your affiliate links yet. As you’ve probably heard countless times, building a relationship with your audience is necessary if you want a decent conversion rate.
Why? Simple: users need to trust you before they buy.
Here’s what you need to do:
Your best bet is to convert some users from the solo ad mailing list into your regular audience. You can do this by designing an opt-in page where users can subscribe to your newsletter. This way, you transfer a portion of the solo ad mailing list onto your own mailing list. This is much more likely to net you a profit.
Where to Buy Solo Ads
When looking to buy solo ads, you have two options. You can either look at a marketplace or find an individual seller. We’ll cover both options. Udimi is the biggest marketplace where you can buy solo ads. They have a variety of sellers, so you probably won’t have problems finding an email list that matches the topic of your website.
The sellers on Udimi get reviews, so you can read first-hand experiences with each seller. This is by far the safest option.
An alternative is to find an individual seller. You can do this on the forums or by doing a quick Google search. This option is usually cheaper, as the marketplace does not collect a commission. Watch out, though: there is a higher possibility of a scam. We’ll address this in a moment.
For now, you should just remember to look at all offers with a critical eye. Review each seller on the forums to make sure they’re legitimate.
Avoiding the Scammers
Still, we can give you a few tips to minimize the risk to yourself.
We have already mentioned making sure the seller is reputable. The first step is to check out forums, reviews, testimonials – anything like that can prove useful here.
The second step is to ask difficult questions about their list. For instance, you can ask what they do in case of a hard bounce (an invalid email address). The owner of a quality email list
should have no problem telling you they remove email addresses after one or two hard bounces. If they don’t give you a satisfactory answer, however, it’s best to look elsewhere.
Probably the best advice we can give you here is to not commit all of your capital to one email list. Even if you purchase solo ads from a seller who is reputable, and the users on the list are all interested in your niche, there’s no guarantee they’ll respond to your content.
It’s best to invest small amounts into several lists at first. You can then see which one gets the best results and proceed with investing more into it. That is the best way to avoid lists that don’t fit you.
Conclusion
The bottom line is:
Solo ads can be a potent tool. You can use them to direct a lot of traffic towards your site for relatively little money.
That being said, solo ads can sometimes also be unreliable, and the results are nothing if not unpredictable.
All things considered, we would not recommend using solo ads if you’re a complete beginner at affiliate marketing. New affiliates rarely have a lot of resources, so it’s best not to squander them on a potentially ineffective campaign. You should first get comfortable writing email marketing copy, creating landing pages, and building an online presence.
However, if you’re already somewhat familiar with the business, you can get great results with solo ads. You’ll especially enjoy them in a niche where it’s difficult to rank and where cost-per-click ads are expensive (like affiliate marketing).
You now know the basics of solo ads. It’s up to you to decide if this would be a useful tool in your kit.
Learn more about my #1 recommended place to purchase Solo Ads
If you are interested in getting started using Solo Ads I would recommend that you read my review of Udimi and how to avoid bad traffic and get the good one right from the start instead.
Learn more about Udimi (and how to avoid bad traffic) on this page
I hope you found this short, to the point article on what Solo Ads are and if it is going to be something for you to get started with. Please, if you have any experience you want o share then share it below in the comment section as it can help others. Also, if you got any questions about this I would be more than happy to answer them below!
I wish you success!
John,
Founder of: $tart Make $top Waste
