You may have heard the term Solo Ads being used as a terrific way to get targeted buying traffic to your site and offers. You would have heard correctly! Solo ads are indeed one of the better ways you can utilize to generate good traffic, and for several reasons.

These are in essence email mailings to a list you don’t own, mailed on your behalf, for a predetermined fee. These lists can range in size from 100 to 250,000 subscribers, and have many advantages over other types of marketing, among them

•   You get to mail to an ultra-targeted “buyers” list.
•   You can effectively pre-sell your offer before they arrive on your landing page, thus boosting conversions.
•   Since the email is coming from someone they trust, it has the feel of an endorsement, again helping with conversions.
•   It’s an incredibly easy way to build your own list.
•   You don’t need any technical expertise whatsoever. If you can write an effective email, this method can bring loads of subscribers or affiliate cash in no time at all!

Solo Ads – What Matters Most?

There are a few variables that matter a great deal when you are considering which solo ads to run.
The size of the list is something to look at. While they can run in numbers from very small to very large as we said, not all lists are created equal. The responsiveness of the list is also a factor. If this list has been beaten down with offer after offer, they may well cringe when they see another of these come around. This makes a list of 200,000 with an open rate of 1% equal to a much smaller list of 10,000 that has an open rate of 20%.

Two other factors that matter are the click thru rate (CTR) of your ad, as well as the conversion rate of your landing page. If the landing page is yours, you can control that to a large degree. If it is say, an affiliate offer, you’re somewhat at the mercy of the quality of their landing page.

This brings us to whether or not it is wiser to use your own landing page or that of someone else. Of course the easiest way is to use one that is already made for the product. You can have this up very quickly, or in the case of direct linking not have to do anything at all other than link to it.

The reason why you may want to consider using your own landing page, even for an affiliate product, is that it can do two things for you that direct linking cannot. One, you get a chance to pre-sell your prospects on the product before they get to the sales page. This can be useful when the sales/landing page itself is not strong, or if you have personal experience you can relate that will convince the reader that they need to look into this. Second, you have the chance to grow your own list!

How To Build Your Own List With Solo Ads!

One of the best strategies out there right now is to use solo ads to build your own list. The best way to do this is by using your solo ad to drive prospects to a squeeze page which has a free offer for them. When they opt-in and take you up on your freebie, they are offered a one time offer (OTO) for a related product or service. You will sell a great number of the OTO’s as they’ve already gotten some thing for free from you, as long as they product you’re offering is good and not priced out of the ballpark.

I hope you can see the beauty of this. You are building your lists and making sales at the same time. Very often the sales from the OTO will more than cover the cost of the ad, and then of course you have the list of buyers you will be able to market to for some time!

Let’s look at the math of something like this. Solo ad vendors will usually guarantee a set number of clicks they will deliver to you. Suppose you buy a 500 click ad for $200. Say the free offer in your mailing attracts a 30% clickthrough rate (small for free offers!) and the one time offer tied to it converts at 20% for $17 (again, stupid small; but for the purposes of illustration…) you’ve just made $510 and added 150 names to your list, (150 for the free offer and 30 buyers!) You just made a net $310 for building your own list!

Where Can You Find Solo Ad Providers?

The best three places to find purveyors of solo ads are in my mind
•   Google
•   Ezine Directories
•   Forums

Google is very easy to do this with as you merely go to a Google search box, and enter a search along these lines in the box: “network marketing + solo ad”. Of course, the first part of that search string are your keywords, and the second telling the search engine you want to see results for solo ads with that term. You can also replace “solo ads” with “ezines” and “newsletter”, as these are also possibilities for running solo ads.

Go through the results and you’ll come up with a number of places that sell solos, and then you need to go there and contact the site owner to inquire about rates, availability, open rates, specific niches, dates and more.

There are also a number of great ezine directories out there, the best of these being The Directory Of Ezines. This makes the search process so much easier.

Forums are another great place to look, and many of them, especially The Warrior Forum, have a large number of solo ads providers who lurk there, as they know that is where they customers are!

Solo ads can be a great way to not only make sales, but also to build your list in a relatively short amount of time, and can be done for a very small investment of time and money. Add solos to your marketing arsenal today!

Tags: solo ads