Solo Ads are a very easy way to start earning $50 to $100 per day in as little as 3 months. But only if you are willing to put in the necessary work to build your solo ad business. If you put in just an hour a day into the business you can expect to see some positive ROI in about 6 months.
To get started with solo ads it will take some financial investment on your part. The more you invest the faster you can get to the point of generating income from solo ads. If you do not have several thousand dollars to invest you can start with maybe a grand and then grow from there.
If you are not sure what are solo ads, then read my very simplified discussion of solo ads. Below that are 7 things that I learned from solo ads.
What are Solo Ads?
You visit a website. That website offers a free report that you can receive if you sign up for their email list. You sign up and get the free report. The owner of the website tries to grow his email list of people that have signed up for the free report to be about 5,000 or 10,000 or more subscribers.
Once the website owner has grown his list to a substantially large enough size he will start selling solo ads. When you sell a solo ad, you send an email to your list touting the free report that the solo ad buyer is giving away.
There is a link to the free report in the email. Every person that clicks on the link in the email is known as a “click.”
Solo ads are sold in some guaranteed minimum number of clicks like 100. You can price your solo ad at any level you want but the price range is generally between $.30 and $.50 per click. So if someone charges $.40 per click then a 100 click solo ad will cost you $40.
Now that you understand what solo ads are, here are 7 things I have learned.
1. Invest heavily in growing your list as quickly as possible
This is my number one suggestion because I find that the sooner you can grow your list, the sooner you can start selling solo ads. Once you reach the point of being able to sell a solo ad, the quicker you reach the point of recouping your initial investment to build your list.
Yes you can start off with a small investment and grow your list over a longer time period. Chances are you might find yourself discouraged and want to give up because of the length of time that it is taking. That is the last thing you want to do is to give up on your initial investment. The sooner you start to see income coming in the more you will dedicate your time to your list.
2. Learn how to click bank as soon as possible
Have you ever subscribed to an email list? Then you get emails from that list. Over time you might lose interest and unsubscribe from the list.
Regardless of the quality of content you provide to your email list, you will have people that unsubscribe from your list. This is just the nature of the game called solo ads.
There are 2 ways to replace unsubscribes with new subscribers – 1) buy solo ads or 2) click banking.
Click banking is the term used to describe the process of sending clicks to other solo ad sellers without selling them a solo ad. Once you have sent the minimum number of clicks to their list, they will then turn around and send the same number of clicks to your list.
This allows you to add subscribers to your list without having to pay for a solo ad. In other words it is a FREE way in which to grown your list.
When you are initially building your list you may not be able to generate 100 clicks from a single email message. That is fine. Let your click banking partners know that you are new and can only send 50 clicks.
When you are building your list you should always agree to send clicks to your click banking partner first as a sign of good faith that you are going to live up to the bargain of sending the agreed upon number of clicks.
3. Split Test Everything
You need to learn how to split test everything in your funnel. Split test your squeeze page. Split test your free offer. Split test the size and color and text on your button on your squeeze page. Split test the words that you use on your squeeze page. Split test the headlines on your squeeze page. Split test the wording of the email that you send to your list.
In other words split test everything.
Why would you want to do this? Let’s say you spend $40 to purchase a 100 click solo ad. You get 40% of the clicks to subscribe to your list.
For $40 you just added 40 new subscribers to your list. That is a cost of $1 per subscriber.
If you split test your squeeze page and improved it to the point where 55% of the clicks subscribe, then for that same $40 investment you would get 55 new subscribers. Your cost per subscriber has now decreased to just $.72 per subscribers.
If you invested initially $2,000 to purchase 50 solo ads at a cost of $40 each, here is the difference you get by split testing and improving your squeeze page.
Conversion Percentage
Number of Subscribers
40%
800
55%
1,100
Let me give you some perspective on why you need to split test. If you did nothing to your initial squeeze page that is converting at 40% it would cost you $2,750 to get 1,100 subscribers. Improve the effectiveness of your squeeze page to 60% then it would cost you only $2,000 to get the same 1,100 subscribers.
That is why you split test everything.
5. Invest in tracking software
Whether you are buying solo ads, selling solo ads or click banking, you need to know the exact number of clicks you are receiving or sending.
When I started I used a free WordPress plugin called Pretty Links to track clicks. Pretty links allows you to redirect one URL to another URL. You create a link like www.jenniferbland.com/track/mysoload1 . You then give this link to the person that you purchase a solo ad from. When someone goes to this link, Pretty Link will redirect them to your squeeze page. This allows you to track the number of people that clicked on the link and how many of these people are unique clicks.
Pretty Link is a great solution to start out with simply because it is free. Eventually you will want to upgrade to commercial software to track links.
The reason for upgrading is that you will want to do rotations for your URLs. A rotation is how you split test everything. If you purchase a 100 click solo ad then you may send your traffic evenly between 4 different versions of your squeeze page. Then you see which one is converting the best and worst. Drop the worst ones and modify your best performing squeeze page to see if you can improve conversion even more.
The most frequently used commercial software is Quality Click Control and AdTrackz Gold. Of the two I recommend Quality Click Control simply because it provides a URL that you can give to people that purchase a solo ad from you that they can look at to see the number of clicks they received and the top 10 countries where those clicks came from.
How Long Does it Take to Build a Solo Ad Email List
Here is a simple fact of life if you want to sell solo ads: You are lucky if you get more than 5% of your list to click on a link. The reality is that you should expect to get 2% of your list to click on a link.
If you have 5,000 subscribers on your list and 2% click on an email then you generate 100 clicks. That is good enough to sell one 100 click solo ad per day. If you sell a solo ad for $40 then you are making $40 per day.
Most people will start selling 50 click solo ads with a 5,000 subscriber list. That allows you to easily over deliver on the 50 clicks promised. If you email generated 100 clicks you could send 65 to the 50 click solo ad buyer and then send the remaining 35 clicks to a click banking partner. (NOTE: you need commercial tracking software to do the auto redirects like this.)
Over time by selling solo ads and click banking and reinvesting some of your income into buying more solo ads, you can grow your list from 5,000 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers or more.
It took me several months to grow my list to 5,000 subscribers. I was not spending several hours a day on building my list. If I had I could have accomplished this goal much faster.
The amount of time it takes is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend every day on building your list.
Tips from Experts
Right now I am in the process of collecting “their greatest tip” from some of the most successful solo ad sellers in the market. I have reached out to them asking them to share that one invaluable piece of advice they can share with others.
My next blog post will be an accumulation of their advice on the solo ad business. You cannot buy this wealth of insider information so stay tuned for my next blog post so you can get this advice for free.