You may be wondering what is a solo ad? A solo ad is a way to send your marketing promotions or affiliate offers to other people’s email in-boxes on a mass scale by renting the email list of other established online marketers or by using solo ad agencies or marketplaces. One of the cool things about using solo ads is they are sent all by themselves without being diluted with other competing offers which can occur with other advertising channels such as using pay-per-click with search engines.
You can promote all kinds of things with solo ads including your own products and services, or anything in the make money online world including affiliate offers. If promoting affiliate offers, you can usually handpick from preexisting affiliate promotional emails to be given to the solo ad provider who will then blast it out to their email list.
Tip: If promoting an affiliate offer that is really popular, there may also be a lot of other Internet marketers promoting the same one and using the same affiliate marketing materials that you are using which may hurt the results of your affiliate campaign. If allowed, it would be best to customize your affiliate marketing materials (or even create your own) to make you stand above the competition who are promoting the same affiliate offer. By doing so, this will help to increase your open rates, opt-ins and conversions due to being uniquely different.
Promoting using solo ads can allow you to start building your own email list very quickly by leveraging the huge amounts of traffic that you can get from using one or more solo ad providers. All you have to do is have an opt-in form on your landing page to capture other people’s email addresses.
Tip: Your email list is one of your greatest assets for your online business… as they say, “the money is in the list.” Some online marketers have built their list so big that they often refer to it as owning their own personal “ATM” machine. So, start building your email list today by adding an opt-in form to your website or landing page used in your solo ad campaign to capture other people’s email addressees by using an autoresponder. The payoff can be huge!
In addition, solo ads are a good alternative if you are in a very competitive market where the cost of advertising is high such as with pay-per-click on highly competitive keywords using search engines like Google.
So, How Does A Solo Ad Work?
Let’s say you want to promote an affiliate offer by using a solo ad. The process would typically go something like this:
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Select an affiliate offer and choose a promotional email from their swipe file to send as a solo ad
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Your solo ad is sent to other people’s email in-boxes using the solo ad provider’s email list
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The solo ad is opened by those who are interested and the call-to-action prompts them to take action now to click the link
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After clicking the link, the person is redirected to your landing page that explains or illustrates the overwhelming benefits of your affiliate offer. To proceed, they will need to opt-in to your email list where they will then be redirected to the sales page of the affiliate offer
- Now, a sales can possibly take place with you earning a great commission!
One of the key takeaways is that whether or not you make a commission, you get to build your own email list where you can do email marketing promotions over and over again of relevant products to your subscriber’s who may be jumping in line to buy them… Priceless!
Elements Of A Basic Solo Ad
Since solo ads are sent as an email, the structure of it would typically have the following basic elements:
Subject line
The subject line is the most important element of the solo ad. It has to be intriguing and compelling enough to convince the email recipient to open the solo ad. If the solo ad is not opened, then the call-to-action will not be executed and the goal (if to make sales or to collect emails) will all be but a failed attempt.
To help make your subject line intriguing and compelling, you can emphasize the biggest benefit to be gained (or lost) from the offer you are promoting and placing it as near the beginning of the subject line as possible to quickly grab attention.
Body
The body (main content) of the solo ad is to get the email recipient to become even more interested and excited about the benefits of what you are promoting and how such benefits could actually help them to successfully accomplish their own goals or desires.
To help you achieve this, you can use such proven tactics in the body of your content as:
- Curiosity
- Emotion
- Logic
- Setting a Vision
- Verified Research
- Relevant Video or Images
- Disclosing Proof of Income
- Independent Testimonials & Endorsements
Write the content of the body to be very convincing and irresistible. This will help entice the email recipient to click the link in your solo ad and proceed to the next step.
Call-To-Action
Make sure you have a strong call-to-action to encourage your prospects to take action now and click the link to be one step closer to the finish line for the goal of your marketing campaign.
Some examples of the call-to-action could be stated as:
- Why Not Get Started Today!
- See How Internet Pros Make Six-Figures Online!
- Safely Lose 15 Pounds in Less Then 30 Days!
- Proven Ways to Relieve Back Pain Now!
Post-Script
Adding a “P.S.” below the signature line of your name (or company’s name) in your solo ad has been shown to be very “eye catching” and highly read among people. This is your chance to add one last compelling sentence with a strong call-to-action for your prospects to take action now by clicking the link.
(To learn more about writing ads, click on How to Write a Great Ad)
Creating Your Own Marketing and Promotional Materials For Solo Ads
If you can’t get your hands on any email marketing or promotional materials (many affiliate programs already have them to use as well as some solo ad providers) for what you are promoting in your solo ad, you will then have to create the design and content yourself or by having it done from someone else with experience.
Fortunately, there are many user friendly tools like autoresponders, WordPress, GeneratePress, and Elementor that you can use to easily design and create your own customized email marketing or promotional materials including landing pages, email opt-in forms and fancy content to be used with your solo ad campaign. If you can point, click, and type, you can certainly be well on your way in creating something absolutely stunning in no time at all!
Keys to Running a Successful Solo Ad Campaign
- Need strong sales funnel that can convert leads into sales – irresistible subject line, convincing solo ad with strong call-to-action, high converting landing page for email opt-ins, highly targeted affiliate offer (hopefully with a high priced backend product), and targeted solo ad traffic.
- Make sure the solo ad provider offers a minimum of 90% Tier 1 traffic (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Stay away from Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries since you will most likely not get sales conversions.
- Buy only real human traffic. Stay away from shady solo ad providers sending you fake clicks by using “bad bots” (automated software programs) or sending you duplicate traffic from the same person with the same IP address.
- Don’t buy cheap solo ads (like under 20 cents per click). This is going to be mostly junk traffic from “bad bots” (fake clicks). Usually, it won’t convert to sales. As a general rule of thumb, quality solo ad traffic starts at around 40 cents per click & up.
- Shorter ad copy usually works better than longer ad copy for solo ads since people usually have shorter attention spans when it comes to their emails.
- Lead your prospects on a clear path down the promotional campaign journey by making sure that you are relevant and consistent throughout your entire marketing campaign. This will help to avoid any possible confusion with your prospects (or even losing them for good).
- Make sure that whatever you are promoting is highly relevant to the subscriber’s on the email list of the solo ad provider to best match their needs to what they would be most interested in buying. You can ask the solo ad provider if whether or not his email subscriber’s would be interested in your offer based on the buying history of what types of products they have bought in the past.
- Solo ads work great for the following industries: Affiliate Marketing, Make Money Online, Home Based Business Opportunities, and Internet Marketing.
Importance Of Link Tracking
With solo ads, it’s important to track your links in real-time using a link tracking software to monitor and analyze things like:
- Number of legitimate clicks received
- Sales conversions
- Where the traffic came from such as Tier 1 (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)
- Whether or not you are making a profit on your solo ad campaigns
In addition, you will also be able to detect click-fraud (clicks from malicious “bots” – automated software programs) using link tracking software.
Affiliate Partner
Solo Ad Providers
When choosing a solo ad provider, you want to use ones that are reputable and that are in the same line of business as yours in order to get targeted traffic for whatever you are promoting.
To get started with solo ad providers, here are some popular ones that you may want to tryout:
- UDIMI
- Roy Tay Solo Ads
- Quality Ad Marketing
- Igor Kheifets Solo Ads
- Safe Swaps
- Facebook (search: solo ads)
- SoloAdsX
Solo ad providers usually reserve the right to edit your solo ad (or even doing the solo ad for you) to make it more appealing to their email subscriber’s since they know best on how they respond to email marketing.
Tip: Always start small when buying clicks from a new solo ad provider so that you can test to see how responsive their subscriber’s are going to be to your solo ad promotion. Buy enough clicks (like anywhere from 300 to 500) to test run. After delivery of the clicks, you can then analyze the opt-ins and conversions to see if you are happy with the results and any profits of running the solo ad campaign. If everything looks good, you can then start to scale it up by ordering more clicks.
See More Ways To Get Traffic
To see our 50+ traffic sources to start getting traffic fast to your online business or marketing campaigns, click on Traffic Sources For Your Website.
Finally
Once you know what you are doing and feel confident with this type of traffic source, solo ads can bring you lots of targeted traffic quickly to your marketing campaigns with great results.