Avoid Commercial Solo Ad Providers

Before I get into the core techniques, I want to warn you against commercial solo ad providers: What I’m going to teach you is how to find people whose list you can mail, so you can purchase solo ads from individuals who are in the business of building a quality niche list just like you are. I want to contrast that against a commercial solo ad provider.

What is a commercial solo ad provider?

That is generally someone who has created a list for the express purpose of selling you a mailing to their list. What happens here is, if someone is in the business only of getting as many clicks as possible to your email advertisement (so that you will purchase that solo ad from that individual) their goal is to find as many subscribers as possible who like to click ads. That’s their goal – at least, that’s their secondary goal.

Their first goal is to sell as many solo ads as possible.

Somehow they need to get folks on their list, so they’re perhaps going to buy a solo ad to somebody else’s list so that they can get say 10k subscribers on their list. Maybe they buy 100 solo ads, get 100 subscribers from each solo add, and now they have a list of 10k solo ad subscribers. Then they sell 2 solo ads a day morning and night and send this list of 10k your ad in the morning, somebody else’s in the afternoon, somebody else’s the next morning, somebody else’s in the afternoon.

What happens to the quality of this list? It just goes down, and down, and down, and down.
As a result of this, if you buy solo ads from those types of commercial solo ad providers you’re not going to get the kind of results that you can get from solo ads. I think that this is where some of the confusion has come in with solo ads.

When we have a discussion about solo ads, and I say “Hey, I ran a solo ad, and did really well with it,” then next week, I say phrase “Be really careful with solo ads,” there’s a real disconnect there!

The problem is, I’m using the word solo ad to describe two different things. They’re both solo ads, and that’s why I’m using that word to describe both things. In one case, I’m using the word solo ad to describe what originally was a solo ad – an email ad drop with a reputable niche list. That is where you contact an individual and you say “hey, can I mail to your list, and what’s it going to cost me?”

Now, because of all these commercial solo ad providers, you might be thinking when you hear solo ad provider: “okay, let me go to this list of 25 people who sell solo ads, because I bought the list somewhere and it’s a great list and everybody’s really excited about it, I’m just going to go buy a bunch of solo ads and build a list.”

Because you heard me say in one breath “I bought a solo ad and it converted, I’ve used solo ads to generate traffic.”

Maybe you didn’t hear me say “You don’t want to buy those commercial solo ads.” I just want to be really clear here that you’re going to go out and you’re going to find solo ads to lists who are not mailed a whole lot of solo ads. Instead, the list has been built for the purpose of monetizing it in-house.

When you mail a solo ad to a list that’s been built in-house, it’s going to be mailed to a strong list. Just like if you mailed to my list, or you’ve mailed to your list. You’re building a strong quality list of people who really trust you.

Let’s just say someone did come to you and they said “Hey, I’ve got something I offer that I believe would be valuable to your subscribers. Would you be interested in mailing it to your list (for a fee or a payment, of course)? Let’s just say that you say “I might be interested, let me see the offer, how much are you interested in paying?” And the person says “Well,

I’ll give you $300 for mailing this offer out to your list.” You look at it and you think that will really help my list. Yes, I’ll take the $300 and you mail it out to your list.

If you only do that once or twice a month, you and your client, the person that bought that solo ad from you, are likely going to get a good response from that mailing. We contrast that from what I just shared with you where somebody’s mailing twice a day these 3rd party offers, and conversion just really tends to go down.