Solo Ad Buys: Track Everything

The second thing that I want to give you is this: you should keep track of everything that you do. I like to use a spreadsheet. You can just use a basic spreadsheet.

Across the top your columns read:

  • Name of Provider
  • Email Address Where Provider Can Be Reached
  • How Much Money Paid
  • How Many Clicks Promised or Estimated?
  • How Many Clicks Actually Received
  • Dollars per click (divide the dollars spent by the number of clicks)
  • Subscribers Received
  • Dollars per subscriber (divide the number of subscribers by the number of clicks)

This is not going to be useful information the first 30 days, or really the first 60 days.

You’re going to go out and say you mailed 30 solo ads the second month. In the first month you’re doing your research.

The second month you mailed 30 solo ads. You’re going to write all this information down on your spreadsheet. It’s not going to mean anything to you until the end of the second month.

After you’ve done all your mailings, then you’re going to sort the list by dollar per subscriber.

You’re going to find that 50% of that list (I’m going to tell a funny here) 50% of that list is going to be above average. 50% of that list is going to be below average 😉

You may not mail to the half that’s below average. Or maybe you won’t mail to the bottom 20% in the future. The only way that you’ll remember down the road not to mail to these people is to keep records. You can just keep a record of it in your handy-dandy spreadsheet and 5 years from now you can look back, and when you’re thinking about doing a mailing to Johnny, you can reference it. You’ll say, “I know I mailed from Johnny before, Johnny mailed for me before, how did it work out? Aww, conversion was really, really low. Maybe I should tell Johnny I’m not interested in doing this right now.

Or maybe I should tell Johnny that conversion was really low last time, the only way I can do this is if we split the price in half.” Whatever the case is.

Let me say this also. From time to time, you run 30 solo ads. One or two people are frankly not going to perform on what they promised. They may have lied to you about the size of their list. That happens. It just happens. Recognize that a percentage of people will do that. At the end of the day you still have some average subscriber cost. If you use your emotional energy being bitter towards that person, if you use your emotional energy to say, “you know what, Johnny lied to me and I spent $200, and I lost that money.” And then next month you decide you’re not doing any solo ads ever again because Johnny stole your money… Well, you’re not going to build a business. If you run 30 solo ads and 25 people perform, and you put 5 people on your blacklist, you know what… thumbs up! You’ve done a good job, and next month, you know the 25 people you can talk with.

The next thing that you can add into your spreadsheet, if you so desire, and if you have things set up in your business to track this, is to track the money you generate over the course of the next year, and tie it to a particular lead source.

If you have the capacity to do that without too much work it’s nice to say that Johnny’s subscribers made you $55/ea., but

Becky’s subscribers only made you $7/ea. What does this mean? It means that a year down the road, when you’re thinking about running solo ads again, you know that you can spend everything that you have on Johnny, but you’re not going to spend anything with Becky.