Solo Ads. Have you heard about them?

byOnly1Hugh

1.7K followers

3 years ago

Like many of us here one of my niches is the Making Money Online (MMO) niche. One of the points that was made to me very early on was that you must write several blog posts, some say 200-300, to start to make a dent in the MMO space. And that is a guess because there are so many factors to rank on the first page that no one, Guru or Peewit, can tell you the exact formula.

Nonetheless, at a turnover rate of 4 posts a week you might start to see something happen after a year. That’s if Google does not make it more difficult with its algorithm changes. And I am not trying to be all gloom and doom just stating what Buzzsumo, Ahrefs and Semrush all say.

On top of that, of course, you have to have highly sought after keyword rich posts that would attract strong traffic and get you love from Google or the sisters Bing and Yahoo, to rank on page 1.

Persons visit your posts, they click on your affiliate links and then you make some paper. Easy enough process but the timeline has always been a bother to me. By the time you court Google you would probably look like our friend here.

So as you can guess, it’s in my nature to always look for alternative routes and through research, there are many ways you can seek to accelerate the road to monetization. And let me say that all have ups and downs.

One such pathway that I have come across is the Solo ad. Again no silver bullet but a nice approach to utilize I think. But hey I am only a Newbie so I would welcome any comments by the more established members in here.

What are Solo Ads?

So Hugh get on with it and tell us What are solo ads? For fear of being dubbed long-winded here goes ….

Solo ads are simply the running of ads on other people’s email lists where you are the only item being advertised. The ads of course have links that track back to your website or funnel.

How do they work?

Let’s assume that you are in the baby clothes niche and that you have been using freebie and squeeze pages to get email addresses. You get 20 email addresses however the opt-in (eg pop-up for sharing of email addresses) is too slow for your liking and of that you would be lucky if you got one sale conversion. Hence the reason why volume is so important. The more traffic the more likelihood of a sale.

So you decide to approach Charlene, who is an Influencer in the baby niche with 20 years of experience. Charlene has an email list of about 10,000 subscribers. She offers to share your ad with a portion of her subscribers because of the market fit between you two. You say you are interested in 100 clicks on your ad. She charges you 45 cents a click or $45. So your solo ad would be the ad that goes out on its own to Charlene's subscriber list. The ad would say something like 'Sign Up and Get Your Free Ebook on 10 ways to avoid unintentional baby injuries'. For 100 clicks on that solo ad, you would pay $45

Advantages

• The Influence has a ready-made email list with subscribers who would be interested in your ad. It’s not like cold traffic
• Solo ads are a nice and simple way to reach a targeted audience
• Once the solo ad runs, results can be almost immediate once the ad is interesting.
• The cost to conversion ratio is substantially improved with the right selected Influencer.

Disadvantages

• As a solopreneur affiliate marketer sometimes you are on a tight budget and you may not have the funds to invest in a solo ads approach.
• Depending upon the market and influencer some solo ads per click can get up to $3, $4, $5 and more.
• Solo ads are not for every market so it would be wise to check the reception of the same before diving head first into this approach.

So do you have any experience with Solo ads?

Would love to hear your comments and also appreciate any likes.

Hugh