Solo Ads – Case Study

I spent most of last year working on my Solo Ads business, so here is my case study on it.  The Solo Ad industry started out strong, unfortunately not so much these days. But I’ll get to that in a minute… Let me start at the beginning.

I first decided to add Solo Ads to my business early last year. I came across a blog by a UK marketer who shall remain nameless as he has ended up burning many of his customers. Not delivering on promises, taking money and not providing his goods/services, etc etc. He turned out to be the stereotypical bad internet marketer, looking for a quick payday and burning many people to get it… But again I digress…

His blog was informative, while I had bought solo ads in the past I didn’t really want to invest my time in selling them myself. His blog convinced me otherwise. Not only could I easily build a new email list while moving traffic through my funnels, but I could also easily automate the income stream from Solo Ads once I hit a certain point. Automated income? Yeah that’s for me lol.

So let me break down the Solo ad business model:

1. Setup a simple funnel giving away something valuable in return for the visitor joining my list by subscribing. Also included in this funnel would be an upsell of one of my products and a downsell of one of my products.
2. Purchase solo ad “clicks” from the many Facebook groups of forums and send them through my funnel.
3. Build an email list from these subs and then sell my own solo ads at $0.30 a “click” which is just the person clicking on the link to the solo ad purchases blog/product/funnel.
4. Continue buying solo ads to build my list while selling solo ads myself. You can also trade clicks with other solo ad sellers once your list is capable.
5. Keep my list fresh from buying/trading solo ads from as large variety of sellers.
6. Rinse/repeat/profit.

So this is a very basic break down of the business model, keeping it short and simple. There are a number of things that are really needed if you want to get into the solo ad business:

• Your own tracking solution. The freebie services out there can be used but I wouldn’t recommend it.
• Your own domain and a quality theme for it. I personally use optimizepress.
• An autoresponder – this is essential and absolutely necessary. A side note: prices vary widely, and each service has their own rules (some don’t like affiliate or internet marketers and look for any reason to ban so watch yourself) I use aweber.
• A solo ad click counter, I use quality click control, it works perfectly.

Now basically when it comes to Solo Ad sellers your opt in rate could vary from 0%-60% all depending on the quality of the traffic the seller is sending you, your offer, and your sales letter. So look for good sellers with reviews/references, and test your copy!! Split test, split test, split test! One of my funnels was able to average a 30% opt in, with a .5% sales rate on my upsell and about 2% on my downsell. The numbers on my freebie opt in are okay, not the best but okay. And the sales figures again aren’t the best but since the goal is to build my list quickly, getting any sales at all is nice. Helps pay for the overhead. Aweber has a monthly cost…

 So here is a quick solo ad potential profit chart:

This was something I found years ago. It doesn’t by any means summarize the business ups/downs, or overhead but it is a good showing point of the possibilities.  It is also using below average stats, so your results can be much better (or worse!)

My results with a list of 8458 subscribers is not quite on par with this. On a good month I can bring in between $1900 – $2600 on solo ads alone, not counting the upsell/downsell. There are many variables, including but not limited to the day of the week and time of day I send my email blast, the quality of the swipe email my buyer wants me to send to my list (more often than not I tweak it a bit to work better with my list, you will quickly learn what they like and don’t) and another frustrating thing that anyone who has done email marketing let alone selling solo ads can tell you, the bigger your list the fewer opens/reads you’ll get. Don’t know why, that’s just the way it is.

So overall do I see solo ads as a viable business? Maybe. It brings in a sizable amount of fluid cash that I can use for other aspects of my business. But I don’t think it’s sustainable.

I have found a way to increase the profitability of my solo ad business by 300% but I won’t be sharing that just yet…

For now I’ll say that if you already have an auto responder, some spare domains, and can get your hands on quality click control, it’s worth a try.

But this will bring me back to the opening of this post. Bad people. With solo ads the only thing protecting you as a buyer/seller is paypal. Be careful with who you choose to do business with. It is easy for people to take your payment for clicks and not deliver. Or deliver shit clicks from 3rd world countries or even bots. There is software out there and some tracking software can see where the clicks are coming from, so you should be able to see if you’re being scammed. Look for a reputable seller, someone well known.

Talk Soon.