12-Minute Affiliate
  • Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • DKSP EP13: Solo Ads Buying Strategies – How to Build Your Email List for FREE!

DKSP EP13: Solo Ads Buying Strategies – How to Build Your Email List for FREE!

August 13, 2015

minutes read

solo ads strategies

Hello and welcome to episode 13 of the DKSPeaks Podcast. IN todays episode we are going to discuss about SOLO ads – how to generate traffic with solo ads and what is the key to success with SOLO ads.

SOLO ads is one of the best forms of driving traffic to your websites, to your blogs and to your offers. While there is a lot of debate on whether SOLO ads is a good source of traffic, it is important that you understand that solo ads is a guaranteed form of traffic just like any other paid traffic source.

There are a lot of advertising options like PPC, banner ads to drive traffic to your offers and to your websites. The same set of risk that you run with running any of these paid ads is what you will run with SOLO ads. But the only difference is that with solo ads it is easier to build a list. While you have no guarantee as to what is the amount of clicks that you will get for a set amount that you will be spending with most of these ads till the time you don’t go about refining it, analyzing it and setting it up the right way, solo ads stand to be a traffic source that is guaranteed to get you traffic, and to get you clicks and to get you optins.

I had sold solo ads a lot until about a year and a half back after which I decided that I will only be promoting offers to my list, but during that one year as a solo ad seller, I witnessed a lot of scams. A lot of people who were scamming people by taking the money and not sending them the clicks and I also saw a lot of people sending junk traffic for amount that you pay but in all of this something that you need to keep in mind is that if you do your due diligence, do the analysis that is required, evaluate each of these solo sellers, go by the review that people post on most of these forums and Facebook groups, then you cannot go wrong.

Buy from people who have credibility in the solo market, buy from people who have sold good quality solo ads, and you will not get scammed and you will not get crappy traffic for the amount that you spend. And considering the fact that you can get 100 clicks solo ads for just about $40, it is probably one of the cheapest traffic form of traffic that you can generate instantly to any of your offers. There are a lot of people who sell solo ads for about $30 per 100 clicks or, $35 per 100 clicks, I am not saying that these are not quality clicks.

But you need to spend your time to go and evaluate what is the quality of clicks that these people send you. SO spend some time evaluating the sellers, reading through the review, and doing your due diligence and I am sure you will get a lot of good quality solo sellers who can send instant traffic to your offer and to your squeeze pages.

Okay, so how to go about getting people to click on your ads and how to go about building your optin list using solo ads

In this episode we are going to discuss about a few simple little tricks you need to keep in mind in order to get the best solo ads buys that you do in order to drive traffic.

Solo Ads Buying Strategies

What we are going to discuss about first is how to go about buying solo ads and ensuring that you get the best ROI.

Okay so the first pre-requisite for an offer to be run through a solo ad is that you need a high converting or a good quality squeeze page. Now you know that with a squeeze page, you need to put forward an offer where people will have to enter their email address to get this freebie or, get this free offer. So it is important that the freebie that you are going to give in return for somebody adding their email address to the optin box has to be good quality. That offer need to entice your visitor to drop their email into the squeeze page optin box. How do you build such a product?

It is pretty easy because of you are not a product creator, there are a lot of good quality PLR product that have a lot of good quality information in them. And most of these products usually sell for about $37-$39 and if you are able to get hold of one such PLR product, then redo the entire thing. Maybe if you are buying a good quality PLR eBook then what you can do is convert that PLR eBook into a set of maybe 5 or 6 odd videos. And whatever is the strategies that are being discussed in the PLR eBook, convert that into a video… do a walkthrough video, show how it is done and you can create maybe about 6-7 videos and make it a set and offer that as a freebie to the people who optin to your squeeze page.

The best method is to go and get a good quality PLR product and then convert it into a different form, maybe if it’s an eBook, then into a video and vice versa and you can do any of these different forms of media and you can offer that as a freebie for people opting into your squeeze page.

So that is on the product that you get. While you are building a good quality product it is also important that your build a good quality squeeze page. Now the design of the squeeze page matters a lot but at the same time keep in mind that you need not put a lot of text or, information on your squeeze pages because that is not required.

After you buy a solo ad, what you are essentially doing is that you are asking the solo seller to send out an email to his list promoting the freebie that you are going to offer to your visitor.

Keep in mind that you need to give your own, self-written email to the solo seller and ask him to send it to his list instead of using his own generic email because in that way what you can do is you can write an email that talks to your squeeze page. Don’t let the solo seller use his own email. His generic email will not convert as well as your email will do. Which means that your optin rates will be extremely low, somewhere round about 30-35%. But if you want to improve your optin rates then the best way to do it is by writing your own emails.

Keep in mind that when you are writing your email, write a very short email. People are bugged with a lot of emails that they get every day and they don’t have the time to read through long emails and then click on the links in it. Basically what people do is when they receive an email, they open it and read through the first few lines and if these are not enticing enough to keep them glued to the email and push them to read the full email, they will just browse away and close the email and then move forward. So it is better that you write your emails and ensure that you are writing a short email. The email shouldn’t be longer than about 4-5 odd lines. Also keep in mind that your email body should talk to the subject line of the email.

Something that I have noticed gives me good conversions is the use of a simple subject line. Maybe a question about a problem that you think that the visitors have is enough, like “Worried about traffic?” And then the email body can talk about how your offer is going to help them in solving their traffic problems, in maybe about 2-3 off lines. In these lines, add the link that you want them to click on. Because the email is short and the email body is in continuation with the subject line, the possibility of people clicking on emails increases. That way you will get better click through rates.

While click through rates are not important when you are buying a solo ad because you are buying a solo ad for an x number of clicks and the seller is bound to deliver those many clicks to you. So if he has promised 100 clicks, he will deliver 100 clicks to you. So the click through rate is not too important for you as a solo buyer. But when people click on those links and come to your squeeze page you want the most number of people to optin to your offer.

The second part that you need to do is keep your squeeze page extremely simple.

Squeeze page tips for Better Optins

Use a good and nice little background that talks to the offer you are promoting. Use a very simple squeeze page, if possible use a double optin squeeze page where there will be a button which when clicked opens another popup for people to enter their email address. Don’t use a complicated one which once again talks about the entire offer, there are bullet points, there are lots of text etc. Don’t use them.

You need to relate this squeeze page to the email that you send to the list. So if you are talking about traffic problems in your email, your squeeze page has to talk to it. Ensure that the headlines of your squeeze page talks about the traffic problems and how this product is going to solve the problem for your visitor. That way your conversion rates improves a lot.

So once you have setup your squeeze page, it is here that your actual strategy starts because if your objective is only to get optins, what will happen is when you buy 100 clicks, you will get 100 visitors coming to your page and you will get about 40 optins, the rest 60 will just go off. Which means that you will only get about 40 subscriber for the $40 that you have spent.

But the objective of buying solo ads is not that. Instead the objective is to recoup the money that you have spent in buying the solo ads and at the same time also build your list using these solo ads.

And in order for that to happen there are a couple of things that you need to keep in mind.

First – Once you have setup your squeeze page, also add an exit pop up to your squeeze page because whenever somebody clicks out of the squeeze page and wants to move forward, present them with a second offer so that people don’t just go without giving your their email address.

From my experience, I have seen that your first squeeze page will give you about 35% optins and the exit popup will give you about 15% optins, thereby giving you a total of about 50% optins from your solo buys if you are using a good exit popups. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t overdo it. Just add one exit popup offer for people who are clicking away from your squeeze page.

Second – you need to build a good and high converting funnel. What is a funnel? A funnel can comprise of a lot of offers. The first one can be a free offer that you are giving away to your visitors in return for their email address. Once they have entered their email address, they are taken to a second offer where they are presented with a low-ticket item priced at around $9 – $10. What you are trying to do with this is, to filter the buyers from the freebie seekers. The people who buy this product are ones who are okay to pull their credit cards out to buy something. These are your prospective buyers. Because this first product is a low ticket item the possibility of people buying this is more.

Here there are 2 possibilities. If people buy this offer, you take them to a slightly higher priced offer, maybe something priced at around $29.00. But for people who are not buying the low ticket item, you redirect them to a down sell where you will be offering the same product but at a slightly lower price, maybe about $4.99. This will still get you a few buyers. Once they have bought the product you can then redirect them again to a slightly high priced offer and so on. What happens in a funnel is that you can filter each of the person who opted into your squeeze page by passing them through a funnel and thereby identify the ones who could be prospective buyers, who have the capacity to buy at different levels and put them into a different segments so that you can promote the relevant offers to them.

If you have the right funnel in place, then you are guaranteed to recoup the amount that you spend in buying the solo, immediately and in some cases even make a few dollars as profit.

The ideal way to build your funnel will be to present related offers as upsells and down sells. So if it is a traffic eBook that you offered as a freebie, the first paid offer can be a video course that teaches about some traffic sources that are free and the second offer can be a detailed traffic training course where you teach advanced strategies to generate traffic. Build you funnel in such a way that each offer talks to the other and there is continuity in what you are offering.

You can use good PLR products as upsells and down sells in your funnel.

Spend some time planning your funnel. Don’t hurry into setting up your squeeze page and buying solo ads. Buy SOLOs only after you have setup your entire funnel.

Once you funnel is ready you can buy about 50 clicks and test the funnel to see how it converts. Once you are satisfied with it, go ahead and buy some more clicks maybe about 200-300 clicks and test the funnel again. Keep tweaking every element in the funnel based on you analytics and results. One important aspect of this process is that you keep evaluating the funnel.

Solo ads are a good source of traffic. In fact instant traffic which you can use to build your email list. And at the same time of you have a good funnel, you will pretty much be building your email list for free. You can also make money of you plugin affiliate offers into your funnels as well.

If you have a good autoresponder sequence you can also make money with every one of those emails that you send to your list including the broadcasts.

A lot of people say that SOLO ads build a list of freebie seekers and that they do not buy anything. That is a myth. The subscribers on the list of the solo seller is just like any other subscriber. And if presented with a good offer, they will also become a buyer.

Most of the solo sellers also maintain a different list of all the buyers and they usually include these buyers list when they send out your solo ads.

When you buy solo ads, ensure that you are asking your sellers these 3 questions:

1). Will they be sending your solo ads to their buyer’s list as well?

2). what is the % of Tier-1 subscriber on their list? Tier subscribers are people who are from the Tier-1 countries. About 70-75% is a good enough mix.

3). How long will it take to deliver the clicks? About 24-48 hours should be a good time. Anything more than that is not recommended.

4). Where can I read some of the reviews and testimonials? Read through these to know the credibility of the seller and to know the average optins that you can expect from running a solo ad with this seller.

If you are in doubt about finding a good solo ad seller, then you can check out my solo brokering service. I have my list of reliable and credible solo sellers from whom I buy solo ads regularly. I can buy good quality solo ads for you from them.

You can contact me using the contact button on this page with the subject line mentioning – “Solo Ad Buys”.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Squeeze page builders –

PLR Products –

Thank you for Joining

So that’s it on todays show. Thank you all for joining and I hope you liked this episode. If you really did, then do rate us here to help the ranking of the show. Do give us a genuine feedback so that we can produce better episodes in the future.

Let me know your thoughts, suggestions and questions by commenting below. You can share it with your social media circles by using one of the many share buttons below.

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the below links:

Click here to Subscribe via iTunes

Click here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes Feed)

Click here to Subscribe via Stitcher

Thank you for joining us. See you in the next episode.

About the author 

Dilip Kumar  -  

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members.
Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

My name is Dilip. I am a fan of the internet and love the many opportunities that the world wide web provides. If used constructively , the internet can give you an opportunity to lead a life free of the 9-5 treadmill and will be able to give more time to your family members. Read about internet entrepreneurship at my blog.

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}
>