Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Solo ads are in my opinion, the second best way to build a list and drive traffic to your offers.
What Are Solo Ads?
Solo ads are effectively paid endorsements from other email marketers. Solos are emails promoting your list from other lists. Not the best explanation, I know… A solo ad is effectively when you pay another marketer a fixed sum to send an email to his/her list.
The email the list owner sends generally promotes your own list. You can use solo ads to directly drive traffic to your sales pages, but very few solo ad vendors allow it. The normal rule is: you’re only allowed to promote a free download/product via a capture page.
You give away a high quality freebie and in return capture subscribers. So evidently you need the basic list building setup: an autoresponder, a freebie and a capture page.
Most marketers never use solo ads to their full capacity. If you’re not making money from your solo ads, you’re doing something wrong. As I mentioned, they’re effectively a list building strategy.
When it comes to list building, the traditional school of thought is “don’t worry about making initial ROI on your new subscribers, because the money is IN the list – don’t worry about selling right away”. In reality, a big percentage of subscribers who buy sometime in their lifespan on your list, will probably buy right away.
This means the people who eventually buy via your follow-up emails, will most likely buy right after joining your list. So you may as well monetize them instantly and recoup the investment you spent on marketing. Email marketers advise not instantly monetizing subscribers because it puts people off.
I’ve found the opposite. If you wait till day 7 or 10 to pitch something, people will buy and it’ll be a “warmer” purchase, however you would have lost a lot of the subscribers who would have bought on day one. That’s just the way it is. If you want to make the most amount of money in the shortest duration of time; monetize instantly.
I take a three step approach to solo ads, solo ads that actually generate positive ROI right away.
Step 1: Setup Your Lead Gen/Sales System
First you need to build your lead generation/sales system. To begin with decide what kind of list you want to build. For example let’s use the Network Marketing niche. I want to hypothetically build a list of subscribers to pitch my opportunity to.
Solo ads get subscribers on your list, but they can’t always directly sell your core product/opportunity. The best way to pitch your core product/opportunity is via follow up emails. This is the basic solo ad system:
Written Email Promoting Capture Page ===> Solo Ad
Solo Ad ===> Capture Page
Capture Page ===> One Time Offer
Follow Up Series ===> Core Offer
In order to send a solo ad, you need to provide a solo ad vendor (person with an email list offering to promote your list) with an email. Generally vendors want you to write the email they send their list. Some vendors will write the emails themselves. However the first step is to write a promo email endorsing and promoting your capture page and its free offer.
Write the email as if you are the solo ad vendor.
Next you need a capture page with a high quality free offer. Next you need to setup your one time offer. After someone joins your list, you have an opportunity to get instant return on investment. This works especially well with solo ads.
After someone joins your list, you can redirect them to a “special” one time offer. The one time offer can be any product that is relevant to the free offer that made the subscriber opt-in to your list. For example, you might give away a free list building plugin via the capture page. After people opt-in for the free plugin, you could hit them with a one time offer offering a premium version of the plugin with more features.
One time offers are very self explanatory, the majority of readers will know exactly what I’m talking about. Ideally your OTO should be closely related to your main opportunity/product you want to sell down the line. Although its fundamental role is to recoup some of the money you invested in each solo ad if not produce a profit.
That’s the basic setup of a solo ad lead gen/sales system. One tip: add tracking to all your pages (Google analytics or get clicky).
Step 2: Find Mailing Lists
Step two is finding mailing lists. Finding people with lists who will accept money for a solo. In some niches there are existing lists of solo ad vendors. In the IM niche you have Solo Ad Directory, for other niches use List Finder, a free online tool.
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There are various other ways of finding mailing lists. The most obvious is to search for blogs and websites in your niche that are actively building an email list. Contact them and propose a solo ad. Again the process is self explanatory.
Offer them a cash sum in return for a mailing to their list (The general price guideline is between 30 cents and 1 dollar/click). Last option: contact product owners in your niche.
Step 3: Buy Solos And Follow-up
Set aside some cash each week to invest in solo ads. If you do all of the above correctly; you should start seeing a burst in subscribers and sales. Ultimately you need to create a follow up email series promoting your core offer. Your core offer could be a Network Marketing company, an info product, software, a service, anything with a premium price.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
Comments
Sarah Thompson, July 30 2024, 21:20
Thank you for sharing this comprehensive guide, David. The strategies are practical and easy to follow. I’ve been struggling to build a strong email list, and your detailed breakdown provides a clear roadmap. I especially appreciate the sections on setting up the lead generation system and finding mailing lists. Keep up the great work!
Michael Lee, July 30 2024, 21:25
Great tips, David! I appreciate the detailed breakdown of each strategy. It’s refreshing to see actionable steps that can be implemented immediately. The part about finding solo ad vendors is particularly interesting; I hadn’t considered that method before. I’m looking forward to trying these strategies out and seeing how they impact my list building efforts. Thanks for the valuable insights!
Emily Richards, July 30 2024, 21:30
Could you provide more examples of successful solo ad funnels you’ve used? Your insights are always so practical, and seeing specific examples would be incredibly helpful. I’ve tried a few of these strategies before with mixed results, so I’m curious about what has worked best for you. Thanks for another great post!
John Peterson, July 30 2024, 21:35
This post is very informative, David. However, I’d like to hear more about the potential challenges and how to overcome them. For example, what are some common pitfalls with solo ads, and how can they be avoided? Also, how do you ensure the quality of the solo ads you get from these methods? Your advice would be greatly appreciated.
Daniel Kim, July 30 2024, 21:40
Hey David, great insights as always. Let’s catch up soon and discuss these strategies over coffee. I find the idea of using solo ads particularly intriguing. It seems like a smart way to have more control over list building efforts. Looking forward to hearing more about your experiences with this approach. Cheers!
Laura Martinez, July 30 2024, 21:45
I’ve had success with some of these strategies in the past, especially using solo ads to build my list. Your tips are spot on and very helpful. One thing I’ve found effective is targeting specific niches for these solo ads. They often have highly engaged audiences. Thanks for sharing these insights; I’m excited to implement more of them!
Mark Johnson, July 30 2024, 21:50
I recently started implementing some of these strategies, and I’ve already seen positive results. The method of using solo ads has been particularly effective for me, bringing in a steady stream of new leads. Your advice on finding and negotiating with solo ad vendors was very helpful. Thank you for the valuable insights, David!
Rebecca Lee, July 30 2024, 21:55
I’m still skeptical about the effectiveness of some of these strategies, especially the use of solo ads. Do you have any case studies or concrete evidence to back up these claims? It would be helpful to see some real-world examples of these methods in action. Your posts are always thought-provoking, and I appreciate the effort you put into them.
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Redrawn as a flow: Written Email to Solo Ad, Solo Ad to Capture Page, Capture Page to OTO, Follow-up to Core Offer. Five handoffs, and the post gives a price range for exactly one of them, the click cost. No failure rate is given for any other stage: capture rate, OTO take rate, unsubscribe rate at pitch. A funnel with five stages and one known variable isn’t a system yet, it’s a hypothesis with a price tag on the first step.
Monetize instantly, he says, because it’s the warmer sale. Convenient, since that’s also the fastest way to sell someone something.
I think what’s being missed in some of these replies is that Tomas’s flowchart point and the post’s actual advice aren’t in conflict. David does say to add tracking to every page precisely so you can find which stage is leaking. Walt’s caution about cold OTOs is fair too, and worth taking seriously. But the core claim, that people who eventually buy usually buy early, is stated as his own tested observation, not a universal law, and read that way it holds up fine.
David inverts a common claim about when subscribers buy, but inversion isn’t data. What’s the actual week-one versus month-three split?
Sorry if this is a silly question but I don’t actually have anything to sell yet, I’m still building my capture page, so is a solo ad even something I should be looking at now or is this a later-stage thing? The post kind of assumes the whole funnel already exists before step one starts.
One reframe I’d offer: treat the OTO timing decision like an A/B test, not a philosophy. Run the instant pitch to half your new subscribers for two weeks and the day-7 pitch to the other half, then compare total revenue per hundred subscribers over sixty days, not just day-one conversions. What would you actually be measuring if you ran that split yourself?
The strongest case against instant monetization, which the post dismisses in a single line, is that a cold subscriber who just opted in for a free plugin has given you zero buying signal yet. Hitting them with a one-time offer before they’ve read a single follow-up email tests price sensitivity, not genuine interest, and the two look identical in a conversion report even though they aren’t the same thing. The ‘traditional school’ he’s arguing against exists for a reason: plenty of list owners found that early pitches quietly suppress trust and engagement for the whole sequence that follows, not just the first sale, which never shows up if you’re only measuring day-one revenue. I’m not saying he’s wrong about his own list. I’m saying the post presents its position as settled and the opposing one as merely timid, and that’s a rhetorical move, not an argument.
A three-step lead gen system, a solo ad vendor to find, a follow-up sequence to write, and a one-time offer to build, before a single subscriber has landed. That’s not a weekend project. That’s most of a month of evenings for someone who only has the evenings.