Solo Ads Techniques

Solo Ads Techniques for Affiliate Marketers

By Ibrahim Dahy

Solo ads is a form of advertising in which someone who owns an emails list offers other marketers a chance to send out emails to his list.

Solo ads without a doubt are great source of traffic, leads and sales for any affiliate marketer.

Email marketing and affiliate marketing are closely related fields and mastering both of them is what differentiates a great affiliate marketer from an average one.

There are many benefits you can get by adding solo ads to your affiliate marketing plan; I am going to discuss the most important ones throughout this article.

Finding a Reliable Solo Ads Provider

Unfortunately many solo ads providers tarnish the image of this great advertising strategy but trying to employ unethical tricks either when they send out the emails or by faking the traffic all together.

Affiliate marketers then find themselves confused by why their affiliate product didn’t convert well and why they didn’t make any sales.

But the good news is that there are ways you can make sure that your solo ads provider is an honest one that can help your affiliate marketing efforts and not hinder your progress.

Method #1: Sign up to the mailing list of your solo ads provider, this way you can see how he is sending out your solo ad, and make sure he is not doing something fishy.
One thing to look out for when you open your solo ad email is to see if your solo ads provider is talking about something which is not relevant to the page you are promoting.

Because some unethical marketers will change the subject line of your solo ad and make it about something totally different than what your email copy says. This might generate high open rates for your email but after they read the email body they will not click your link because they were deceived by the irrelevant subject line.

Method #2: Contact the person selling you the solo ad and ask him about the niche of his list and how he built his list. And if possible, as him for his leads capture page to make sure he is following good email marketing practices.

Leads on niches other than yours hardly generate any click through rates, let alone making sales from them.

Also ask him if they will change your email message and if he will, then ask him to what extent. If you didn’t get a reasonable and convincing response then you should consider taking your business elsewhere.

You need to be very comfortable with your solo ads provider, because your affiliate marketing solo ads campaign might just depend on it.

Test your Squeeze Page

Not only does solo ads helps you generate sales to your affiliate offers, it can also be used to test the performance of your pages

For example, say you just finished your squeeze page and did your best with the design and copywriting and you are thinking of investing a huge effort and perhaps money on promoting it on Google or PPC ads.

Now instead of pouring money and effort in your advertising plan, you buy solo ads and direct the traffic to your squeeze page. You can then see how well your opt-in rates are and if they are not satisfactory enough you then edit your page and re-run another solo ads campaign until you get it right.

Squeeze page is not the only thing you can test with solo ads, you could also test the niche itself and how they respond to your affiliate product.

This is effective for products in the weight loss niche for example, because there are many segments in it (i.e. fat loss, diets, training). And being able to tell how well the niche responds to your affiliate product is very important in projecting your affiliate sales amount.

To be able to test the niche, create your affiliate product review page and then contact the solo ads providers with lists relevant to your niche and then send your solo ad.

Don’t buy a big plan at first; a 100 clicks plan is great for testing.

Track Your Solo Ad Campaign

When you launch your solo ad campaign you need to be able to track it so you can improve it and fix anything you find wrong. And here are some of the things you need to track:

• Click-through rate
• Open rate
• Affiliate Sales

Some solo ads providers will provide you with a tracking system that show you the amount of clicks you received (i.e. click-through rate) along with the IP address of each click to ensure that they are not generated by 1 person or by bots.

Beside the clicks you also need to track the open rates of your solo ad. This is important because if your email subject line is not well written, it can affect your email click through rate and your affiliate sales altogether.

The marketer you are buying the solo ad from should be able to provide you with the open rate data. But you have to ask him for that since it is not information that is usually given out without asking.

Finally, you need to keep an eye on the amount of sales you generate after you do the solo ad. If you didn’t make any sales after running a solo ad campaign then you need to change the solo ad provider and also change your affiliate review page.

This way you can do another test with all variables changed. Always keep testing various product review pages until you reach a satisfactory sales conversion rates.

Affiliate marketing traffic sources are so many, and it will be hard to try them all at once. But I recommend that you give solo ads a shot, but don’t start with it if you are not familiar with list building and email marketing first.

A good affiliate marketing training (check this one) can teach you the basics of email marketing, and after you feel comfortable with sending emails and building relationship with your subscribers you can then move on and try solo ads on your affiliate product.