The Complete And Uncensored Truth About Solo-Ads

Selling Solo-Ads

Making money by selling Solo-ads, that is by sending out emails to your own list which contain links to the offers of third parties, sounds as if it should be easy and profitable, but, in fact, it is difficult, time consuming and hardly worth the effort. There are people who are very good at it and who do make a handsome living from it, but it’s not for me. That doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t give it a go, if you feel inclined to. Perhaps you are one of the few that take to it naturally. But before you do, here are some of the things that you will have to consider before you start:

• Required List Size. I would not recommend that anybody tries to start selling until they have a list, in a single niche of at least 3,000, which is an absolute minimum. It has become the norm that most buyers expect a batch of 100 clicks to be delivered in 48 hours maximum, so make sure you are able to do that on a regular basis.
• Maintaining Your List Size. It is an unfortunate fact of Solo-ad vendors’ lives that almost every time they send out an email, they will get some “unsubscribes” when a few of their subscribers will click the “unsubscribe” link which must, by law, be displayed somewhere in the email. Usually at the bottom. Therefore to keep their list numbers up to an acceptable level, or, hopefully to see it slowly grow, every seller must be constantly replenishing his list, ether by buying more clicks, which, of course eats into any profit made, or by click banking or click swapping. (See last 2 sections). The most common choice is click banking but with that comes a dilemma, which will be explained in the next section.
• Who Writes The Email? The Vendor Or The Buyer. Obviously, if you are the vendor, it saves you a lot of time and effort if the buyer writes his or her own email to contain his or her links for you to send to your list. Most vendors ask for the buyers to compose the email, with the proviso that it can be amended at the whim of the seller. Unfortunately, most seller’s draft emails are enticing as a wild grizzly bear at a picnic, and, if the 100 clicks in 48 hours “rule” has to be adhered to, the email will have to be re-written in any case. Hopefully the squeeze page is acceptable, but, on more than one occasion, during my short selling career, I have had to ask the seller to replace it. On one occasion, I was given a picture of a full-frontal naked lady, legs apart, holding a board which read something like, “Would you like to be able to afford me every night”. That was one potential customer who got a refund in a hurry.
• How Is The Transaction Set Up And How Does The Seller Get Paid? The normal way arrange a transaction, and agree on all of the details is by Facebook Private Messages. Some people use The Skype written message board, but Facebook is the more common method. The usual way to receive and make payments in the Solo-ads industry is to transfer money directly from the buyer’s Paypal account to the seller’s Paypal account using the seller’s Paypal email address. Using this method the seller is charged a small fee, but it is free for the buyer. This transaction is done BEFORE the seller starts to send out the emails.
• How Does A Seller Get Started With No Testimonials. At the start of a selling career, you have to sell as cheaply as possible, $30 per 100 clicks maximum. But make sure that you advert spells out the fact that you are a newbie and expect a testimonial in return. Make sure you over-deliver by at least 20% and give at least 80% T1. There are many Facebook groups designated entirely to the giving and receiving of testimonials. There are several of them in the downloadable Excel spreadsheet with the link above. Take screenshots of all testimonials received, even after your initial reduced price campaign, (or at least the good ones) so you can easily show them to all of your prospective clients in the future.
• As a seller, what tracker should I use?. As much as I hate the product, and think it should be banned for misrepresentation, it grieves me to have to say that, at the moment, I can’t see how anybody could operate as a seller without using Click Magick, not withstanding that, without realizing it he or she is probably sending out almost double the clicks than they need to. If the seller used any other tracker, they would be constantly arguing with buyers who did use Click Magick about the number of clicks sent and the whole thing would become a nightmare. The advent of Click Magick was the main reason that I gave up selling Solo-ads to pursue more lucrative ways of making money on the internet.

Click Banking

Click Banking, which is two words, unlike the affiliate web-site, www.clickbanking.com, is a free system of increasing the size of your list, while maintaining the possibility of achieving some affiliate commissions along the way. Like with selling, it is recommended that to start click banking you should have a list of around 3,000 subscribers, though, because there is less time restraint it may be possible to start with a little less than 3,000. Click banking operators simply swap clicks with each other. One party goes first, and delivers a set amount of clicks with a specified minimum T1 percentage, to his or her list using the link given to him or her by the second party. This link would lead to the second party’s squeeze page, where, hopefully, the first party’s subscriber will opt-in to the second party’s list as well, and then, maybe go on to invest in whatever product the second party is promoting. After the agreed number of clicks have been delivered, the two parties change rolls and the second party sends out emails to his or her list containing a link to the first party’s squeeze page. When the two “sends” have been completed to their joint satisfaction, bearing in mind that the two results will rarely, if ever, be exactly the same, the parties will either go their separate ways, usually still on speaking terms, or will start another round as partners together. The following points are pertinent to how click banking works in practice:

• The Setting Up Of The Agreement. As in buying and selling (see above) the initial contact between two potential partners is usually made via one of the Facebook groups set out in the Excel spreadsheet, which there is a link to above. The subsequent details of the contract are then discussed and, hopefully, finally agreed through Facebook Personal Messages. The most important of the many details that have to be ironed out before a contract can proceed is, which party is to send first. The party that sends first is the one that takes all the risks, as he or she is dependent on the second party to reciprocate after the first batch of clicks has been completed. It is therefore common practice for the first party to demand to see some testimonials from the party delivering second, before the contract starts.
• The Use Of Click Trackers. Because there is no money involved, the necessity of using Click Magick is not so great when banking as it is when selling. As most of you will have realized by now, i would never contaminate my hard drive by installing Click Magick and when I was click banking I always insisted in going first when my partner was a CM user, even although, as explained in the previous paragraph, it is the riskier of the two options. If my partner complained that, according to his Click Magick stats, he had received only 160 of the 210 clicks I had sent my reply would simply be, “I’m not arguing, just send me back 160 clicks and we’ll call it quits.” Frequently, at the end of his or her send, I would get a link to the CM stats, which showed me they had returned what CM thought was 160 clicks but, according to my tracker I actually received 180. It’s a strange bit of software alright.
• The Use Of Rotators. It is normal practice for click bankers to have more than one partner at the same time. This is done by the use of what are called “rotators”. Rotators used to be separate pieces of software but nowadays they are usually “rolled in” with click trackers in the same piece of software. Rotators can hold a limitless number of separate links, although I don’t think I ever had more than 6 in mine, but the rotator itself also has a unique link, which is the link that is placed in the email which is sent out to perform the click banking. All rotators can be set up in one of two ways, which can be changed at will. These are called “Series” (or something similar) and “Rotate” (or something similar). Some rotators have a third option, which is ‘Random”. With the system set to “series, everybody who clicks the link in an email will be directed to the first link in the rotator, unless he or she has clicked the link before on the same day. If this is the case, the clicker will operate the second link, and then the third etc. If the rotator is set to “rotate” then, everybody who clicks the link in the email will be taken to the destination of the link after the one that was most recently clicked by somebody else. Obviously, after the last link is activated, the next link to be activated will be the first link in the rotator. If the rotator is set to “random, anybody who clicks on a link will be taken to any one of the destinations of the links in the rotator. The usual setting is “rotate” which enables an operator to have more than one banking partner at a time. maximizing his click through rate while minimizing the difference between the number of “raw” clicks and the number of “unique” clicks. However, if the operator is also selling clicks and, because a sale has not reached its quota in two or three emails, and so he or she puts the link to the offer for sale into a rotator, it should go at the top and the rotator’s function should be changed to “series”.
• Generic Emails. By far the most difficult part about click banking is the question “what the heck do I write in the email”? Every email must be interesting and appealing but you are trying to sell half a dozen products at once, you’ve probably got no idea what they are, and, even worse you’ve no idea which of the products the reader will be directed to, after they click on a link. There is also the autoresponer’s view of the headers you use and the wording in the body of the emails which needs to be taken into account. You don’t want to lose your list by botching up a few bad emails that you write in your first attempt at click banking. Over the years I have written 150 emails, each with 4 header lines, which seem to work fairly well, and which Aweber has never had any complaints with. They are all in the “make money online” niche, and when I was creating them I kept 4 words uppermost in my mind. They were, “Cheap”, “Easy”, “Profits”, “Quickly”.

• Click Swapping

  Click swapping is very similar to click banking, with two major differences. Firstly, in click swapping, both partners send out the agreed quota of clicks simultaneously, instead of one after the other, and secondly the expected time frame is much quicker when click swapping than it is when click banking. With click swapping, partners are expected to provide 100 clicks in 24 hours. With click banking, 100 clicks in a week is usually acceptable. I can see no reason for the great haste, as you should be hoping, once they are “warmed up”, to keep all subscribers obtained for a lifetime. So what do a few extra hours, days, or even a week matter in the whole scheme of things? People are beginning to realize this and, together with the recent noticeable decline in the delivery rates of the major autoresponers the popularity of click swapping has reduced remarkably in favor of click banking.

Conclusion

Below, I have set out a summary of the good and bad points of Solo-ads, both for the operators and the users. These points are in no particular order and I will type them down in the order they enter my befuddled head.

• Solo-ads are a cheap source of paid, targeted traffic. $1 per subscriber, (not click) should be possible.
• After a list of around 2,500 to 3,000 subscribers have been collected, the use of click banking can be utilized to continue to grow the list for free, although the writing of the necessary generic emails can be difficult and time consuming.
• After the 3,000 mark has been passed list holders could branch into selling, but this too, is difficult, time consuming, and highly competitive.
• Solo-ad traffic is very cod traffic which has been bombarded with offer, after offer, after offer, together with many many enticements to join many many lists. If you are a buyer of Solo-ads or use click banking or click swapping to attract subscribers you have to be very good at “warming up” your subscribers so that you stand out from the many other lists that every one of your subscribers will be a member of.
• Solo-ad traffic is not noted for its loyalty. They often join, grab whatever “freebies” you may be offering and then unsubscribe, before you have had a chance to “warm them up”.
• Subscribers from Solo-d traffic are noy known to be big buyers. A few may buy your front-end product, but few, if any, will buy any up-sells you may have, never mind the high-end products at the sharp end of your funnel

For these reasons, among others, I have decided to switch my primary source of traffic to my iPro based business, away from click banked Solo-ads to other methods of traffic generation.

Please comment, share, and ask any questions you may have regarding the Solo-ad industry below.