Solo Ads For Affiliate Marketing – A Home Run Or Just Another Way To Lose Your Shirt?

Today we’re going to take a look on how to use solo ads for affiliate marketing, and more specificly if they are a viable option to build your list.

If you’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for a while you’ve probably heard it a million times before – the money is in the list. The bigger your list the more money you can make with less effort.

But that statement is only partially true. Having a big list is essential, but if your big list is not buying anything then it’s pretty much worthless.

The size of your list doesn’t matter, what really matters is that you have people on your list who are willing to whip out their credit cards. But how do you build a list?

Well essentially, you only need a simple opt-in funnel, a paid offer and traffic…lots of traffic.

And this is where most new marketers get stuck. They are completely clueless when it comes to driving traffic. But here’s the thing, driving traffic is NOT rocket science.

There’s only 2 ways to do it – free organic traffic or paid traffic.

Whichever way you choose to go, they both work very well but they are very different in nature.

While paid traffic can get you results fast…It can take ages to get just a trickle of traffic if you go the free route.

Another form of paid traffic that is hugely popular is solo ad traffic.

A solo ad is literally an email marketing advertisement where you use someone else’s email list to promote your own (affiliate) offer.

Because your email is the only promotion that will be sent to that email list, it is known as a solo ad.

The process is pretty straightforward – you prepare an email that will be sent to the solo ad vendor’s list, and you pay him to deliver it.

Some solo ad sellers may even write the email ad on your behalf to get the highest conversions.

If they offer this service and you’re planning to buy clicks, I’d say let them write the ad because they know what gets people to click.

You can buy anything from 100 to probably 10 000 clicks if you want, and you’d pay around $0.40 up to $1.00 per click.

Although it is quite expensive, it is probably the fastest way to send traffic to your offers…

>> Click Here To Find One Of The Best Courses On Running Solo Ads

But are solo ads a reliable traffic source to build your email list?

Some marketers swear by them, while other marketers wouldn’t even touch them if you held them at gunpoint.

However, in this case the truth lays somewhere in the middle. Yes you can use solo ads to build a list and make money from that list.

But it is NOT going to work for everyone. When you want to build a list using solo ads you need an entirely different approach.

By that I mean, you most likely need another offer, your funnel structure needs to be different, and your follow up sequence needs to be more aggresive.

A Normal And Most Commonly Used Opt-In Funnel Would Look Something Like This

Well, this kind of funnel is NOT going to convert very well with people on email lists from solo ad vendors.

They will opt-in, but by the time they’ve landed on your bridge page they just think – Here’s another dude telling me how to make a thousand dollars for free. Yeah right, and they’ll just click away.

Now you might be thinking what does it matter, I have their email address and my email follow up sequence will do the trick. Well it won’t, unless you’re going to mail them up to 6 times per day.

Never forget, these people are on literally hundreds of lists and receive hundreds of emails per day. Your one email a day will be drowning in a sea of unopened emails.

To really get the most out of your solo ads you need to follow these rules

1.Your paid offer must scream Quick and Easy. The more hype on the sales page the better.

Plus your offer should have a low entry barrier, preferably around $12 or less, and a sales funnel with at least 3 up-sells which could potentially cover your ad spend.

2.Get rid of your freebie. These people have seen them all and they couldn’t give a rats arse about your freebie.

3.Ditch your bridge page. You don’t have to inform people that the freebie is on it’s way because you have none, and they have zero interest in another rags to riches story.

4.Send them straight from your squeeze page to your paid offer. And remember, the more hype the better.

5.Send them at least 4 to 6 SHORT hyped up emails a day. NO storytelling, NO let me show you how to do something…Just SHORT emails that SELLS them an offer.

6.Keep sending them emails until they buy your stuff, unsubscribe, or you get rid of them by removing unresponsive subscribers from your lists.

7.Rinse and repeat…CONSISTENTLY!

An Effective Opt-In Funnel To Use With Solo Ads MUST Look Something Like This

A list build with solo ads should really be treated as a churn and burn model and that’s why so many marketers dislike using solo ads.

They want to build trust and rapport with their subscribers by offering value first and then promote relevant offers along the way.

If you go for the know, like & trust model then solo ads are not for you. Unless you build an entirely separate list just for solo ads, which is exactly what I did – one list for solo ads and another one for all other traffic sources.

>> Click Here To Find One Of The Best Courses On Running Solo Ads

If You Want To Use Solo Ads Then I’ve Got Some Tips That You Should Consider Before Spending Any Money

1.Always buy your solo ads straight from the vendor’s website and not from market places such as Udimi.

While these are great places to do some research on the vendors, you should be aware that these market places have their own additional fees that must be paid.

The solo ad vendor will include those fees in his price per click, and therefore it’s way cheaper to buy the clicks directly from the solo ad vendors website.

Every vendor worth his salt will have a website of his own. If they can’t be bothered to set up a simple website I would be very wary of the quality of traffic they provide.

2.Always ask the vendor how he build his list. You want to buy clicks from a vendor who build his list either through organic traffic, Facebook ads, Google Ads, etc

Stay away from vendors who bought their lists from other solo ad vendors because you might end up paying for clicks that come from burned out lists.

Also ask if the list was built using double opt-ins? Did he use freebies to built the list? Are there real buyers on his list?

You really want to look for double opt-in lists that were created with sales funnels, and verify that they have successfully sold to that list in the past.

3.Always track your clicks. Sometimes solo ad vendors will do this for you, but this is a courtesy. You need to measure how many clicks you get to protect yourself from getting scammed.

Plus you definitely want to know which one of your pages converts the best.

You can do a Google search for popular tracking tools such as ClickMagick or ClickMeter.

4.And last but not least always split test your emails. Ask the solo ad seller if you can split test your emails.

You should use two different subject lines in one test and than use two different emails in another test. See which one converts better. Keep the winners and ditch the losers.

Alright then, I hope you enjoyed this little guide on how to use solo ads for affiliate marketing and grow your email list.

I’ll level with you, I don’t use solo ads quite as often as I used to, but when I do buy solo ads this is what I do and it always brings in awesome results.

Hopefully, when you put it into action, you’ll get equally awesome results too. The key factor is to change your mind-set when it comes to using solo ads…

And always remember that a list build purely with solo ads is a completely different animal than a list build with any other traffic source.

>> Click Here To Find One Of The Best Courses On Running Solo Ads

If you’ve got any questions, drop them in the comments section below and I’ll try my best to help you out.

The post How To Use Solo Ads For Affiliate Marketing appeared first on davechomkam.

Affiliate Marketing Using Paid Ads – Make Money With ShareASale And AdClercks

Lets face facts, free traffic is a long term strategy. It literally takes forever to get results, especially if you’re just starting out. So, in this post I want to share a simple but very effective strategy for affiliate marketing using paid ads.

So yes, this will require a small investment to execute, however if you watch your numbers closely and you understand the math, you can make a killing with this strategy. It might not be for everyone, but for the right person, this could really pay off.

But first, you need to understand a couple of terms. Internet marketing jargon, so to speak.

EPC = Earnings Per Click

Essentially, this is how much you will earn on average everytime someone clicks on your link.

IMPRESSIONS = How many times a webpage or element of a webpage is used.

This is basically when someone visits a webpage or a particular section of a webpage, it counts as an impression.

CLICKS = This is a marketing metric that counts the number of times users have clicked on a digital advertisement to reach an online property.

When someone clicks on your advertisement, link or banner, that counts as a click.

Alright…Now that you understand what those three terms basically mean…I want you to understand that you need to generate traffic in order to create impressions.

Got it? Good. Let’s get cracking.

Step 1 Create an account on AdClercks

If you visit a site called Adclerks, you will find a platform that specializes in advertising.

It has a large variety of websites in many different categories that you can advertise on for a small monthly fee.

The cool thing here is that each website that you can advertise on tells you how many impressions it gets per month and how much it will cost you to advertise on that website per month.

An example would be a site that gets 776k impressions a month and will cost $15 a month to have a banner ad on that site.

Now…that is your traffic mechanism.

Step 2 Create an account on Shareasale

Next I want you to head over to a site called Shareasale.

Shareasale is a platform like Clickbank or WarriorPlus where you can sell products as a vendor and promote products as an affiliate.

Go ahead and sign up for a free Shareasale account.

Next head over to the health category and find a good product to promote. You are looking for good EPC’s, high conversion rate, frequent sales, and decent commission rates.

Also, how long has the product been selling? The longer it’s been selling, combined with good numbers on those other things I mentioned means the more reliable and proven the product is.

Shareasale is going to show you this information. You just need to be able to know what you are looking at.

Once you find your offer, go ahead and scroll down to the button that says “Creative Preview” and you’ll be able to see the banner ads that you can use to sell this thing.

Step 3 Do the math

Once you get approved for the offer, it’s time to start getting the ads out there and making some money.

So head back over to Adsclerk and find a website to advertise on that makes sense for your offer.

Now the numbers matter here so listen up…

Let’s say you want to advertise on a website that will get you 542,000 impressions every month and for that you are going to pay $75/mo.

Let’s estimate that .01% of those impressions become clicks that will generate traffic for the product you are promoting.

Now that is very conservative and it’s the equivalent of around 54 people visiting that sales page of your product.

Now, let’s say your product has an EPC of $45.19. Well if you take those 54 people and you multiply it by the earnings per click you will get $2,440.26.

Next we need to subtract the amount that you spend on advertising, which is $75. That’s going to leave you with a total of: $2,365.26

So the numbers in this example make sense. Even if you cut the earnings in half, you still are looking at over a thousand dollars a month in profit.

The truly unknown variable here is how many impressions will become clicks.

We estimated our example at .01% but we see that if it was even half of that we would still make over a thousand dollars a month on an offer with around $45 EPC’s and a $75 a month ad spend.

Okay, so let’s run down the steps on this one:

1) You can find great products to promote on Shareasale. I recommend that you go for health products when using this strategy.

2) You can get your traffic from Adclerks.

3) Paid advertising is about testing. See what is working for you and what is not. Make sure the numbers add up.

4) Ditch the losers and focus on the winners.

5) Invest a percentage of your gains to scale up your campaigns and test out new products.

6) Rinse and repeat.

Optional – You might want to create a bridge page where you collect the visitors email address first before you send them to the sales page.

By doing so, you’ll be able to re-market to them over and over again and you’ll definitely increase your chances of making the sale.

Not sure if this strategy is for you – Here are a few things to consider…

There are barriers to entry with a method like this and that keeps your competition down.

What are those barriers to entry? I mean, I just made it sound easy right?

Well, let’s look a little closer…

First, it poses a learning curve. You have to figure out how to use Shareasale and Adclerks.

Second, it requires business math and critical thinking. You have to look at your numbers and understand what the heck you are looking at.

Third, it requires investment in advertising. Many people always want the free method. They are not willing to put an investment on the line to try something new.

These three barriers to entry will keep a lot of your competition at bay. The question now becomes, could this be the next big move in your online journey?

Well, that’s for you to decide.

The post A Simple Way To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing Using Paid Ads appeared first on davechomkam.