Without a doubt, one of the cheapest ways to generate leads for your business (that works if done properly) is solo ad marketing.
A solo ad is simply finding someone in your niche or industry who has a large list, and asking them to send out an email to their list.
You can find these people in forums, by searching for keywords in Google, or by searching for people that advertise that they provide a solo ad service.
In general solo ads are much cheaper than pay per click advertising or banner advertising, and if done properly can generate a lot of leads in a short amount of time.
Here are some tips to maximise your results uisng solo ad marketing:
1. Only contact list owners that are in your niche/industry.
As I mentioned earlier it is important that your solo ad is being sent to your target market.
If your niche is dog training, then there is no point in sending out emails to a list that is interested in car racing.
The more specific the niche the better, and the more appealing your offer is, the more chance you have of getting a lot of clicks.
It is always a good idea to opt in to the list owners list, and check them out before you pay them any money.
2. Make the headline as interesting as possible.
If you provide a poor subject headline, then you will find that not too many people bother to open your email.
The emails needs to get the attention of the reader and entice them to read the message. One good idea is to pretend that you are writing the email to a friend, because that way people don’t get the impression that it is advertising.
The headline also needs to be relevant somehow to the the body of the email, otherwise people will feel tricked into opening it.
One classic example of this is the headline “You have just earned a commission”. This headline gets the readers attention, but unless the body of the email is relevant to them earning a commission, you will find that people quickly hit the delete button.
3. Always put the link in the first few lines of the copy.
To give yourself the best possible opportunity to have your link clicked on it, it is important that you place the link in the first 10 lines of the email so that people can see it immediately.
A common mistake is to write a long message and then put the link at the end of the copy, but unless people scroll down the page – they never see the link.
And the other common mistake is to make the link a different colour to the standard dark blue. People are used to seeing dark blue links and recognise it immediately. If your link is red, green or any other colour than dark blue, then some people will not even realise that it is a link.
4. Keep it relatively short and to the point
A solo ad should be short and to the point, because the primary objective is simply to sell the click. The only objective is to get people onto your landing page, and if you write a long piece of copy then you risk the reader becoming bored, confused or distracted.
The landing page should also be short and to the point, because in this case you are simply selling the opt in. Long copy and long videos are not necessary and generally result in much less opt ins.
The only place where long copy is necessary is on your sales page. This is where you want to illustrate the benefits of purchasing your product, and also show examples of other satisfied customers.
But, as far as the solo ad is concerned get to the point immediately and motivate your reader to click on your link.
5. Always send people directly to a lead capture page
A solo ad should always lead the reader straight to an opt in page and collect the details of the prospect.
You never want to send people to your blog or website, because that is just a waste of money. The whole point of a solo ad is to build your subscriber list, and the only way to do that is get as much targeted traffic onto your landing page as possible.
The landing page should have no other links or pages on it, purely just an opt in page by itself. It sounds obvious but some people do not realise this, and waste their money.
6. Always track your clicks, conversions & cost per lead
To find out if the campaign has been successful or not is extremely important to know your statistics.
You should generate unique URL’s for each campaign and track precisely how many people clicked on your link, and out of these people how many of them opted in. And if you can also see how many sales the campaign produced you should be able to determine your profit and return on investment.
A good tool to use for your tracking is Hypertracker.
7. If a campaign is profitable, keep using it.
Once you know if your campaigns are profitable or not, you can then decide whether to place another solo ad with the same person or to try someone else.
As a rule you should keep using the same person’s list for as long as it remains profitable.
Keep in mind though that sometimes your subscribers will not buy straight away, and if you are using follow up emails with your auto responder they might buy further down the track. Or some of these people may buy other products from you in the future.
And also, usually the clicks keep coming in for about a week or so, until the agreed amount of clicks has been provided by the list owner.
So if a campaign produces zero sales but you get a lot of subscribers cheaply, then you may still consider that to be a good result.
And also on the other hand, if a campaign produces barely any leads or sales then you don’t bother using them again, and look elsewhere.
But the most important thing is to do a lot of solo ads and learn from your experience. Don’t just do two or three, and then give up and say that it doesn’t work. This is just a wate of time, and you never get anywhere with this sort of attitude. Patience is the online marketers most deadly tool.
Keep testing and measuring, and over time you will become an expert at solo ad marketing.
