Solo Ads — The Ultimate Guide To Buying Solo Ad Traffic

7 min readOct 20, 2022

Let’s take a deep dive into Solo Ads and show you exactly how you can make solo ads work for your business.

Fun Fact: Solo Ads is what I used to make over $250,000 in a single year and is responsible for my first $100 a day online business which took me just 6 weeks to build up from 0.

Table of Contents

What Are Solo Ads And How Do They Work

Fortunately, I know this industry inside out (the good and bad parts)

So let’s dive in and take a look at what exactly are solo ads?

Simply put, solo ads are emails that are sent to an advertiser’s targeted email list. The advertiser (you) pays the owner of the email list to send out an email to their list, usually in the form of a sales pitch or promotion.

Usually, this email is written by the seller, usually generic and designed to get a click to your website, which then means your website is where you convert them into a subscriber.

Solo ads can be highly effective in reaching potential customers quickly, but it’s essential to make sure you’re working with a reputable email list owner. Otherwise, your solo ad might just end up being fake traffic, giving you fake subscribers and just wasting money. So let’s run through how you can avoid that and instead watch your conversions and $$$ take off.

The Benefits Of Using Solo Ads

It’s all about tapping into a pre-made traffic source that you can get FAST!

Plus, you know exactly how much you are going to pay per click / visitor, which countries your subscribers will be from and that you can quickly test, improve and scale up a profitable campaign.

Plus it’s an extremely cheap way with minimal technical skills to build up an email list, that you can continue to email and market to whenever you like…. i.e. long-term money

Example: I build out a simple funnel (squeeze page -> offer) and then order 100 clicks at $0.40 each… this converts at 40% and I get 40 new subscribers on my list.

I then improve the squeeze page and run a 2nd offer and jump to a 50% conversion rate.

(^^^^Split testing is key to profitable solo ads)

This now gives me 50 subscribers for every 100 clicks (most solo ad vendors actually send you extra clicks too).

Now I’m building my list for just $1 per subscriber!

Then comes the offer, which is shown immediately to the people who optin (submit their email) and from this it converts at 10%. So for every 50 subscribers, we get 2 to 3 sales immediately!

Use a monthly recurring offer and this will pay you for months or years to come.

Plus! We haven’t even mentioned adding in a follow-up sequence to re-market to these people over and over again, overcome any of their objections to not buying the offer immediately and encourage them to purchase.

As soon as you have cracked the funnel side (the same with most businesses, you have a business you can infinitely scale, improve and an email list which you control the traffic for too!

Solo Ad Terminology

CPC — Cost Per Click (How much you pay for the traffic)
CPS — Cost Per Sale (How much your subscriber’s cost / cost per sale)
Tier1 — This is traffic from the US, UK, AU, NZ, CA (the countries with the most spending power and English as their first language)
Squeeze Page / Landing Page — The page with your optin form to send people to who then submit their email address.
Optin — This is the form / action of someone submitting their email on your squeeze / landing page.
Funnel — The squeeze/landing page to offer
Follow-up Sequence — The emails you send automatically to your new subscribers / email list.

Solo Ads For Affiliate Marketing / Crypto / Weight Loss

These are the GO TO niches for solo ads.

The ones where you will find the MOST vendors and be able to get the most traffic too (other niches are still possible and we go through those in a second).

The BEST place to get these solo ads is from Udimi!

We Recommend Udimi

Use this special link to get $5 off your first order AND $5 off your second order too!

Solo Ads / Ezines For Other Niches + Premium Solo Ads

Originally solo ads were actually called Ezines / Ezine ads! Then somehow the terminology changed as the Industry and marketplace adapted.

They are essentially the same thing, just the traditional way of getting solo ads / ezines is a lot HARDER (not impossible though!)

– The Old School Method

It all stemmed from approaching websites with email lists in your industry and contacting them and asking for a price to send out an email to their list.

Normally based on a cost per email VS per click and with your own email swipe (copy) sent out to their list and with their sellers help to improve it to fit with their audience.

You can still do this today!

Find websites in your niche, drop them a message and ask.

Side Note: Recently, a guy I know shared how he took his content writing service from 0 to 6 figures and actually sold the business for just over $250,000 in 2 years and ALL he did to generate sales was purchase solo ads from Industry websites where his service would fit with their clients/email lists.

Some websites will actually list this as an option in their “advertising” pages as an option.

If you own the offer you’re looking to make sales for, then you can also use this method to recruit affiliates and instead of paying them a fixed amount per email, you can instead set them up as an affiliate to promote you that way.

Obviously, advantages and disadvantages of both and you could be shooting yourself in the foot in terms of income if you just let them signup as an affiliate though.

These solo ads are of a much higher quality in terms of sales, the value of the subscribers VS buying from people selling “solo ads” because of their relationship they have with their list and the fact that they will also be super selective on what they promote to their lists too.

^^^This does also mean it’s more risky as they will in 90% of cases cost much more (unless you get lucky and find a website owner who doesn’t know their lists value) and the fact you pay a fixed cost per email VS a specific cost per visitor/click.

How To Find A Good Solo Ad Vendor

This doesn’t have to be difficult and we can easily avoid the scammers by doing 2 things….

1). Buy from a GOOD Solo Ad Marketplace

I personally recommend Udimi for this, they have a fantastic review system and a basic tracking system built in for solo ad buyers too.

You can use this link (click here) to get $5 off your first order PLUS! get another $5 off your 2nd order too ($10 off in total just by using this link!)

Solo Ad Marketplace

We Recommend Udimi!

Click Here To Get $5 Off Your First & Second Udimi Order

2). Track Your Solo Ads

Udimi does have a basic tracking system included when you buy solo ads, just make sure you set it up.

But check out the next section to really track them properly AND make the most out of the traffic too (even if you only implement the changes later on, as you can get and store the data)

Click / Traffic Tracking

We recommend ClickMagick for this!

Click Here For A 14 Day Free ClickMagick Free Trial

Exactly How I Would Use Solo Ads Today

This is exactly what I would do with solo ads today!

Run a simple funnel like mentioned earlier.

Use Kartra for this to improve the conversion rates based on design, speed and the pre-populated email form.

Split test both the offer AND squeeze page

Use clickmagick to do this AND hold the data on the visitors to show them varying offers and squeeze pages depending on if they are a new or old visitor.

1st). Focus on the subscriber conversion rate:

Buy 100 clicks per squeeze page from Udimi (start with 3 variations so 300 clicks total) then optimize and improve until it’s at 50%+

(I’ve had squeeze pages at 60%+)

2nd). Then work on the offer

Tweak the headline on the squeeze page, follow-up sequence to improve the conversion rates there.

3rd). Build It Up

a). Once the list was up to 1000 people I would either a). start a solo ad business selling traffic too

b). Setup a 365-day sequence in Kartra promoting as many different offers as possible to the same list.

*(You could easily do both of these too!)

The 3rd step then means the conversion rates of your funnel doesn’t HAVE to be perfect, you can fast-track the process by generating money outside of the funnel by using your new email list.

So your funnel could make a loss initially based on cost BUT because your offer is recurring, or now and again someone buys an upsell it is close to breaking even AND then with your email list you continue to make pure profit afterwards too by just sending out emails to sold solo ads and/or other offers/products.

Conclusion

Solo Ads work amazingly BUT make sure you are doing it right to make the most money, don’t get scammed and have leveraged your newfound knowledge to fast track getting a highly converting funnel!