Here’s a disturbing trend I’ve been seeing lately in the solo ad market… solo ads that are giving list builders a 100% optin rate.
Let me take a step back for those who might not know what I’m talking about… a solo ad is when you pay someone to mail out your offer to their list and they promise to send you a certain amount of visitors, e.g. 500. List builders buy solo ads to build their list quickly.
Now, I personally have never bought (or sold) a solo ad. My philosophy is, why would someone want to sell me their lists traffic when they can monetize their own list and make even more money sending them to their own offers or to affiliate offers.
My feeling is that if their list was any good, they would keep the traffic to themselves, rather than sell it to me.
In any case, solo ads are a great way for beginner list builders to get their first few hundred subscribers so that they can start doing email adswaps. At least, that is what I encourage my students to do if they want to fast track their list buidling efforts and if they have the finances.
(I encourage them to source their solo ads from Safe Swaps – they have a good rating system but still you need to be careful)
However, I have noticed that lately there are solo ad providers that are sending traffic to squeeze pages that is converting at 100%. That means that for every 100 visitors they send to your squeeze page, you will get almost 100 optins.
Now, if you’re a list builder you’ll know that this is impossible. Great squeeze pages convert at around 50%. A 100% optin rate is like every person that walks onto a car yard purchasing a car from you. It’s just not going to happen.
If you buy a solo ad from someone (or do an adswap with someone) and get that kind of optin rate, I would be very, very suspicious. Not only that, I would test to see if the new leads you have received from them are any good. I would suspect that you would find that they are false leads.
One way to test this is to send a promotional email to only these new leads. See if they open the email and click on your links. Don’t be surprised if they don’t.
You might be wondering, “how can someone get so many people to falsely subscribe to my list?”
There might be a lot of ways to do this. One way that I know of are sites that you can post ‘micro jobs’. Examples of this is microworkers.com and centworkers.com (June 2018 update: Centworkers website no longer exists). You’d be amazed at what jobs you can ask people to do for you, how many people there are that are willing to do them, and how little they are willing to get paid!
Check this out…
My advice, stay away from anyone that sends you that kind of traffic!
Note: By definition a ‘solo ad‘ is where someone agrees to mail out your offer to their personal email list. Any other traffic that anyone sends you in the name of a ‘solo ad’ is not a solo ad at all. It’s just traffic, good or bad.
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