Solo ads are one of the ways that internet marketers are told to get new subscribers. They’re a kind of “ready meal” for internet marketing – someone else has found a potential subscriber, all you need to do is pay them to send you clicks and you’ve got a new subscriber.

Are they a good way to build your subscriber list?

Or are they likely to empty your wallet for no real return?

As with everything in internet marketing, there’s no simple answer.

Switching briefly to search engine optimisation (SEO), it’s generally true that the easier it is to get something like a backlink, the less it’s worth.

And to a large extent the same seems to be true in solo ads.

There are various marketplaces where you can get solo ad suppliers. The better ones like Safe Swaps have a rating system so you can get an idea of how the list has performed for other people.

You can also track down people who email their own lists and contact them to find out if they will offer you a solo ad, even if there’s no normal option to do that.

Once you’ve found a list that you think might be a good fit, you need to design a squeeze page and an offer.

Then you’ll need to write an email “swipe” that the solo ad list owner can use. They may give some guidance on this and they will almost certainly reserve the right to amend your swipe if they see fit.

The “swipe” needs a strong offer and a strong call to action.

Most solo ad suppliers will insist on the offer being a free gift – you can’t usually sell to people until they’ve joined your list.

You then need to monitor the results.

Even if you’ve bought a list of good solo ad suppliers from someone like Paul Nicholls, you still need to monitor things.

The responsiveness of lists changes over time.

So does how they’re kept replenished – emails “rot” over time and get less responsive, so they need to be replenished.

And your offer may be different.

Even small differences between offers can make a big difference in the response you get.

The swipe copy is obviously what gets people to click in the first place.

Then there’s the actual page you send them to.

The contents of the squeeze page and the speed it loads are also factors.

If your site is slow – you can test it here – you may need to consider changing hosts.

Responsiveness changes by day of week and time of year.

And the offer you’re sending out may be seasonal – for instance, things like weight loss and self help peak at the start of the year.

Back to responsiveness…

It’s generally agreed that the most responsive list is people who’ve bought from you before when you offer them a new product you’ve created.

Next most responsive are people who’ve bought from you before when you offer them someone else’s product.

Most of the time, the least responsive are the people who’ve just signed up to get a free gift.

Which means one other thing to consider when choosing a solo ads vendor is how they keep their list replenished with potential leads.

Do they create their own offers?

If so, are those offers free or paid?

Or do they grow their list with something called click banking – nothing to do with Clickbank – whereby they send clicks to someone else’s solo ad offer and when they’ve sent enough clicks they get sent the same number of clicks back to their list.

That can get quite incestuous quite fast.

Another way some solo ad vendors get new subscribers is by running ads on sites like Clixsense.

That site is interesting – it’s an internet world I didn’t really know existed when I started investigating solo ads.

Essentially people are paid to click and then have to stay on the page with the advert for a set amount of time.

And that really means stay on the page – tab away or bring another thing on your computer into the foreground and the clock stops ticking.

Then after 5 or 15 or however many seconds, their account is credited with a fraction of a cent.

Yes.

There are people building up solo ad lists with clickers from sites like that.

Food for thought.