Many of those people who’s participating in this blackhat marketing are also solo ad vendors, but you should absolutely avoid them if your goal is to build a high quality email list. I’m a solo ad vendor myself, and I know I’ll lose sales for saying this… but let me tell you.
The insider secret that none of my competitors wants you to know…
About 95% of solo ad vendors in our Self-Help/Spiritual space sorely built their lists through sorely using ad swaps and solo ads only.
I know this for a fact, because I’ve been in this industry for more than 5 years.
Do you know what this means to you as a potential buyer?
It means those 95% of solo ads vendors in our industry are more or less sharing many of the same subscribers together since our space (people does solo ads/ad swap in our niche) is a small pocket of community in the vast niche of personal development and spirituality. I’m not directly involved, but many of my friends are and we kinda know each other. Since they build their email list inside this small community, they naturally have a lot of shared subscribers between each vendors.
While having shared subscribers isn’t much of a problem in most cases as it’s common with any platforms. Even on auction platform like Facebook ads, Google ads, you’d still be competing for the same audience to show your ad to. So you’ll naturally have shared subscribers anyway even you don’t optin for solo ads.
For example, we have a lot of subscribers who are also subscribed to Mindvalley (which is the biggest personal development company) since we primally used Facebook to build our audience, we ended up targeting the same audience more or less.
After all, there’s only so much people who’s interested in X topic, within X age group, in X country, on X platform. Right?
Now having said this, the real question you should be asking yourself is WHO are you sharing your audience with? That is way more IMPORTANT than list affinity which will occur anyway.
Before you purchase any solo ads, you want to know these:
– How does their website look like? (to determine if the person/company is legit)
– How did they build their email list? (to determine overall initial quality of the list)
– What’s their sending practice like? (to estimate churn and their current quality of the list)
The thing about is our small industry (solo ads vendors of self-help and spiritual niche), many of vendors tend to be low quality because their sending practice is horrible. They send like 4-6 times a day like nothing and some newbies even send like 15-20 emails a day which is a quite ridiculous.
Can you see how messed up that is?
This happens because those marketers, especially new ones don’t know how to monetize their email list properly and are very desperate to make return quickly.
Yes, it’s true they tend to make a lot more for their list size to due to sending more frequency. But this is obviously not a sustainable way to do business at all. They are essentially sacrificing long term profit over short term profit. Now I hope you see the problem…
Their subscribers are getting heavily churned out due to their sending volumes. Yes, a modern average consumer receives over 100 emails daily, but for their subscribers, it’s so much more.
This is why I generally don’t recommend purchasing solo ads from the most vendors in our industry unless you know that they’re a quality vendor. Think like this, 90% are low quality. 9% are good to great quality. 1% are the top tier. I know it’s tempting when you see very cheap clicks (some offer even offer CPC 1/5 of average Facebook CPC), but you have to AVOID cheap clicks. Sure, it can simply be a great deal. But most of the time you get what you pay for. I know a guy who has 20K subscribers but barely make any sales from his list because he built his list using really cheap solo ads which are low quality, while my student who built his list using high quality vendors pulls around $6K-$10K/mo from a small list of 15K.
There’s no doubt that the quality of your leads matters A LOT.
Now after hearing all of these, you may think solo ads is a bad way to build your audience…
Well I get it, but please don’t get me wrong, sure there may be many bad apples in market and it’s difficult to find quality vendors. But if you can find the right vendor, solo ads can be incredibly profitable and the fastest way to grow your business compared to any other marketing channel with minimum effort.
In fact, email advertising is the BEST traffic source of all marketing channels.
According to Direct Marketing Association report from 2019, email has the highest ROI for every $1 spent compared to any marketing channels. And it usually gives the highest conversion since traffic is already warm.