3 Reasons Why Solo Ads Win Big Time Over Facebook Ads And Google Ads

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle. I’m your host Igor Kheifets and today we have another episode about solo ads. Today’s discussion is an extract from a longer interview I did with my friend Jason to serve as a short course on solo ads for his audience. To be more specific, the interview was on the topic of how to grow a massive email list with solo ads and Jason offered a bonus, I believe or something like that. But then we decided to release it to the public so that more people can benefit from it. It’s a very valuable talk where I go in depth comparing solo ads in both Facebook and Google ads and explain why solo ads win big time, especially when it comes to selling digital products. But I’d also touch on a couple other things like how much you should expect your solo ads to cost depending on what niche you’re in, as well as share a few tips on how to differentiate between good traffic and bad traffic and how not to fall for scammers or people wanting to make a quick buck off of you by basically selling you shitty solo ads. Overall, today’s episode is a must watch for anyone looking to start running solo ads or anyone who’s already doing it. Now before I leave you with the episode. Just a quick note that this intro has been recorded using an artificial intelligence voice trained to sound like me, don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of it by writing to me at Igor dot top slash voice. And without further ado, I’ll leave you now with my real voice for the rest of the episode and joy.

01:19

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

02:05

What people should expect to pay per click for their solo ads, but then also, why it is so much better than Facebook and Google buying those ads. People always talk about how Facebook is so targeted and even micro-targeting talks about why this traffic source is so much better.

02:19

I can sell against Facebook all day long. So the problem with Facebook is it appears targeted. But it’s not. Because even today as we’re actually doing this, as we’re having this conversation just recently, Facebook disables quite a few targeting options that you used to be able to do but not anymore. In my opinion, the best targeting you can possibly go for can only be done by Google, because Google owns a lot of that information about us right not only our demographic information, but also the keyword information. So when you get someone at the precise moment of them looking for that solution, obviously, that’s a pretty good click, if you will. So if I’ve got an appliance issue, my refrigerator isn’t working, and I need someone to come in and fix the refrigerator. I mean, if I’m looking for a technician, whatever, and at that precise moment, the ad pops up for the refrigerator guy, I mean, you can’t get any more targeted than that. Now, of course, if that’s your business, you’re probably better off using Google ads, and especially Google Local Ads, that kind of puts you in that area where you can actually service the people. But here’s the caveat, when it comes to selling digital products, we’re using that exact strategy that is very, very, very expensive. And you can probably expect to pay $15 a click sometimes just to get that one click from the search engines from the paid search. And again, great traffic is just extremely expensive. And it really depends on the niche to like, if you’re an insurance agent, you’re paying, like 50 bucks a click, if you’re a lawyer, you could be paying 100 bucks quickly. So all these niches are really competitive. And because it’s a bidding system, and Google has way more customers than they can possibly serve, they have to auction it off. And I’ve seen, I mean, if you’ve ever been to an auction or seen something being auctioned, you can see how fast a price can go up. And so that’s what happens with Google now with Facebook, the targeting is crap, really, really just crap. And there are other downsides to it too. For example, you’re paying per view and the newsfeed is so crowded that at this point, people just develop ad blindness. So if you want to get in front of them and you find them to pay attention, you have to run 15 different ads, some of the videos some of them text, some of the messenger bots, you basically end up paying and I’m like I really just given you like a low estimate number something like the lowest I was able to get it to and I’m like really experienced pain at the very least $12 per option not even for sale, no guarantees that that often will buy anything, just not and this is a number from 2017 which is when you know I just said you know just I’m done with it. I’m not even going to try it because I always love to have multiple buckets in my business. So I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, if you will. It’s just some point like I’ve just stopped trying on Facebook altogether. So it’s really expensive. And here’s the worst part of it. All these people don’t open emails. The one thing I could never figure out with Facebook and I wouldn’t be willing to pay $12 per subscriber. But the one thing I was never able to figure out is how do you get them to open up those emails because they don’t have that social mindset, most of them just have, they don’t want to check their email, but the email is where the money is. So it was really, really difficult. Now, that’s like this is a set of issues, right. There’s also another set of issues and that as compliance because Facebook changed their terms of service every 20 seconds. So the moment you optimize the great campaign, which was the last time you know, I had a webinar selling a $1,000 course, I was paying $800 to make a $997 sale. So it was still making a little bit of money. And if I don’t consider refund requests, let’s say I was losing a little bit, just a bit, but I was still acquiring customers, and then your account gets shut down. That has happened to me like 12 times by now. And another thing that I’ve noticed is that anyone who is successful with Facebook ads usually is a master of starting new accounts before their old accounts get shut down. If you get into that game, you have to expect to lose your accounts and start over every now and again. So that’s just not a game I want to play, I want to build a castle and a castle to stand and to be there and to withstand a siege, I want that castle of your rock solid because I need to rely on something. And that’s something I was able to do with solo ads, because first of really reliable so you know, like you approach a list owner, you tell them what do you want, they tell you how much it costs, you give them money badly, send out an email, second automated, you don’t have to sit there and optimize anything, you run a campaign that runs without you. So you can purchase most of these solo ads from your cell phone. And that’s awesome too, because you can do it while at work if you have any other commitments, and you don’t really have to become a slave, obviously. Third is these are email subscribers that want to open your email, a huge advantage right there, you’re making it a much easier job for yourself to get more sales. And of course, price wise, you’re looking at paying anywhere from I would say $2, probably maybe a little bit under $2. And maybe up to $5 per subscriber because these people are more likely to opt in because of the level of targeting you’re achieving because of the level of interest that you can hit with those lists. And because it’s overall the transfer credibility from a source because what happens here is not just that you’re getting a click, but you’re getting a click that was driven to you by a tribe leader by a list owner by somebody who has a relationship with the audience. And that’s huge. That’s huge. So you’re kind of like a parasite on the back of a host, right. And so they end up carrying you to that sales conversation. So yeah, in terms of how much you expect to pay for a click, it will vary based on two criteria. First, it will vary on the criteria of a niche, because for example, in the make money online space, you can get clicks, for as little as 30 cents. And as high as $2. In self-help or personal development. If you’ve got a product about coaching people, life coaching, anything like that, hypnosis, stuff like that, you can be paying $3 per click. So I mean, it can change in the financial space, you can probably expect also to kind of climb towards that $3 A click in the weight loss, it’s probably going to be you know, up there in the $5 a click. But again, depending on the niche, it will change a little bit. And of course, depending on the quality of the list you’re hitting. So one of the reasons, by the way, why so many people out there will try and sell you really cheap traffic from the solo ad lists is because they don’t know how to monetize them at all. And a lot of these lists are really not that great. So what they end up doing is they end up discounting, it’s so much that they basically end up dancing on your greed glands, right? They just appeal to that part of you. They’d be like, well, I can’t pass up on this deal. So when you start researching solo ads, you’re probably going to end up on websites like Fiverr, where they say something like, and I’ll run your thing to my 100,000 person list for 10 bucks or something like that. This is something really ridiculously cheap. And no, that whistle is you do tend to get what you pay for. So expect results according to the price you’re paying.

08:43

But what about outside of that is you’re seeing people offering their list? Is it just what you do? What are some of the tips that you would give people who are just starting out?

08:51

That’s a great question. So the thing about solo ads is that you can end up getting lots of fake traffic. And for example, three months ago, we had to, because we buy a lot of traffic we buy at the very least two to $3,000 a day worth of clicks. And when you buy that volume, you work with tons of different solo ad providers. And you have to be really careful about how you track because in between the volume someone can sneak in, you know, they can squeeze in some, they can inject some crap, that’s what they usually do. So I’ll be reviewing results for the previous months. And what we’ve discovered is that we ended up paying about $80,000 for completely fake email addresses. Apparently, he developed this amazing new script or software where they would make fake traffic appear real. And they would challenge this traffic through triggering IP addresses on different sites and injecting emails from databases that had no business to be there and then had no intention to opt in. And so basically, most of these were fake. And one of the reasons we discovered it was because our sender score on our emails went way down. And all of a sudden we started appearing on the blacklist and the other thing was, of course that we ended up with tons of money for fake traffic. So we had to kind of really revisit how we protect ourselves. Now, I’m not going to go into the whole how to protect yourself technically meaning like all the software you can use and stuff like that. But one of the simplest ways you can protect yourself without getting super technical is by having a conversation with the vendor and asking them some really specific questions that would put them in a position to reveal where they are getting their traffic. How are they emailing their list in the first place to see, whether they email or not, and a bunch of questions like there is a way and you don’t have to have a technical Arsenal or technical knowledge necessarily to protect yourself. Because more often than not, you will talk to genuinely good people, I guess, unless you sort of fall victim to what I call the Facebook mafia, where there’s like a bunch of people, they all get their traffic from the same fake source. So all of these people, they originate in one Facebook group. And if you go looking for solo ads on Facebook, a lot of times you end up working with, and what they do is they kind of count on the fact that while most people need the traffic, and a lot of times they reach out to them, they just don’t have the technical knowledge or the marketing knowledge necessary to judge whether or not they get bad quality traffic. And what happens is probably 20% of the time they get caught. So the person comes back to them and be like, what is this crap? And they say, no worries, here’s your money back, right. But 80% of the time they win. So they just keep playing that game. They maintain the averages. I don’t want to get

11:27

too technical. But you mentioned you go back to the traffic source, you say, Hey, that was crap, and they give you your money back? Like, what’s the definition of crap? Is it that you end up with less than 10%? Open Rate? What’s the thing that people should immediately say, wait a minute, is something wrong?

11:40

Absolutely. It’s so what is crap? Well, obviously, the first thing is, is it real or not? Did the person actually want to go and opt in? Or did they get injected? Was it just a completely fake and non-existent person, or I’ll give it a good, perfect example, one time I spent 10 grand with a solid provider who started out really well. And they started out saving me some good traffic, but then they sort of went in, they made the switch at some point. But then I noticed that sales are down. And I also noticed that what I’m getting is bounces now when you email someone like just any email address, and your email comes back and says did not make it to their inbox or got rejected. And there are a couple of reasons that can happen. First of all, maybe the inbox is full, I’m not sure like it is these days, and it’s rare because all in boxes come with huge sizes, but sometimes it could happen. A lot of times it happens because you know, maybe email is misspelled or maybe email used to exist but doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe just not real. Maybe it was just made up. And so this is what may cause a bounce. So when I see a spike in my bounces, it hurts your sending score with the email service providers, your email rates go down, overall, your domain can get flagged, which means your domain may now be categorized as a bad spamming domain. Because one of the things that the email service broad is used to determine whether or not you’re a good egg, when it comes to email marketing is whether your list is clean. Whether when you mailed a list if those emails actually received the emails, and whether you keep it fresh and clean, because freshness of the list is also very important. So as soon as they get the message that Okies is emailing really old and dead email addresses, he’s emailing and he’s bouncing back and they don’t like it. And so they lower your score. It’s kind of like a shower. Like you have to take your email to the shower every now and again, wash off all the dirt and bring it back in. So anyway, gents, your question. Fake traffic or bad traffic could be either a list that just had no intention to opt in with you. So they got put on your list, but not necessarily chose to be there. These could be old email addresses that don’t exist anymore, or that got turned into what’s called spam traps, which means whenever an email address dies, or the person discontinued their inbox, they don’t really die, they don’t really disappear. They still exist. But from now on, the email service provider receives a signal if anyone continues to send to that email address that means they don’t take care of their lives. That means they’re bad, they just kind of sort of send to anyone and everyone another way it can work. It could be in a completely automated script. It could be just a robot that was created by a software that crawls your page finds the opt in form inserts an email and it creates an appearance of activity, but you’re basically maybe even getting a real email address that does exist somewhere, but there’s no sales because there’s no real people behind it.

14:23

Fascinating. So fascinating how that works.

14:28

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic. Go to www.igorsbook.com. Now to claim your free package.