The Accidental Solo Ad Agency

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen by accident. I was already familiar with solo ads, a quick and effective way to drive traffic to your landing pages, but I never imagined it would become the foundation of a thriving business. One day, out of pure impulse, I decided to sell a solo ad instead of sending out my usual promotion. That simple decision not only solved my immediate problem, but also led to an incredible discovery. I could turn this into a full fledged passive income stream. In this episode, I’ll share how a chance experiment became a game changing business model, and how you can replicate it to achieve your own success.

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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 best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at 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.

1:28  

Earlier today I spoke about how oftentimes, in pursuit of something, or in the middle of some kind of project, you bump into something that happens by accident, and that ends up leading to a big breakthrough, and then you find a way to make it happen on purpose. Well, at the time, I was already familiar with the idea of what solo ads are. In case you don’t know, solo ads are a way of getting clicks and visitors to your landing pages from other people’s email list. It’s a very convenient, fast way to do it, and you get high quality traffic. And I’ve used this as my way of growing my business, which, you know, propelled me to my first big success. But then once I’ve had a list big enough and I was promoting stuff, you know, sometimes it didn’t run into an issue of not having something to promote. Sometimes I did run into an issue of having something to promote, but it was bombing. It wasn’t working really well. And you know, I remembered that at one point, you know, I was buying solo ads. I was also doing cross promotions with other people who had lists, which means we were exchanging solo ads. But also I was a member of groups where people were buying and selling them. And, you know, just by sheer impulse, somebody posted that they needed a solo ad, like, ASAP. 

2:32

And I was like, Well, I don’t have anything to mail today. I can do it. And I sold it for a ridiculously low price, like, basically I knew what other people were charging, and I undercharged specifically by maybe 20% or so. To me, it didn’t make too big of a difference from my bottom line, because I was still living in Israel, therefore making a US dollar went a long way. Whether I made like, you know, $100 that day, whether I made $80 that day, then didn’t change anything because, you know, my income was, maybe, I don’t know, $400 a week. So it was just, no, I’m sorry, $400 more than 400 maybe $800 maybe $1,000 a month. So making that in a day is still big money. It’s just money instantly available to me in my PayPal account. So I figured, you know what? I’ll do it because it solves my issue. I don’t need to figure out what I’m going to mail. And it’s a free offer, usually, so cool. And I mailed it, and the person who received the traffic loved it. Came back. Said, I want more. 

3:03

I sold them again, mailed them next week, but I got the money up front. So all of a sudden, like, at the time, I think it was $150 new, $160 richer, again, big money for someone like me at the time. And the list wasn’t, like, huge, it was maybe 3000 people. So, like, still, it was, like, a really cool way to monetize it. And I did it a few more times, maybe over a course of a month, I would interchange between mailings and offer and mailing a silhouette. But at some point it’s like, can I make it into a business? And I was one of the first who figured out a way to systematize it to get enough customers to want to buy their traffic and to turn into a legit business, which is to this day, an incredible, incredibly passive, incredibly profitable, incredibly easy business to have, like just an income stream that runs on autopilot, that just fits into my ecosystem and the, that, like, just helps people, and it’s great, you know, later on, when I started teaching other people how to do it, specifically how to start solo ad agencies. Because at one point, a couple years ago, I actually, you know, had a good 20, you know, successful students, kind of almost like an Igor mafia, in a way, kind of, you know, dominating that game. 

4:00

So I just figured out a way to help people get into this business, by becoming the middleman, you know. So basically, you know how people who flip houses, like, for example, a mortgage broker flips mortgage policies right so they don’t actually own the mortgage. They just talk to the customer and they help the customer get the mortgage, right. Um, so real estate brokers, insurance brokers, in the same way, you can be brokering the solo ads, and you can be the middleman, whether you tell the people who buy them from you or not, doesn’t matter, but if you do your job right, you’re actually helping them get good traffic. You’re helping them achieve an outcome, and they’re happy paying you because they’re still paying you way less than they would have had to pay to Google and Facebook and all the other platforms. The amount of time and effort you’re saving them, because it’s just a simple way to get traffic, is just incredible. So overall, you’re just providing so much value. 

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You got a little bit of a markup there, but then, you know, you just make it up in volume and you’re good. You don’t have to take any risks. You don’t have to buy anything up front. It’s just a very low key, passive way to do it. And you can manage all of it from your phone, like all of it from your smartphone. So a really cool model. 

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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 best selling 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 blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.