Watch Out For These 4 Solo Ad Scams

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Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
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Jonathan: You are listening to the List Building Lifestyle Show. Here’s your Uncle
Igor.

Igor: [laughter] I think that was the fastest intro in the history of podcasting.

Jonathan: [laughter] Well, look, the last time you told me that we’re messing up
your brand, giving you too many titles, and in that last episode you called
yourself Uncle Igor, so I was just kind of following up with that.

Igor: Do you remember those ads? I don’t know if you had those. In Ukraine, during
the ’90s, we had ‘Uncle Ben’s’. I think it was rice and some canned foods or
something like that.

Jonathan: Yes, yes. ‘Uncle Ben’s’.

Igor: You remember that?

Jonathan: Yes.

Igor: ‘Uncle Ben’s’. I always really liked Uncle Ben’s. I really like that guy. He
was so friendly and so inviting. I really wished he was my uncle. Hopefully,
somewhere, an 18-year-old is listening to the podcast right now and he’s like,
“Yes, it’d be so cool to have Igor as my uncle.” That would be really sweet. I’d
be really proud of myself.

Jonathan: “Rich Uncle Igor, give me a car.” [laughter]

Igor: [laughter]

Jonathan: Alright, Igor. What do you have for us today?

Igor: Well, as promised, I want to chat to you about Solo Ad scams. Now, I realize
it’s not the most inviting topic, it’s not the kind of topic that makes people
excited, and I’m not one to be all negative about things. Although I go on rants a
lot, but I do try to do it in the positive way. But this episode is going to be
dark. It’s going to be dark because over the years I got scammed in many different
ways as I was buying Solo Ads, and still sometimes they do. In fact, last week, I
identified three different sources that sent me bullshit leads that I had to
really go and confront. The issue of being scammed when you’re buying Solo Ads is
a real one. Maybe anyone listening had this experience, a lot of times people try
a couple of Solo Ads, they get no results or really poor results and they sort of
go away and only come back to Solo Ads a couple of years later when the pain wore
off and they say, “I haven’t had luck with Solo Ads in the past, but I’m ready to
try again, maybe with a different vendor.” A lot of times this happens because
they deal with assholes that scam them. Only they, I mean customers, are not able
to identify the fact that they were scammed in the first place. They discard the
entire strategy, the entire Solo Ad strategy as a bad one simply because they fell
for the bad apples. Now, obviously, just like with any industry, we, Solo Ad
people, have our fair share of assholes in the industry. Same thing can be said
about lawyers and doctors and whatnot. But apparently, all of these scammers, they
give us a bad name.

Jonathan: Igor, how are you able to identify those couple of vendors that you said
we’re giving you bullshit leads?

Igor: Well, I’m going to disclose this in this episode.

Jonathan: Ah hah!

Igor: Perhaps we should just dive right in.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: There’s really four different types of scams that are currently going on.
Over the years, they kind of change because the scammers kind of get caught and
then they adapt. But really, there’s four big strategies for scamming you when
you’re buying traffic. First things first, you may be just getting fake clicks.
Fake being not real, fake being program software that’s supposed to look real,
it’s supposed to click on your links, but in reality, you’re getting really poor
traffic that never was designed to perform on your offer. For example, you could
be getting automated crawling bots that are usually coming to expired domains, and
then these bots are crawling from those domains to the next page that’s supposed
to redirect, and the person selling you the clicks is just putting your link in
that rotator. Because they own a bunch of expired domains or however it actually
works. I’m not really familiar with the actual set up, I just know that expired
domain traffic is abundant and it’s very easy to come by, and you can get it for
quite literally Jonathan, I’m not kidding you, like half a cent per click. Now,
imagine if you go out there and you have unlimited access to this traffic and you
sell these clicks at 30 cents a click, which is really, really low for Solo Ads,
you make a ton of money. All you have to do is just sell a lot of clicks and
that’s not a problem at that price. You just go on those Solo Ad Facebook groups
and just say, “Hey, I got 30-cent clicks.” and everybody jumps on you.

Jonathan: Yes. It tells you how naive I am. I’m like, “Well, why would anybody
want that?” I didn’t think of somebody reselling the crappy traffic.

Igor: Of course, of course. Of course they do. I fell for this myself. I remember
buying clicks from a dude for 27 cents a click, which is lower than I would
usually go, but I bought I think about 7000 clicks before the penny dropped and I
realized I was getting scammed.

Jonathan: Ouch.

Igor: That wasn’t cool. That’s the first way you can get scammed. Second way is
the price you see advertised may not be the price you pay. Again, a lot of the
scammers, what they do, they try to get you because of the cheap traffic, because
of the cheap price. What they do is they charge the traffic somewhere between
30-40, maybe 60 cents per click, and then what they do, they send you really
crappy clicks. I’m talking real traffic, but really, really poor performing, maybe
from a dead list or something. Technically, they’re not really scamming scamming.
They’re still sending you some real traffic, but that traffic is so bad, it’s so
beaten to death, the list is so used up that it’s incapable of producing anything
in terms of sales and profits because they just mailed it too much and they
haven’t replenished it. Again, they killed their list. But they are trying to
squeeze whatever’s left. You pay very little money for each click, but you end up
paying anywhere between $3 to $7 per for an unresponsive lead on your list. That’s
actually pretty common. It’s way more common than getting fake traffic. It’s just
getting traffic from dead lists. Because the dead list owners especially, they’re
trying to do anything to try and recoup at least some of the investment that
they’ve made into the list, and they obviously realize that when they send out
affiliate links, they don’t work, they don’t convert so what they do is they just
sell the clicks to you, because here you are, trying to buy Solo Ads, and that’s
how they make a little bit of money. Again, very, very common, especially,
especially in the Solo Ad Facebook groups. Happens all the time. Number three is
you may be overpaying for brokered clicks. Now, again, this is not technically a
scam, unless they tell you, just like for example my friend Harris, that they
broker your clicks. If they tell you up front, “Hey man, I got access to these
publishers and you’re paying me my price and I resell your traffic to these other
guys at a markup.” Fine. They’re honest about it and if those publishers are not
available anywhere else, I am willing to pay a little bit of an extra for each
click because I recognize the value of having a fresh traffic source. However,
many Solo Ad vendors do not do that. What they do instead is they pretend as if
they have a list, they pretend as if they have a business, they pretend as if they
have an audience, but then they go, turn around, and resell your traffic to the
people you’re already buying from because they’re in the same pool as those other
guys you’ve been buying from. What ends up happening, instead of buying clicks
from the other dude for 80 cents or 70 cents, you’re buying from this dude for $1,
and he resells you at a 20-cent markup.

Jonathan: Wow.

Igor: Now, that is a douche bag move.

Jonathan: That’s dirty. [laughter] That is dirty.

Igor: But that is the truth. That is how the industry works. Last but not least,
which is not the oldest trick in the book, not the oldest one, but it’s pretty
old, and it’s coming and going all the time. Sometimes they do it a lot, sometimes
they go back and they wait for a year and they come back and do it again. But the
point is this, sometimes what they do is they inject the leads, so what happens is
anyone who understands coding, PHP coding specifically, is able to do what’s
called a co-reg where they take the PHP data so they get the opt-in form to, this
is going to get technical but I just want you to understand how it works, so when
somebody opts-in to their squeeze page they’re using to get traffic from whatever
they want to get traffic to, they have the opt-in form past the email to the next
page where they have a hidden script that is triggered by the IP address of the
visitor and it injects the email address into as many as 40 forms at the same
time. What ends up happening, you end up generating a really, really high opt-in
rate, but these leads never actually wanted or intended to opt-in to your list.
They don’t know you, they didn’t ask for it. They do not know that they’ve just
been resold to you. Not only they give you what you didn’t pay for, they scam you,
but also you now end up in trouble with the autoresponder company because that is
going to lead to a really high spam complaint count. You will get in trouble. That
is how I got scammed last week that I was telling you about. I’ve had people
injecting leads into my offers, but we were able to quickly identify that because
we saw no actions in the ‘thank you’ page at all and we were able to quickly put a
stop to that.

Jonathan: That thing is still messing with my brain, injecting leads. So the leads
go in, they don’t hit your ‘thank you’ page, and then they’re pretty much unaware
that they’re laid for you. That’s ridiculous. [laughter] So ridiculous.

Igor: They not only don’t hit your ‘thank you’ page, they don’t even hit your
squeeze page because what the scammer does, he goes on your squeeze page, he looks
at the code, he pulls out your token information or whatever he needs from the
opt-in form itself, and he then creates a script that automatically injects leads
into that form. The prospect doesn’t even know you exist, let alone land on your
‘thank you’ page.

Jonathan: Good grief.

Igor: You know what I mean? Nobody tells the prospect, “Hey, when you’re going to
opt-in, you’re going to get on 40 other email lists. Nobody does that. What
happens is they just end up on your list and you email them obviously with the
first email. All of a sudden, you’ve got a high complaint rate because they didn’t
ever expect to hear from you. They didn’t know who you are, they don’t understand
why the hell are you mailing them. I used to check, there’s actually a very simple
way to check whether or not you’re getting those leads, and also whether people
actually do that. What I like doing is that when I buy Solo Ads, I usually ask the
person who sends the traffic to show me the funnel that you’re using to build your
list. Because if you’ve got a list, you should have at least one funnel. Usually
you should have many, many more funnels, but at least one you should have. First
off, if they don’t give me a funnel, if they try to tell me it’s under
construction or get funny I know they’re reselling my clicks, I don’t deal with
them. Unless they outright tell me, “Hey, I’m reselling your traffic, and for
whatever reason you should buy from me and not from this other guy to buy direct.”
However, if they do give me their squeeze page, their funnel, their whatever, what
I do Jonathan, and this is a really simple trick that John Cornetta taught me a
long time ago. You start a Gmail account or you can use your existing Gmail
account if you want, but I would start a different one for that, and what you do
is, let’s just say your Gmail account is [email protected]. You go into their
squeeze page and you enter your email, [email protected], but then, before the
‘at’ sign, after ‘jonathan’, what you do is you put a plus sign, a plus symbol,
and then a word, I usually use the name of the person I’m buying from. Let’s say
I’m buying from Frank. What I would do, I would go to Frank’s squeeze page that he
supposedly uses to build this funnel and I would put my email there that says
‘[email protected]. Now, what this does is when I get an email to that
inbox, I know that that email had something to do with Frank, because it will show
where it sends the email. If Frank injects me into any other lists, and all of a
sudden I start getting emails from Barbara, from Lily, from Mary, I know that
Frank is doing something shady and I should not work with Frank.

Jonathan: Busted. I did that. I did it differently though, when people used to
collect names, I just put their name to remind me, and then I’d see like, “Who the
hell is this person sending me an email with the wrong name?” But that’s obviously
a big deal in the Solo Ad industry. I didn’t realize people would buy your own
traffic, resell it at a markup, and compete against you. That is ridiculous, man.
What an interesting, interesting thing that I didn’t even know it was going on.
Igor, what else can you say about the scams that people are running into? What
other warnings can you give to List Builders?

Igor: Well, these four scams pretty much sum up all the potential ways you can get
scammed. Obviously, if you watch for language and behavior you can spot some more.
But these should be enough to keep you away from 99% of all the scamming out
there.

Jonathan: I have to ask, how is Igor Solo Ads then different than all these
scammers?

Igor: Well, besides the fact that we don’t scam you? [laughter]

Jonathan: That’s one part of it, but I guess maybe I’m digging too deep into your
IP because I know that you do a lot of work on the back end to make sure that your
list is scrubbed, clean, and really up to date, so you don’t have a lot of garbage
on your list.

Igor: Well, that is true. We spoke about how we verify leads as they come in and
how we really do not send a click to the customer until that click did something
to show they’re real. Yes, as far as like qualification of the traffic, yes,
you’re right. We do go through some extra steps, if you will, to make sure the
traffic is at least real. I’m not talking about the clicks being rich or whatever,
the clicks being able to afford anything, but what we focus on is getting a real
click and getting an emotionally engaged one. That’s been our focus for the last
two years actually, and has been working really well for our clients.

Jonathan: Alright, good stuff, Igor. As we’re wrapping up, do you want to tease
out what you have coming up for us next time?

Igor: Yes, next time we’re going to talk about subject lines. Because we touched
upon subject lines on the last episode, and I stress how important they are and
how your entire faith can sometimes swing on that subject line, like if you’re
doing an email launch, like if you’re following Ben Settle, and he just did a lot
for the email launch, subject lines are really, really important to pull those
off. I decided to share with the List Builders, the five ways you can easily screw
up your subject lines, so you know what not to do, some sins not to commit when
you’re creating them.

Jonathan: Man, I’m looking forward to that. That is a wrap for another edition of
the List Building Lifestyle Show. We’ll be back with you next time.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to
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one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your
business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy
of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival .
This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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