The network marketing professional is constantly looking for an edge.
How do you get more leads, get more traffic, and ultimately get more sign-ups and customers.
One way you may have heard of and seems to be making a comeback in terms of popularity is solo ads.
What are Solo Ads?
If you don’t know what solo ads are, they are just another form of online advertising.
There are many ways to buy traffic to a landing page or website.
You can run social media ads, go for organic traffic, use youtube to generate traffic, or a plethora of other options.
How Solo Ads Work?
Basically, the solo ad industry consists of people who have huge lists of a certain type of person (people looking to make money online, people into network marketing, people looking for “opportunities”, etc.)
When you buy solo ads you pay-per-click.
If you want 100 visits to your landing page or website, you simply find a company you want to buy your clicks from and place an order.
Then you start watching the traffic roll in.
It sounds too good to be true, right?
Well, in this article I’m going to do several solo ad reviews and show you what the actual results were.
You can see how my campaigns have performed and you can decide if it’s a good option for you.
The idea behind these solo ads is to get people to your landing page or opportunity (or website) in hopes that they will convert into a legitimate lead or sale.
The real question then becomes… do they work?
Do Solo Ads Work for MLM Leads?
This month I wanted to drive as much traffic to my landing pages as possible to run some split tests.
I already know from all my other traffic going to these landing pages that these are optimized landing pages.
#1) The email opt-in page with real traffic converts anywhere from 19% to 70% depending on where the traffic is coming from.
#2) The 2nd page of the funnel (my video) converts consistently at 12-28% regardless of where the traffic came from.
That being said, I decided to try something I’ve never done before.
I wanted to try to get network marketing leads by using solo ads instead my regular paid and organic traffic.
To do this, I spent a lot of time looking at different vendors and studying how this form of advertising works.
I had heard of solo ads, but I didn’t know exactly how they worked.
Below are the details of my solo ad experiments and my results.
I can’t say you would or wouldn’t have the same or different results, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if your experience was similar.
I think it comes down to how the solo ads industry works.
Smarter Solo Ads Review
This was my first solo ad campaign.
Tracking Link Provided: Yes (Clickmagick)
Amount of Traffic Purchased: 200 visits
Amount of Traffic Received: 179 visits
Number of Days Until Traffic Started: 24 hours
Total Number of Days until all Traffic Received: 5 days from start of traffic
Total Number of Opt-ins: 84 People Opted-in to my email sequence
Total Opt-in Percentage: 46.93%
Opt-in Percentage Landing Page #1: 28.57%
Opt-in Percentage Landing Page #2: 51.39%
Total Number of Opened Emails: 12
Total Sales: 0
Total Scheduled Calls: 2
Total Completed Calls: 1 (one person was a no-show)
* It should also be noted here that during the 5 day window I was receiving solo ads, I was also receiving traffic from other sources.
That means it’s quite possible that the 2 scheduled calls I had came from another traffic source.
I was able to go back and try to figure out how some of this traffic was generated and the screenshot below is one of the squeeze pages I saw the company was using.
No wonder it didn’t produce results, people were literally submitting their email to “get their money”.
Sumo Traffic Review
Tracking Link Provided: Yes
Unfortunately, it was their own tracking link and not from a 3rd party vendor.
To me, that is NOT a reliable way to track.
If a company sells you something and then says here’s OUR data to prove it worked… that’s suspect to me.
That’s okay though because I track my own numbers.
But it’s a good to know and keep in mind when buying solo ads, especially if you aren’t doing your own tracking.
Amount of Traffic Purchased: 100 visits
Amount of Traffic Received: 119 Unique Visits
Number of Days Until Traffic Started: 24 hours
Total Number of Days until all Traffic Received: 2 days from start of traffic
Total Number of Opt-ins: 53 People Opted-in to my email sequence
Total Opt-in Percentage: 44.54%
Opt-in Percentage Landing Page #1: 30%
Opt-in Percentage Landing Page #2: 47.47%
Total Number of Opened Emails: Unfortunately, my clickfunnels integration wasn’t working during this time, so I have no data on this which could also be part of the reason for no conversions (see below).
Total Sales: 0
Total Scheduled Calls: 0
Total Completed Calls: 0
* It should also be noted here that during the traffic window I was receiving solo ads, I was also receiving traffic from other sources.
I hate that my email integration wasn’t working.
However, the traffic from here was dramatically less engaged with my video on the 2nd page of my funnel than my normal traffic.
I track engagement using Wistia so I can see how many play the video and where everybody drops off of the video.
Even though my funnel didn’t capture their email properly, most the visitors left the 2nd step in my funnel within the first 5 seconds.
This is NOT normal for me as that video usually has a much higher engagement rate.
It’s been tested through thousands of visits.
I can’t say definitively that this traffic wasn’t real but I can certainly say it wasn’t good for me.
It didn’t convert and it had a lower engagement rate with most people (over 90%) watching very little of the video.
I will say though that Sharif Abdel-Rahman was on top of his customer service.
He followed up with me a few times to see how the traffic was and how it converted.
That being said, I may run another campaign and see how it goes.
(Right here I took a break and a few months passed before I ran the next ad).
Tim P Solo Ads Review
It’s been awhile since I ran any solo ads, so after a solo ads hiatus, I decided to give them another shot.
The thing that’s so enticing about solo ads is that they are so very easy to run.
You just buy clicks and visits and you know ahead of time how many you’ll get.
You can also choose Tier I or Tier II traffic (the tier signifies country it comes from).
This time, I went to a solo ads review site again and picked the highest rated solo ads seller I could find.
Here’s what I found and what the results of my solo ads campaign was.
Solo Ads Review Results: My Last Campaign
Results (Commentary)
I’m not even going to bother with listing all the specific stats like I did above.
The results were about the same… no results to speak of.
Here’s the deal with this campaign.
As usual, I got a lot of opt-ins, but very few opened my first email which normally gets a high response and open rate.
Only 1 person booked a call and when I talked to her she wasn’t what I would consider a good prospect.
She had no money, she wasn’t motivated, and even though she watched the video she was clueless.
Plus, she couldn’t remember what she clicked on but she said she was trying to get to the what was being promoted by the email (which apparently was clickbait).
Keep in mind that while vetting these solo ad providers, I didn’t go with the cheapest ones.
That’s usually a recipe for disaster and I really wanted to find out if they worked and produced results.
I spent time trying to find the highest rated solo ads I could possibly find.
My guess is that the entire industry is just smoke and mirrors.
The sad thing and worst thing of this entire experiment is that it messes with your data.
I’m a data junkie.
All these junk clicks messes with my real data.
It makes it really difficult to know what’s working and what’s not when you have people landing on your pages who really are not interested in what you’re doing and may not even be real people.
I don’t want to track and try to enroll bots and I certainly don’t want to pay to have them visit my site.
I’m not saying any of the clicks were bots, but I wouldn’t be surprised based on the results.
People are people and my landing pages convert fairly well when it is real people landing on them.
Conclusion
3 words:
Don’t do it!
If you need to generate mlm or network marketing leads for your business, I DO NOT recommend solo ads.
My recommendation is to generate your own leads or set up your own marketing funnels and drive your own paid traffic to those funnels.
It will be more work and more expensive, but in the end it will produce better and more predictable results.
If you’d like to get an idea of how a high converting funnel works, I encourage you to go through our funnel.
Maybe you can get some good ideas and at the end of the video, you’ll have the option to get our landing page for free until we hit our limit.
All this stuff is fun and exciting, but it pales in comparison to the love of Jesus Christ. Your ticket to heaven was already paid for, you just have to get your ticket punched.
Have a great year and God Bless,
Jason & Daniele
