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In today’s fast-changing digital landscape, businesses need to bring their A-game forward. Long gone are the days of traditional advertising consisting of newspaper and TV ads.  There are over 6 billion smartphone users, and this number is expected to rise further. This means most people use their smartphones to perform most functions, including accessing social media sites and their emails. Naturally, this paves the way for a newer, different world of advertising consisting of Facebook ads, Google ads, and solo ads.

For people living under a rock, solo ads are an easy and effective way to promote your business, product, or service on another person’s subscriber list. This is how it works. When you purchase solo ads traffic, you pay for the sender to send an email containing a link to your business website or product to their entire list of subscribers. The number of people that click on your link will depend on how big the subscriber list is. You might pay for the number of clicks you get, a cost-per-click (CPC) model, or the number of emails sent out.

Now that we know what solo ads are, how do we use them? Solo ads sellers use a pay-per-click model, so it’s a direct way to get your audience’s attention. After all, the email lands right in their inbox. This should automatically make it better than Google and Facebook ads, right, where the audience may or may not see your business/product service. While this seems like the obvious choice, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In this guide, we’ll weigh in on the pros and cons of solo ads.

✔ Solo Ads are Cost-Effective

If you’re just starting out as a business, or don’t want to allocate a huge marketing budget, solo ads might be your best bet. Here’s our pick of the top 5 solo ad vendors to get you started. However, do bear in mind that nothing is for free. If you have a couple of hundred dollars, you can easily purchase some solo ads, and expect a decent amount of traffic from the cheapest solo ads. Solo ads generally cost somewhere between $0.30 and $0.50 per click. So if you get 100 clicks, one solo ad will cost you between $30 and $50, which is not bad at all, especially if you’re a new business.

While the popularity of solo ads has significantly increased, there are many solo ad sellers so the price remains within the range mentioned above. When we talk of solo ads cost, we aren’t talking about cheap ads that could incur the risk of bot clicks. One of the most renowned and reliable marketplaces for good solo ads, Udimi, follows the same price. The minimum cost of an Udimi solo ad is $0.50 per click, going up to a maximum of $2.00 per click, which is affordable.

Of course, the higher the number of clicks, the higher the cost. But think of it this way – if you have a higher click-through rate, you’re creating more brand awareness. Some of these clicks might even result in a purchase, which generates more revenue for the business. Keeping in mind the price and the result you’re getting, it is safe to say that solo advertising is a viable and cost-effective strategy, especially for new businesses.

× They Are a Risky Investment

Unfortunately, not everything about working with solo ads providers is smooth sailing. While solo advertising is not illegal, it does have some characteristics that render it a risky investment. When you purchase solo ads, you are relying basically on what the seller tells you (this is different than PPC ads). If they tell you they have 1000+ beauty subscribers, you believe them, hoping to get back sufficient traffic to make a profit. Otherwise, it’s money down the drain. However, you can’t rule out the possibility that they could be talking a big game-a lot of solo ad sellers do that. But you’re paying for the number of clicks you get, so that does soften the blow.

However, what’s even scarier is that the email list could consist of bots that act just like regular email subscribers and quality traffic. They open your email, and even click your website but naturally, they don’t convert. The rising problem of clickjacking serves the business owner no purpose except to waste their money and direct phony traffic to their website. Moreover, many subscriber lists use ‘scraping software’ to gather email addresses. That’s an inaccurate program that hops from one website to another, randomly collecting any email addresses it finds. As you can expect, many of these email addresses don’t convert as a lot of this public data is outdated.

You can find solace in the fact that the email list you choose is somewhere between all good and all bad. You might get some traffic, and that’s good enough for your purpose. But please be warned there are many scrupulous solo ad sellers out there who might scam you with a large scriber list that is mostly filled with bots. Fortunately, there are ways to discern the shady ad sellers from the genuine ones.

If you are looking to sell your own email list, check out our guide for selling solo ads.

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✔ Solo Ads Generate Targeted Traffic

No matter what your product or service, every business can use traffic. This traffic is what will lead to conversion and then revenue. The whole purpose of advertising is to generate traffic for your website. But not just any traffic, targeted traffic. In digital marketing, targeted traffic is when people visit your website with the intent that it can satisfy their concern – for example, help them purchase a product or answer a query. If you want to know why solo ads are effective, we first need to establish the importance of targeted traffic vs. traffic.

If you spend time attracting random traffic, you aren’t getting anything from it. It is hard to convert a user who is just not interested in your product. For example, marketing lingerie to men won’t really help, would it? So you’re just wasting money with ANY traffic. You need targeted traffic, and that’s what solo ads offer. A solo ad lands in your inbox. If you’re interested, you will click on the link, either to purchase the product or to find out more. Either way, these are people who are interested. If you’re not interested, you will simply ignore the email.

As a result, the CTR (click-through-rate) is a solid measure of the effectiveness of the solo ad. If you get 1000 clicks, these are all the people who made an active choice to open your website. This naturally increases the chances of conversion. One might argue that you might not get any clicks, but in that case, you aren’t wasting money because you’re paying for the number of clicks, i.e., pay per click (PPC).

× Dead Traffic

Internet marketing solo ads run the risk of dead traffic. This means you’re getting clicks, but they’re coming from bots or people paid just to click on the link. The solo advertising market has become overly saturated, so you will find many shady solo ad sellers. However, if you steer clear of that, you’re good to go.

This scam is increasing day by day. There are some solo ad red flags that you should keep a lookout for. Scam solo ad seller pages will be full of testimonials. Carefully sift through these to discern the real ones from the fake ones. Another telltale sign is very low pricing. Here, you should consider if it’s a brand new seller trying to garner. If not, don’t fall for this trap.

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✔ Reach a Vast Audience

Working with a solo ad vendor is a foolproof way to reach a vast audience without much effort. You might have a great website, but what if people don’t get to see it? If you want people to know about your business to increase visibility or want to inform the audience of a product launch, there is nothing more quick and effective than a solo ad.

You don’t need any technical know-how or need to create your own email list to reach people (or even write the ad, though you may want to write it). You don’t even have to wait a long time to get traffic. The seller will take care of all this for you. Most ad sellers have a mailing list of 100k+ subscribers. This number can help you reach a larger audience. Solo ads solve the problem of a limited attention span that comes with Facebook ads and also evade the need to fight for placement, as is the case with Google Ads. Solo ads can be an extremely viable part of the marketing strategy, especially for business owners who want to create awareness of their brand.

Final Word – Solo Ads ARE Worth It!

While knowing the pros and cons of solo ads is important, you need a careful and strategic plan to succeed with any digital ads. While it is an undeniable fact that there are many scam solo ad sellers that sell fake traffic at very high or very cheap prices. But if you manage to sidestep this and find reliable solo ad sellers, there is nothing like it.

Solo ads providers can generate targeted traffic for your website, increase brand visibility and awareness. It is perfect for new business or affiliate marketers with limited budgets. With its PPC model, you will literally pay for the number of clicks you get, so you do end up achieving your ultimate goal. Solo ads are the perfect pre-warm marketing activity that you can avail at a flexible price. Allowing you the liberty of conversion tracking, solo ads are a viable tool for your digital marketing strateg.