A Word About Cheap Solo Ads And Setting Realistic Goals
I want to make this weeks post to talk about setting realistic goals for yourself and the truth about using cheap solo ads if you choose that route for your marketing and also about free advertising in general. The reason for this is that I want new and current team members to understand what it really takes to be a top recruiter and what you will need to put into this if you truly want to see success. For those who want it bad enough, I am sure that nothing is going to get in your way.
This will also hopefully answer the question I get a lot from my downline about what they need to do to get more signups and what it is that they are doing wrong. First off let me just tell you that there are no secrets so stop trying to find them. Everything that works I post here and hold nothing back. I am not doing anything different then anybody else and if I found something new that works, you will be the first to know.
First a word about free advertising verses paid advertising.
This is real simple:
Free advertising - It works but don’t expect to get rich overnight. This takes much longer and the results are slow and steady over time and you must never stop doing it.
Paid advertising - This works also and much faster but will require capital from you to test and track your results. If you are not using ad tracking don’t even bother doing paid ads because you will not be able to track your ROI or return on investment which is the only way to consistently make money with this.
If you are looking to get rich quick it’s not going to happen, but you can get rich slow and build residual income over time. It takes money to make money so if you are afraid to lose money your never going to make it. You have to start by changing your attitude about money. The way I look at it is like this. If your in debt and working a regular job or even if your not in debt and working a regular job, you will NEVER be financially free and always working paycheck to paycheck so you really have nothing to lose by trying to build your own business and finally get out of the trap of a fixed income.
Instead of buying that $47 ebook on the secrets of website traffic or how to build a million dollar downline, try using that money to advertise instead. At least the advertising can give you return on your money. The book will only give you knowledge which is great but if you don’t put that knowledge into action, it will never make you any money ever.
Before we start I have said it a million times and it’s the most important thing that you will need to make your business grow: Set yourself up with some AD TRACKING now!
I recommend Adtrackz or if you want a web based service use Adminder.com
Cheap Ezine Solo Ads
If you are expecting to buy a $5, $10, or $20 solo ad and get hundreds of dollars back think again.
You need to understand the purpose of using these ads and how they can help you earn more money in the future. It is just your first step towards making big money with solo ads and the testing stage. If you have heard about big marketers making thousands with solo ads they are not doing it with cheap solo ads. These ads are used for testing that waters before you move on to more expensive advertising. All big marketers use these to test their copy and response to see if it is worth it for them to spend hundreds of dollars on the big ones. They might run them multiple times and tweak them each time till they get the highest converting ad.
Don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely do well with a small ad and get a couple of signups, but don’t expect to be on the leaderboard with a $20 ad it’s just not going to happen.
If you see someone who has made the leader board and is making $1000 in bonuses, you can assume that they probably spent a couple of hundred dollars on advertising to get that type of return or they could of even spent more and took a loss for the week, it happens sometimes. You just have to position yourself so you are in profit the majority of the time and cut your losses through ad tracking.
David Parnell spends thousands of dollars in solo ads every week to make the money he is making. It takes money to make money so if you want to roll with the big boys, you are going to have to spend big money and practice good cash flow to always get a return on your investment and always track your ads.
If you don’t have a lot of money my advice would be to start on a smaller scale and build yourself up with free ads and cheap advertising like PPC and experiment with some cheap solo ads until you can make a bigger profit. Rome was not built in a day.
I want to get this out so new affiliates don’t get let down and feel like they are not getting anywhere. I know that some of you have no experience with solo ads and you need to understand how it works so you don’t lose money you can’t afford to lose.
Go out there and start experimenting. Send out 1-5 ads a week and track the results. You start to see how different headlines and body copy effect click through rate and conversions and you will be on your way to being a ezine solo ad expert and profit almost every time.
Just take consistent action and you will see results. Stop procrastinating and spend time doing useful things like ad tracking. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results it’s just not going to happen.
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How To Find Targeted Ezines To Advertise In With Solo Ads
This week I want to talk about the main advertising force behind Residual Wealth Factor which is the use of Ezine solo ads. If you have not started sending them out yet you are missing out big time. There is a reason why David can get more then 100 sign ups every week and that is because he constantly has solo ads in circulation and tracks the results so he can reinvest his profits back into the campaigns that perform well. It’s really not that hard to do. All you have to do is get ad tracking software and place a code on your website which tells you how many hits and how many leads you get from whatever solo ad you placed. If you run a campaign and get a lot of leads which lead to GDI signups, then run it again until it does not work anymore.
Before you spend money on solo ads you should have ad tracking software or sign up for a web based service.
I personally use Adtrackz because it is software that runs on your own server and you only pay once. You can also use a service called Adminder which is subscription based and runs online.
I have seen a lot of you sign up for the VIP team but still have not tried out solo ads. I run at least one every week. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, but if you want to grow your business fast and get your site in front of the right audience, then this is the way to go. You should run at least 1-5 solo ads every week in addition to the free advertising methods I teach to maximize your list building and sign ups.
In addition to the list of ezines that are on the team website there are also other ways to find targeted newsletters to advertise in that are potential untapped goldmines of new prospects and signups.
If you don’t want to do any research and want a complete directory of ezine publishers to contact for advertising, I suggest you check out The Directory Of Ezines. It’s a one time fee to join but will save you a lot of time and hassle of searching for ezines to advertise your solo ads in. David uses this one as one of his sources for ezines.
You are not just limited to the ezines on the team website. There are many other ways to research your own ezines and find new and profitable newsletters to advertise in. Here is how you would do it.
Go to Google and do a search for ezines. Put a keyword in quotes to target an ezine that our target market would be in.
Example: “mlm” ezine, “network marketing” ezine, “work at home” ezine, “internet marketing” ezine. Come up with your own variations also and keywords.
Go through all the results and find ones that accept advertising and do solo ads. We only want to deal with solo ads becuase these will be our own mailing to the subscriber list without any other ads involved.
Now we want to take all of our potential ezines and pre-screen them to try and judge weather or not they will be good for the ads we will be placing. Remember that just because an ezine has a lot of subscribers does not mean an ad will be effective or not. The price of an ezine also has no impact on an ads performance, but generally the quality or number of subscribers will effect the price of the ad.
1. Sign up for the ezine.
Use an alternative email address for your ezine subscriptions. You can then see what kind of solo ads other advertisers are placing and decide if your ad will be something the subscribers will be into. If you see an ad that is run every week, this is a good sign that it is a profitable campaign and the person running it is having success with it or else he would not rerun it again and again.
2. Contact the publisher.
This next step is optional but highly recommended if you really want to investigate further about your ad source and if it is right for you. You can either email them or call if they have a phone number and tell them you are interested in advertising in their publication and would like to know if anybody else has run a similar ad or if they think it will be something their subscribers will most likely sign up for. This way you can know if the subscribers have ever been exposed to your program already by other advertisers. This is a great way to find untapped markets.
3. Set up ad tracking and run the ad.
Now you are ready to submit your ad with your ad tracking link. Just sit back and wait for the ad to be publish and watch the results. You want to basically take the amount of leads you get and compare that to the number of GDI sign ups you get so you can estimate your conversion rate. If you get 100 leads and get 8 GDI sign ups, your conversion rate for GDI sign ups is 8%. This is really just an estimate. The only conversion rates we can really track are lead sign ups and we have to estimate the GDI sign ups compared to how many leads a campaign brings in. If we had our own product we would be able to better track sales conversions, but because we are affiliates of GDI, we can’t install tracking code on GDI’s website.
4. Reinvest half of your profits back into advertising
If you placed an ad that cost $100 and you got 20 GDI sign ups you would get a $400 bonus from GDI. You would simply keep $200 for profit and reinvest $200 back into placing new solo ads and then keep repeating the process. Don’t worry any money that you lose can be written off as a loss and reported at then end of the year because you now have a home business and all the tax advantages that come along with it.
Bonus Tip!: Before you run solo ads you can always test your ad copy in a number of free safelists to see which copy converts better before you placed the real paid ad. Try changing around headlines and body copy. Sometimes just one word can make the difference between a winner and a loser.
That’s about it for solo ads. Go out and place at least 1 a week at a minimum. That’s the only way you are going to build your GDI business fast and keep the momentum going. Once you start making enough money and are getting 20 sign ups a week, you can have ads running on autopilot that bring in cash 24 hours a day.
