It’s no secret that we have made a lot of money over the years with direct mail – sending mail through the post to potential customers.
It has changed over the years but it is still an incredibly lucrative business to get involved with.
Sadly, it isn’t as easy as it once was.
GDPR and stricter privacy laws have made renting mailing lists more difficult than it used to be…
But there is a workaround that works brilliantly for promoting products (yours or affiliates), and for building your own email lists.
It actually amazes me how few people know about this newer workaround. It is also ideal for people just starting out who have a small budget and are short on time.
Instead of renting mailing lists and sending out physical sales letters like many people did in the past – we still do but only to our own list, you now rent an email list and send a series of emails.
You don’t actually get sent the email addresses and email them yourself; you pay the owner of the email list to send an email to their list with your information and details.
What sort of email is sent differs from person to person.
Some will allow you to write the email, others will write it in their own voice to match what the audience is used to.
Some may add a small paragraph with your link at the end of their email or newsletter; others will allow you to exclusively send a full email.
Different email list owners will allow you to do different things.
What is good about this is that you can send emails to large lists of people who could be interested in what you have to sell.
Obviously, this is going to cost money, but you can start small and pay for a smaller amount of ‘clicks’.
Usually, you pay for a specific number of ‘clicks’ you get. This is people ‘clicking’ your link and visiting your webpage.
Clicks are not sales, they are just clicks on your link. This is something that people need to remember.
It is possible that you could pay for a specific number of clicks and not make any sales and so you may considered it to be a waste of money.
However…
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You also have to consider the following…
- If someone has joined your email list because of that solo email ad, then sales may come later in the follow-up emails you send to your list. When that happens, it is not wasted money.
- Some people do not aim to make sales at the beginning and simply use other people’s email lists to grow their own list by giving away a product for free.
- The list may not have been the best for you at that time, other lists may perform a lot better and so you should never judge future outcomes of email lists on previous results gained from using other different lists.
- If you are selling or promoting high ticket programmes and products you will probably only need one sale to earn back the cost of the solo ad and as stated in the first point, those sales can come later.
Yes, it is nice to make sales that cover the cost of the solo ad, and you should consider building a ‘break-even’ funnel which will earn money to cover the costs of running the ads meaning that it is free traffic and that you can run solo ad campaigns indefinitely…
But your focus should always be to build an email list.
A list of ‘buyers’ is always going to be a better list than a list of ‘potential’ buyers, but if you do not yet have a product to sell, just aim to build a decent sized email list.
Email list owners who are willing to rent their email lists can be found in many places online.
There are dedicated market places for buying and selling solo ads such as 10DollarSoloAds, Udimi, and SoloAdHub.
You can also find people on Fiverr and Facebook selling solo ad services.
There are plenty of people renting out email lists in many different niches, finding the right ones for you could be the tricky part.
But, as with all businesses, there are costs and expenses and this is one of those costs. To grow your email list, you need to spend money.
Yes, there are a few methods to grow your email list for free, but they can be quite slow.
Paid methods always reap rewards faster than free methods.
As Dan Kennedy famously said:
“Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.”
That can mean a couple of things such as:
The person or company with the biggest advertising budget will gain the biggest and best following which result in them taking the lion’s share of the market and make the most money.
And it can also mean that the more you spend to acquire each new customer means that the customer is of a better class of buyer and could be worth more money to you in the future.
Spending money to make money is the best way forward.
Streetwise Publications isn’t where it is today without spending money, placing adverts, renting lists, and sending mailings.
The truth is this… the people and companies with the biggest number of followers usually make the most money…
And those with the biggest advertising budgets can grow the biggest followings fast… so with that in mind, spending money to build an email list is a good move.
The main benefit of solo ads over other paid traffic like using Facebook ads is that you don’t run the risk of getting your account shut down.
Facebook can be a beast and has been known to close down people’s advertising accounts without warning or giving any clear reasons why.
Very often they can disable accounts after they have approved ads to run on their platform.
For some reason they change their minds and then hit you with a T&Cs ‘violation’ and disable your account… even though they approved the ads that they now disapprove of!
This happened to us a few years ago… and it is incredibly frustrating!
With solo ads, that is never going to happen because you talk with the list owner before the email is sent. They will approve your email or content and then send it at the agreed time.
With so many people willing to rent their email lists, you will never be short of people to use.
If one email list failed to deliver, you move onto another.
The fears associated with solo ads for most people are:
- It can be costly, especially if an email failed to deliver the results expected.
- You don’t know how trustworthy list owners can be.
I’m sure there are some people who will pose as solo ad vendors and will take payment to send emails to a poor non-responsive email list which they knew was dead.
These people are more likely to approach you and offer their services.
For example, here are a few screenshots of a conversation we had with a solo ad vendor in Facebook messenger:
I cannot say whether you should buy from people who approach you on social media without getting to know them better, but I don’t recommend it.
We certainly didn’t buy from this chap.
We don’t know him from Adam and it kind of feels like buying a bottle of cheap label-free beer from a tramp in an alley behind a popular well-established pub.
You just wouldn’t, would you?
It would be foolish to buy dodgy unknown beer from a tramp when there is a good pub selling quality beer that you know came from a real brewery just a few feet away.
It’s the same with solo ads, there are good market places that are just a few ‘clicks’ away and they have trusted vendors.
I recommend that you go to one of the big platforms and buy through them as they are more regulated and they often have an inbuilt review system which will give you a better idea as to how good someone and their lists are.
So why should you use solo ads to build an email list?
An email list means that you can sell products and services to people as and when you want.
It takes as little as five minutes to write an email, although the ones I send you take a little longer and that is mainly because I tend to have a lot more I want to say and share.
But here’s the thing… when you have a decent sized list, you can slow down to the point where you just need to write an email a day and the rest of the day is yours to do as you please.
If that sounds like something you would like, click the link below to discover more:
The Email Secret
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PS… A quick email writing tip for you… use real life stories and talk about real life events as they help to align people with you. Emails are as much about nurturing a relationship with the readers as it is about selling products.
Remember, no one likes being sold to all the time, especially if nothing else is being shared.
Here’s that link again:
The Email Secret
