Can Anyone Help Explain What This Email Means...

Whenever I let anyone at ALL advertise to my list I

A. Get a free copy/membership of whatever they're trying to sell. (To review and make sure it's QUALITY and your list will get value from it, also great perks)

B. Charge BEFORE hand based on the size of your list and quite possibly how well your list converts, not how many clicks your list will get the person, that's just strange.

-Paul

Hey Moneyland,

I will give it a shot!

A solo ad is one where you as a list owner send an email blast to your subscribers regarding someone else's product or offer (usually a free offer but that is your decision as at the end of the day the list is yours). Now since it is your list, you decide how much to charge for the mail out. For example you could say that you will send an email to 1000 members for a certain $$$ value. So lets say if you put a price of $100 for sending it to 1000 people then you are charging 10 cents to send the email to one subscriber. So it all depends on what you think your email list is worth and how much you would like to earn out of a solo ad mailing. Please note the example I mentioned above is not the most efficient way of doing a solo ad as I mentioned sending the email to 1000 people and not actually getting them to open your email and having them visit the offer page of your customer.

There are more popular variations to this.

One of them is where you assure your customer a certain number of clicks to his squeeze page. So lets say you have 10000 subscribers in your list and you assure your customer that you will send him 1000 unique visitors to his squeeze page (Lets say for $100). Now what you do is start sending mail out to may be 5000 subscribers from your list and see how many of them go to the squeeze page (of the person who pays you for solo ad). Lets say you have 800 people visiting the page. Now you need to send another 200 people to honor your commitment. you may go ahead and send an email blast to may be another 1000 people from your list and make sure that at least 200 people visit the customer's landing page.

So basically to answer your question, based on this example you have charged $100 for 1000 unique visitors looking at your customer's (the fellow who pays you for solo ad) offer. That means you are charging 10 cents per visitor.

This kind of arrangement works very well for many marketers. Its a win win situation for the buyer as well as the seller given that it is handled properly. I will share some of my thoughts with you regarding this

1) You must know what your list is worth. For example if you have a buyer's list then you may want to charge more for the mail out as compared to what you would charge for a mail out to a list of freebie seekers. That's because a buyers list is proven to have purchased through you or from you in the past and will trust your recommendation a lot and possibly will bring in more sales and value to the solo ad buyer.

2) A solo ad is not about selling a mail out blindly. It certainly is not a deal between the buyer and seller. In my opinion the most important thing to consider in a solo ad deal is the subscribers in the list. Their interest should never be compromised. So when ever you do a solo ad make sure that the offer you share with your subscribers is good for them and will ad value to their life or their business. One of the good ways of doing it to make sure that the solo ad talks about something valuable being given away for free and the product must be aligned with the requirements on the list. For example if you have a list of offliners make sure you promote a squeeze page something in lines of offline marketing.

3) One must keep the interest of the solo ad buyer in mind as well because the experience they have working with you will spread through word of mouth and you want that to be good publicity for your solo ad business. If you ensure that the solo ad offer (offline niche for example) is being promoted to a niche interested in offline marketing then the click through ratio will be higher and a lot of people who visit the page will accept the offer thus adding value to the solo ad buyer's business.

4) Doing this ethically will strengthen your opportunities of getting more solo ad offers and after people realize how much value you can bring in through your list you will be able to quote higher prices for mail outs as well. So it is a win-win-win situation if done right.

So to answer your question how to decide on a cost per click system, that is completely up to you based on how much your list is worth to you.

Apologies for the long post in here, but I sincerely hope this helps.

Cheers
HonestIM