Seth Johnson has been running solo ad traffic to his offers since 2007. That is not a beginner poking around to see if email traffic works. That is a buyer who has watched the space change for the better part of two decades, and who has a very specific reason to be careful about who he hands money to.
He says it plainly in his video: he is leery of buying from sellers he does not know. Good. He should be. He researched me before he ever placed an order, and when he finally did, it was small on purpose.
A few orders later, one 500 click run produced $965 in commissions, tracked in his own tracking, over roughly a month. Here is how that went, step by step, with nothing added.
Seth's first order with me was 100 clicks. It produced 3 front end sales.
His second order was 200 clicks. That one produced 2 front end sales.
Neither of those is a life changing number on its own, and Seth was not treating them that way. He was doing what an experienced buyer does when he tries a new source: spend a little, watch what comes back, and see whether the traffic behaves the way the seller said it would. He said each order made his money back plus some and added to his email list, which is exactly the bar a test order should clear.
I want to be honest about something here, because it matters for you. For most buyers I recommend starting at 500 clicks, not 100. Seth could learn something from a 100 click order because he has years of his own campaign numbers to compare against. If you do not have that history, a small order gives you a handful of leads and a result you cannot read. It tells you whether your page is completely broken. It does not tell you whether your campaign works. That is why 500 clicks is the size I point new buyers to.
Seth earned the right to test small. Most people have not, and there is no shame in that.
The other thing his first two orders did was buy him confidence. He was not reading a testimonial page and hoping. He had his own numbers from his own tracking, twice, before he put real money behind a bigger run. That is a better way to evaluate a seller than anything I could tell you about myself.
For the third order, Seth scaled up. He bought 500 clicks and asked for 100% Tier 1. He sent the traffic to an aggressive squeeze page for his offer.
Over roughly the next month, that order produced $965 in commissions, tracked in his own tracking. Not my dashboard. His.
His words on it: "probably my best solo run yet."
That is the part I want you to sit with, because it says something about how solo ad traffic actually pays. The clicks arrived, the leads went onto his list, and the money showed up over the following weeks. If Seth had checked his commissions the evening the clicks finished and judged the order on that, he would have come to the wrong conclusion about a campaign that ended up being his best run.
Here is the line from Seth that I think is the most useful thing in this entire case study: "the subs that he's sending me are actually openers."
Openers. Not clicks. Not opt ins. People who open the emails he sends them afterward.
Anybody can report a click count. A delivery report is a number on a screen, and it does not tell you whether the person behind that click will ever look at your name in an inbox again. That is where a lot of traffic quietly falls apart. The clicks land, the opt in rate looks fine, and then the list is dead on arrival. Nobody opens. Nobody replies. Nobody buys, because they were never really paying attention in the first place.
The whole point of buying email traffic is that you are buying an audience you get to keep mailing. If those subscribers never open, you did not buy an audience. You bought a spreadsheet row. Seth has been at this long enough to measure the thing that matters instead of the thing that is easy to count, and what he measured was that the people I sent him open his mail.
I am not going to pretend a 500 click order is magic. Two things lined up for Seth.
He sent the traffic to a squeeze page instead of straight to his offer, so every subscriber stayed on his list whether they bought that day or not. The clicks bought him leads, and the leads bought him a month of chances.
And the commissions came in over weeks, not on click day. He gave the campaign room to pay out.
Now, some general advice from me, clearly labeled as advice rather than anything Seth said. First, make the squeeze page make one promise and ask for one email address. Every extra field and every extra idea on that page costs you opt ins. Second, have your follow up written before the traffic runs, not after. The worst time to write emails is while fresh leads are cooling off in your list. Third, mail those new leads twice a day for the first 30 days. Fresh solo ad leads are at their most responsive right at the start, and buyers who go quiet for a week after the clicks land leave most of the money on the table.
None of that is complicated. It is just the part most people skip.
Seth said two more things I am going to quote.
"he's always over delivering."
And then, shorter: "His traffic rocks."
That is a buyer with almost twenty years of solo ad history, who researches sellers before he spends a dollar, describing traffic he paid for with his own money. I will take that over any headline I could write for myself.
Seth's results are his own. Your results depend on your offer, your page, and your follow up.
If you have an offer that already converts and a follow up sequence ready to go, the traffic is the easy part. Start with 500 clicks and count the openers yourself.
Remy ordered Mixed Tier and thousands of clicks. It came back at 98% Tier 1 with a 40% opt in rate, at about half the per click price he had been paying.
September 23, 2026 · 6 min read