So you keep seeing the phrase and nobody will give you a straight answer. Fine. What are solo ads? A solo ad is you paying someone who already has an email list to send an email promoting your offer to their subscribers. No banner, no sidebar, no sharing space with anything else. One email, one link, yours.
I have been selling them for 12 years to more than 4,000 customers, and about 85% of them come back and buy again. So I have had this conversation a few thousand times. Here is the version without the sales pitch wrapped around it.
You have an offer. You need people to see it. Building your own email list from zero takes months before it can send enough traffic to matter.
Somebody else already did that work. They spent years collecting subscribers who opted in for the kind of thing you are selling. You rent one email send to that audience. You pay per click, not per subscriber, so you are paying for people who actually showed up, not for the size of somebody's database.
That is the whole product. Email goes out, people click, they land on your page. Everything else is detail.
Here is the sequence on my end.
You place an order and tell me where the traffic goes and what your offer is about. Takes about two minutes.
I write the email. Personally, every order, not a template with your link dropped into it. This matters more than most buyers realize, because the email sets the expectation for what people find when they land. If the email promises one thing and the page says another, the clicks are wasted and neither of us can fix it after the fact.
The email goes out to my subscribers. Clicks start arriving within 24 hours of the order.
One more thing about the email itself. People ask why I write it instead of letting them hand me a swipe. Because I know how my subscribers read and what they respond to, and after 12 years of doing this I can usually tell from your offer description what angle is going to land. You know your offer. I know my list. That split is the whole reason this works.
Visitors land on your page. From that point it is entirely your job. Your page converts them or it does not. Your follow up sells them or it does not. I can put the right people in front of your offer. I cannot make your offer good.
This is the part that separates buyers who make money from buyers who complain.
A click is a visit. It happens once and it is gone. If somebody lands on your page, does not buy in the next 90 seconds and leaves, you have nothing. You rented their attention for a minute and the lease expired.
An email address is different. That is yours. You can mail it tomorrow, next week and next month. Most sales do not happen on click day. They happen in the follow up, after somebody has heard from you a few times and decided you are worth listening to.
Which is why you send solo ad traffic to a one field squeeze page. One promise, one box, ask for the email and nothing else. Not to an affiliate offer directly. Send traffic straight to a sales page and the people who do not buy today are gone forever, and that is most of them on the first visit.
Seth Johnson ran 500 clicks to a squeeze page for his offer and made $965 in commissions over about a month. Not on click day. Over a month, out of the leads he kept. Here is how that ran.
Then mail those new leads twice a day for the first 30 days. Yes, twice. They are freshest in the first month, they signed up because they wanted what you promised, and if you go quiet for a week they forget who you are.
They work when you have these things.
An offer in a market where people read email. Make money online, business opportunity, affiliate marketing. Audiences that live in their inbox.
A squeeze page that does one job. One headline, one promise, one field.
A follow up sequence written before the traffic runs. At least a couple of weeks of emails ready to go. The traffic shows up within a day, so writing the sequence afterwards means your best leads sit cold while you type.
A reason for someone to give you their email that is not "join my newsletter."
Worth saying plainly: if you cannot answer what happens after somebody opts in, you are not ready to buy traffic yet. Not because the traffic will fail, but because you will have no way to tell whether it worked. Leads with nowhere to go look identical to leads that never showed up.
Local businesses. If you fix air conditioners in one city, a national email list is not your customer.
Anything with a long approval process or a heavy sales cycle. Email traffic is impulse traffic. It does not survive three weeks of paperwork.
Anyone with no follow up at all. If you have no autoresponder and no plan to mail, you are buying one visit per click and that is a bad deal at any price.
Anyone hoping to spend $50 and find out whether their business works. That is not a test, that is a coin flip.
A few things people expect that are not what this is.
It is not a list you get to keep. You are renting one send to somebody else's subscribers. The only list you build is the one you capture on your own page, which is exactly why the squeeze page is not optional.
It is not a sales machine you plug in. Traffic is the one variable I control. Your offer, your page, your emails and your timing are four variables you control, and they decide the outcome more than the traffic does.
It is not instant. Clicks start arriving within 24 hours, but sales usually trail the clicks by days or weeks, because that is how long it takes a new subscriber to decide you are worth buying from.
It is not a way to skip learning your numbers. You need to know your opt in rate, your open rate on the first three emails, and what those leads are worth over a month. Buy traffic without tracking those and you are guessing with a receipt.
Three options on the order page.
Mixed Tier is the standard and it is what most buyers run. It comes in at 90% or more Tier 1. It is the best price per click, and for the vast majority of offers it is the right choice.
100% Tier 1 costs more and guarantees the whole order comes from Tier 1 countries.
100% USA costs more and restricts the traffic to the United States.
Worth knowing before you spend the extra: Remy LePage ordered Mixed Tier, the standard option, and his traffic came back at 98% Tier 1 with a 40% opt in rate, at roughly half the per click price he had been paying before. He did not pay the premium and he got the quality anyway. Start on Mixed Tier. Move up only if you have a specific reason, like an offer that only pays out on US buyers.
Do this before you pay, not after.
Your squeeze page, live and tested on a phone. Load it on your own phone and opt in yourself. Half the broken pages I hear about would have been caught in 30 seconds this way.
Your thank you page or offer, working, with any affiliate link tested.
Your follow up emails loaded and scheduled.
A sentence explaining what your offer is and who it is for. I write the email, but I write it from what you tell me.
Your tracking, so you are counting your own numbers and not just taking anyone's word for anything. More on why that matters here.
Straight pricing, Mixed Tier: 100 clicks is $55, 250 is $112.50, 500 is $225, 1,000 is $450, 2,500 is $1,125, 5,000 is $2,000. Custom orders run up to 10,000 clicks. The per click price drops as the order size goes up. There are monthly autopilot plans at the same per click price if you would rather set it once and stop thinking about it.
Order 500 clicks.
That is the smallest order that gives you viable data. You get enough visitors to judge your opt in rate and enough fresh leads for your follow up to produce real sales numbers. Anything smaller tells you whether your page is completely broken, which is useful, but it will not tell you whether the campaign works.
Run it, count your opt ins, mail those leads twice a day for 30 days, and look at what came back at the end of the month. Then decide. If it worked, scale up and pay less per click doing it.
If you want the longer version of what to check before you buy from anyone, read this next.
Otherwise, you know what solo ads are now. Start with 500 clicks and go find out what your offer can do.
Twelve years of selling solo ads, condensed into the conversation I wish someone had with me before my first order. What you are buying, what it should cost, and what to do with the clicks.
September 23, 2026 · 10 min read