In this article I’m going to briefly discuss click management and how to manage clicks – why, because clicks are currency!
This is a concept that I read about from Solo Ad Black Book by Matt Bacak, who currently purchases $250k of solo ads per month. He is therefore buying and managing many thousands of clicks per month.
He has also developed a system that enables him to delegate and even outsource part of the job, leaving him to manage his business based upon the data that is flowing back to him.
I learnt a number of key concepts from reading Solo Ad Black Book, which is basically a recording and transcript of a live seminar with a pdf of recommended solo ad vendors based on Matt’s scoring system. The transcript was not easy to read because Matt has a breathless type of delivery that leaves sentences incomplete as he starts off on a different strand of thought to explain what he is thinking.
Nevertheless there was a lot of good stuff in this product that confirmed a number of my own conclusions about internet marketing.
A Lead Often Has A Short Shelf Life (i.e. Watch Your Attrition Rate)
Matt operates in the Business Opportunity / Internet Marketing niche and he separates the market into opportunity seekers (90%) and the more serious players (10%) and his promotions reflect the type of traffic he purchases. However, overall the vast majority of leads are ‘on heat’ (his words) for just 30 days. This means that he aims to turn a profit from each lead within 30 days of optin… but of course he tries to do this much quicker – even instantly from his front-end sales funnel.
(TIP: This is something I noticed from our recent launch of Hangout Cash Code. We really over-delivered on this product but the drop-off of email opens and clicks surprised me after the initial month – we were seeking to create a long-term relationship but, for the vast majority of customers in the make money online niche, this is not easy to achieve, so aiming to be profitable within 30 days in our niche is an important goal!)
His Sales Funnel
His sales funnel has a range of products priced at different price-points up to very high prices to maximise his initial EPC. After free optin, the prospect is sent to a 3 second meta-refresh page which says that the free report will be delivered by email and then the prospect is sent to the front-end product which is priced at $47 (which is relatively high in my opinion but he has clearly tested this price point.) Suffice it to say that he has a sophisticated sales funnel to squeeze out as much income from the visitor as possible. From the $47 offer they go to a $197 offer with a downsell of $97 and then to a $497 offer
His Approach To Split Testing
When split-testing he initially takes a quite radical approach. He will offer either a complete ‘Make Money Online’ product or a ‘Traffic’ product and exit pop to whichever product he is not offering on the front-end. Only once he has determined the ‘radical’ test does he start trying to ‘optimize’ the sales page through further tests. So effectively the initial split-tests are radically different offers before he settles into optimizing the sales pages through further split-tests.
A Data-Driven Business
Matt believes nothing that anyone tells him. He believes in HIS numbers only and he gets those from running his own tests and monitoring the results i.e. his business is driven by data. This is a very sensible approach because there are many half-truths and lies in our marketplace. If you only get one thing from this article it is that should run your business by the numbers i.e. that you measure your performance by the key performance indicators on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Tracking
He uses Hypertracker to monitor unique clicks (in preference to AdTrackz Gold which has a small deficiency in the way it counts clicks.) Each link has an ID which includes the date, name of the solo ad provider and price e.g. Nov14Bailey100for30 (- this means that in Nov 2014 he bought 100 clicks for $30 from someone called Bailey. (I thought this was a really clever way to track his links and will be adopting this myself!)
Paid Traffic -Why Solo Ads?
Because Matt believes in managing clicks he is a great advocate of paying for his clicks. He does not like Google Adwords because of their restrictions, changes in policy and his lack of control i.e. they can shut down your Adwords account overnight. Organic traffic is just too unreliable and time-consuming to pursue and difficult to scale. He has therefore turned to buying solo ads – this is where you pay someone who has a list to send an email to their list driving traffic or clicks to your chosen squeeze page.
The Email Swipe
He insists on providing the email swipe copy so that he can say in the email copy something like ‘Click here to optin in’. This warns the email recipient that if they click on the link they will be asked to optin and this increases the quality of the clicks and conversions and makes the solo ad vendor work harder to fulfil their side of the contract.
Money/Traffic Leaks
Matt studies his numbers to see where there are ‘money leaks’ in his sales funnel and back-end marketing system i.e. where visitors are not doing what he wants them to do. By studying these areas closely, he tries to close down these leaks as far as possible to improve his numbers. He is not concerned with numbers on his list or open rates – he is purely monitoring clicks and revenue i.e. EPC. He is looking to increase his ‘click line’ i.e. the number of clicks he can send to an offer.
For example anyone not opting in on his squeeze page will trigger an exit pop with another offer and if they optin be recycled back to the front-end offer – he has two exit popups in an attempt to plug the leak on his squeeze page .
Buying Solo Ads
He initially buys 100 clicks to test the vendor and then grades them – see ‘Scoring Solo Ad Vendors’ below. If they meet his criteria of prompt deliver and 30% or more optins then he will wait one month for the vendor to refresh their list and in month two buy the maximum number of clicks that he can from the vendor. If they continue to meet his criteria, in month 3 he puts them onto a monthly order system handled by his assistant. He buys through his credit card rather than a Paypal balance because he then has recourse through his credit card company for non-delivery of clicks as he doesn’t want the hassle of going through Paypals process. He also likes his traffic to come mainly from the top 5 countries – USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (although Singapore is also acceptable.) He expects to pay between 30-90 cents per unique click.
Where To Buy Solo Ads?
If you buy Solo Ad Black Book you will get a list of recommended solo ad providers but I also recommend that you take a look at http://solochecker.com . (Here is another site where you can buy solo ads – http://www.soloadmarketplace.com/). You can also find solo ad vendors on the Warrior Forum.
Scoring Solo Ad Vendors
Matt scores solo ad vendors based on speed of delivery, under/over-delivery of clicks and % optins. The vendors score determines whether he purchases again or not.
Systems
Of necessity, because of the amount of solos he is buying, he is very systematic about running his business – he first sets up and tests the system, then delegates to his own office staff and when they can run the system, outsources parts of the system to staff in the Philippines who are managed by his office staff who have already proved that they can run the system. This allows him to scale his business safely because he gets comprehensive management information that allows him to step in and fix the system when the numbers dictate.
Affiliates
Despite holding the gravity record on Clickbank for a launch, this is what Matt Bacak has to say about affiliates: – he regards them as ‘bonus’ traffic because he wants to always be self-sufficient and be in a position to make things happen for himself. (Once again I find myself in sympathy with his thinking because I believe that affiliate traffic has the unhealthy expectation that you will promote in return whether you like a product or not – there is a sort of unspoken expectation of reciprocity which clutches at my integrity – I really want to have the freedom of deciding whether a product is worthy of promotion without that ‘I mail/you mail’ obligation!)
This is a brief recap of what I learnt by listening to Matt Bacak’s Solo Ad Black Book yesterday and I think that it provides a good framework for buying solo ad traffic – it’s all about click management and how to manage clicks.