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Finding the Best Solo Ad Sellers

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Solo ads are a great way to get traffic to your website or squeeze page. They are also great for building your email list fast. You can get traffic extremely fast and sometimes within hours.

But… Did you see that coming?

The solo ad industry is rampant with fraud and other problems. This is why you see so many people claiming that solo ads don’t work and are a waste of money.

Many sellers in the solo ad market get their traffic from very poor quality sites. For example, paid to click sites.

Some solo ad sellers even sell you fake traffic. They use a bot network to send you the clicks you purchased. Some high end bots even have the capability to opt-in to your mailing list.

Groups of people in third world countries are paid pennies to opt-in to your list. This may be real traffic and real people, but the traffic is not worth anything.

Fraudulent solo ad sellers even go as far as posting fake testimonials that say how good their traffic is.

The problem even gets worse…

Good solo ad sellers can go bad. You may have found a great solo ad seller and then months later his traffic starts to suck. Some good sellers find the easy money selling fake or poor traffic and turn to the dark side.

Good sellers can send bad traffic and not even know it. They could be buying clicks or trading clicks with someone that is sending low quality or fraudulent traffic to them. They in turn send this traffic to others and may not catch the problem right away.

The million-dollar question is; how do you find a good solo ad seller that is sending high quality traffic?

Let’s look at what you can do to locate good quality solo ad sellers.

The first step is to head on over to Facebook and start joining all of the solo ad seller groups you can find. Explore these groups and start building a list of solo ad sellers that “seem” to be selling quality clicks. “Seem” is the keyword here.

Now start looking for solo ad testimonial groups on Facebook and join these.

You will want to take the list of sellers you have gathered and look for testimonials and comments about each. Start tossing out the ones you can find any feedback on or ones that are getting bad testimonials.

You will want to look for testimonials from people you know. If you find one, contact them and ask if they did in fact write the testimonial.

Now that you have eliminated most of them, take the remaining solo ad sellers and visit their Facebook page. Do they have a real Facebook page or are they only using Facebook to sell? Does the profile look real or fake?

Next, post questions in some of the groups and see if anyone has any experience dealing with particular solo ad sellers.

Now take your list of solo ad sellers and head over to your favorite search engine. Do a search on their names. Do you see any comments or warnings about them? Do you see good things about them? Do they seem real? Does nothing come up when searching on their name? No results usually means stay away from them.

Using due diligence, you can find quality solo ad sellers. Not all of them are bad.

After narrowing down your list of solo ad sellers, you will want to make a test purchase from each. Never buy large amounts of clicks at one time from sellers you don’t have a track record with.

After a seller sends you clicks, you will want to look over the results closely. Do the opt-in emails seem real? Do the IP addresses come back to ISP’s and not hosting companies? Is the opt-ins actually downloading any lead magnet you are offering?

If everything looks good, then buy additional clicks from them.

Now don’t forget that a good seller can go bad or accidentally send bad traffic. So, keep monitoring your results on all clicks you purchase.

How to Investigate A Solo Ad Seller

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How to Investigate A Solo Ad Seller

Are you tired of getting scammed when buying solo ads? Are you tried of buying poor quality clicks from time to time?

What I am going to show you today is how to actually investigate a solo ad seller before you purchase clicks from them.

This actually is not that difficult to do and only takes a little of your time.

The choice is yours. Keep getting scammed and sold poor quality clicks or read on and find out how to investigate a seller.

When investigating a seller you will want to start off by doing a search on their name and any handles that you have seen them use on the main search engines.

I would recommend doing this search on both Google and Bing as these two search engines will give you the best and most results.

While performing these searches you will want to keep an eye out and look for any of the following.

Watch for business forum posts in the results. Read each of the business forum threads you find where the seller is mentioned or is posting.

Look for social sites showing in the results. Go look at and read the seller’s profile on each social site they have accounts on.

Watch for any other names or handles the seller uses. If you find any, you will want to do search engine searches on these as well.

Keep any eye out for complaints about the seller. Also note if they responded to the complaint. If they did respond to a complaint, was it resolved? Was it denied by the seller? Did the seller just try to blow it off?

Watch for conflicting information about the seller. For example, different addresses, different claims, different amounts of years selling. Look for anything that conflicts with the information you have seen about the seller.

If you can’t find anything about the seller in the search engines, this should toss out a big red flag. Either the seller is extremely new, or just created a new name to use to scam people. Personally I will not do business with someone that does not seem to exist. It’s not worth the chance, no matter how cheap their prices are.

Now take a visit to Facebook and see if you can find the seller’s personal page. Just search on their name or handle. You may find that several people have the same name. Just browse through the results and see if any of the personal profiles seem to be the seller.

Once you locate the seller’s personal Facebook page, you will want to look for the following. Is their profile fairly new? If it is, this could be a bad sign. Most Internet Marketers have had a Facebook page for a considerable amount of time. New profiles can be the sign of a scammer. Not always, but more often than you may expect.

Facebook is mainly a social platform and not a pure business platform, at least as far as personal profiles go. So when you see a seller’s personal profile and it contains ONLY business type buy my stuff postings, it’s usually a bad sign. It’s usually a fake profile or duplicate profile. Both are against the Facebook terms of service. Would you really trust doing business with someone who blatantly disrespects a company’s rules? What rules of yours as the buyer will they break? They lied to Facebook. They are most likely not telling the truth to you too.

A popular method male scammers use is to claim they are a female. This unfortunately can cause some problems for legitimate female sellers.

You can usually spot the male poser scammers by the way they write. Does it read as what you would expect from a real female? Does it go overboard trying to sound feminine?

You will definitely want to investigate their profile pictures and any picture they claim is of them. I’ll discuss how to do this further down below.

These posers are supposed to be conducting business. Not writing a steamy novel under a pen name.

Look out for sellers claiming they are from one country but have no grasp of the native language of that country. This usually signals someone using deception to get your business. What’s sad is this is not needed. It’s a global economy and you don’t have to be from specific countries to provide quality traffic.

This one I really don’t get. You will run across solo ad sellers on Facebook that change their middle name to solo. I’m not really sure what to think of this but it tosses a red flag into the air for me. Mainly because I have seen so many people do it that turned out to be scammers. Plus, they are violating Facebooks terms of service by using a fake name. For safety I would recommend just skipping these sellers unless you know them personally or have a very good business friend that has done business with them and can vouch for them.

Before you leave Facebook you will want to check the different solo ad groups for posts by or about the seller.

When looking through the solo ad groups, look for the following. Do you see any complaints about the seller? Did the seller respond to any complaints? Do you see multiple complaints about the seller? If you see several complaints about the seller, look closely at how they responded to the complaints and if they did their best to correct the problems buyers were having.

Do you see good testimonials being posted about the seller? If you do, write down the names of the buyers leaving the testimonials. You will need their names later in your investigation.

If you can’t find ANY testimonials about the seller, either they are brand new or have created a new profile just to scam people with. Many scammers open multiple Facebook accounts and switch to the next one once they get caught scamming. So watch out and be careful of a seller if you can’t find any testimonials about them.

If a seller seems to constantly post to groups that do not allow advertisements, trying to sell solo ads, they are usually scammers. Some may be new and trying to get those first sales. But  most are not. They churn and burn Facebook accounts to spam as many groups as they can. Best to stay away from these desperate sellers.

You can usually find out a lot about a seller by searching the Internet Marketing forums like Digital Point and the Warrior Forum. Just visit these forums and do a search on the sellers name and any handles you have discovered they use.

While searching these Internet Marketing forums, look for the following:

1. Do you find them making helpful posts and trying to help others? Do they post quality information? Do they seem to be well respected on the forums?

2. Do they seem to be knowledgeable about buying and selling solo ads?

3. Do they seem to only post to get their signature seen? If they seem to make a lot of posts like: Great post, I agree etc. They are only there to promote their signature link or links. If you see this type of behavior, it’s usually best to stay away from this type of seller.

4. Do they seem to argue a lot or post just to piss off other members of the forum? These types of sellers usually are just after attention and sell very poor traffic. Don’t feed the trolls by doing business with them. There are way too many good sellers available to do business with than deal with these idiots.

Most forums delete threads that are complaining about a specific individual. But watch for these threads. You can learn a lot about a seller by the complaints they receive and how they respond to them.

You will want to visit several black hat forums during your seller investigation. While visiting these types of forums, keep in mind that multiple types of people visit them.

You will find these types of people on black hat forums:

1. The true black hatters. They are discussing and using techniques that give short term results but are not breaking any laws. The techniques they are using are frowned upon by search engines and measures are constantly being developed to block these black hat techniques.

2. The criminal. They will claim there is nothing illegal about what they are doing. But, they are delusional and are in fact breaking many laws. This group also shares software and ebooks they have purchased or stolen.

3. The learners. These people are here to learn from the different techniques being discussed. Many black hat techniques can be molded to gray or white hat techniques.

4. The guardians. These people frequent black hat forums to see if any of their products are being shared illegally. They are here to protect their property and rights.

When visiting the black hat forums, you will want to watch for the following concerning the seller you are investigating. Is the seller big into black hat techniques? This is not necessarily a bad thing. Just really read and think about each of their posts. Will their black hat techniques cause the clicks they send to be low quality?

Does the seller discuss and seem to participate in illegal activities? If so, cross them off your list to purchase from. You don’t need the headache caused by this type of seller.

Now this next one to watch for is a big one. Does the seller discuss the use of bots? If they do, you will most likely be buying click bot traffic from them. Just cross them off the list of sellers you buy from as soon as you read any mention of bots.

Does the seller attack and belittle other members or people? If they do, and you have a problem with their clicks, you will probably get the same treatment. I usually pass on this type of keyboard warrior seller.

If the seller has a site, you will want to take a very close look at it and also investigate the domain it is on. You will want to do a whois search on the domain name and check the following.

Is the domain new and just recently registered? Did the seller just appear on the scene but claims he or she has been selling solo ads for a long time? If so, you will want to check the seller out a little closer. It could be that they just moved their sales business to it’s own domain, or finally setup a sales site.

If the domain is new and things just don’t seem to agree, just do your due diligence and really dig deep when checking out the seller.

If the whois data is not privacy protected you will want to compare the name and address of the seller to that of the whois record.

Are the names the same? Is the address the same as on their site? Many times you will see what you thought was a female seller having the domain registered to a guy. If the guy is not the husband or partner, be suspicious of this seller.

If they are using PayPal you will want to click the buy button to go to the PayPal payment page. Now compare the information you see on this page to that of the seller. Does it look right?

I have used this method to catch several scammers that would change names to continue to scam people but forget to change their PayPal email address. This one little step has saved me from being scammed several times.

You will also want to investigate the seller’s testimonials to determine if they are real or fake.

You will want to search for the buyer’s names in the search engines. Just like you did for the seller.

Look for information on each buyer. Do they seem trustworthy? Do they even exist?

There are a lot of fake testimonials out there, so you want to take a real close look at each buyer.

If you are just not sure about a testimonial, contact the buyer and ask.

Now you want to search for each buyer’s name along with the seller’s name using the search engines.

You want to look for patterns. Does it look like they are just trading testimonials as a group?

Do you see any relationships between buyer and seller that could cause a testimonial to not be as truthful as it should?

Look for things like husband and wife, close friends, teacher and student, coach and student, members of same membership type sites, roommates, neighbors etc. Look for anything that could cause a testimonial to be inflated, traded or just plain fake.

If the seller displays or posts pictures that are supposedly of them, you will want to investigate these pictures also.

You can do this by using Googles reverse image search. You can also use Chrome to search for an image. Just right click the image and select Search Google for this image.

When results are returned for your image searches, you will want to look for the following:

1. Watch for each picture coming up on stock photo sites. These are the sites you can purchase photos or get them for free. So the seller just happens to also be a face model? Yea right!

2. Do any of the photos come up on other sites where the photo mentions that it is someone else and not the seller? If you run across this type of situation you need to investigate further and see who the picture is really of.

3. Also watch for sellers using pictures of known or smaller celebrities.

If the seller is using pictures of someone else and claims them as their own, I would run as fast as you can to the next seller and never look back.

Now for the bottom line. You need to check out and investigate each new seller you want to possibly do business with. I hope you now have a basic understanding on how to go about investigating a seller before you spend your money with them.