He Stopped Shipping Products and Made More Money

I had $1 million in inventory in a warehouse and no customers. My return on solo ads is 5 times higher. What makes solo ads work?

Tim Hewitt built a $2 million a year business and made a decision that he was no longer going to house inventory, but he realized that he could sell other people's products by being an affiliate.

Now he's been an affiliate for everything from software to potty training techniques. We're talking solo ads, which Tim says convert 5 times higher than your traditional Facebook ads.

Knowing who you're marketing to, even though it's just a solo ad, is just as important as the messaging. I started in affiliate marketing. I told myself I had too much integrity to sell a product that I didn't already use myself. I recently had a customer who bought my book, came back and said, I don't know why people say these don't work. My offers are flying out the door. If you think your business is on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, guess what? Those can go away tomorrow. MarketingSecrets.ai is the best thing I've ever seen come out of Russell and Todd.

This is Tim Hewitt. Welcome back to ClickFunnels Radio.

I'm Chris Kamada.

Joined with me as always is the man, Dante Torelli.

What's up, Chris?

Oh man, this is a good time. We've had a whole series here this week, um, of affiliates in the Canton office here of ClickFunnels.

Yep.

And we've got my main man, Tim Hewitt, here. I wanna go back in time. Okay. It's funny, Russell talks about cycling and he talks about a lot of times entrepreneurs have to do this to get to the next level. And, you know, I remember 2008, not everybody's old enough to remember like how horrific 2008 was, but you understand how to make businesses run. And in 2008 you had a thriving golf business.

That's right.

$2 million. Was this brick and mortar?

It was a combination of online and brick and mortar. So the brick and mortar was a driving range and a small retail store. The online was golf components for club makers along with custom clubs and fitted clubs, which I actually did with an online fitting form that they would fill out, and then I would get a baseline for what I could build for them.

What made you be able to scale to $2 million And then what was the catalyst that made this thing really come undone?

So the golf industry was at a very high point at that point in time. Tiger was in the news every day. Everybody wanted to play golf.

For good reasons.

For good reasons. Yeah. The component industry. Different these days. You did, very different. Poor Tiger, yes. But the golf industry for component sales, which are kind of non-branded clubs, was very strong. So there are a lot of independent club builders building complete golf sets for significantly less than you could buy in a major retail store. High quality, custom fitted with components. And so that market, the component supply market, was extremely strong.

That's niche.

Very niche. Yeah. And my suppliers were frantically providing inventory as we were demanding it. And then I was resupplying club makers. So I was a middleman between the factories and the clubmaker. So I carried a significant amount of inventory in a warehouse and we shipped same day. That was our big selling point. So you could go to other people, but they would ship you in a week or two. And I shipped everything same day. And that allowed me to capture that market. When the economy crashed in 2008, this disposable income for the golf business went away. So literally overnight, I've got warehouse staff doing nothing because there's nothing to ship. They're fighting over the one order that just came in so they can pack and ship it. You can only sweep the floor so many times during the day in the warehouse before you have to get rid of warehouse people. And so—

How many employees you have?

I had 9 at one point. Wow. Most of them part-time. So we found a program where we could employ moms, stay-at-home moms whose kids were in school. And so they would come in and work when they were available and they could leave to pick up their kids because I didn't need them. Remember, we ship same day. Yeah. So I got to get everything packed up and ready to go so they can get picked up by 4 o'clock.

Mm.

So I really didn't need anybody after that. So it was a great workforce. They were very loyal, very stable, working the number of hours they needed and then Literally overnight, I had to start letting people go. At that point, I got a call from my old boss in the high-tech semiconductor industry saying, "I have something for you in Malaysia to help me out with a factory there if you're available." So this make it so you shut down the golf business, go take that? I didn't shut it down initially. Okay. I allowed my wife and kids to keep running the supply side. I did sell the driving range, but the component supply side for another 6 months or so, but it just dried up. And at that point, we shut it down completely. And I was in Malaysia. Really? Yeah. So Malaysia was interesting in that I went from the kind of total self-control of my world, playing golf 4 days a week and working my tail off in the business, to now working for the man again. In a foreign country, although I'd been there many times before, back to my old high-tech grind in a factory, which was how to go find a whole bunch of money and save them money in the factory. So make it better, faster, cheaper. And a real skill in there and nice, happy to apply that. But I felt in many ways like I had gone backwards myself. I'd left that and now I'm back at it. And the skill was all still there, but—

It's not something you wanted to go back to.

The passion was no longer there.

Yeah.

I'd already gone through that stage. Yep.

But it was a necessity at this point.

It was an absolute necessity at that point. I had $1 million in inventory in a warehouse and no customers.

What'd you do with the inventory?

I sold it off in clumps, most of it. I still have about $200,000 of it going on eBay right now.

Still, 2026.

Yep. So when I was out of the country, I didn't sell it. It sat in a climate-controlled warehouse. And then I got back, I started putting it on eBay in a pattern that allowed it to sell. If you dumped it all, nobody would buy. You know, I got 200 of these. Well, I don't— he's got 200 of them. I know. So you just kind of trickle it out there and get— I'm getting about $0.10 on the dollar. Right.

But you're getting $0.10.

I'm getting $0.10. And I have written off the inventory costs. So the IRS and I are on good terms already.

Gotcha.

Gotcha. But is this still relevant in 2026, the exact same stuff?

Most of it is, yeah. Some of it, no. Some of it went in a dumpster. Yeah. But yeah, and what's interesting is a lot of the smaller drivers in golf are now called mini drivers.

Mini drivers.

Different than a hybrid? Oh yeah. It's a smaller driver head, but it's the same heads we were selling in the 2000s. They're just smaller and they're the same lofts, they're the same everything. They go on a shorter shaft and everybody thinks these are cool and modern. I list those as mini drivers on eBay. No kidding. Yeah, even though those heads were made in the 2000s.

It's all in how you position it.

It's all marketing.

It's a new opportunity. It's the same thing.

There it is.

He's just jumping in now. It's a mini driver.

Absolutely. And you know, they're like, the first time I put 'em up there as driver heads, nobody bought 'em. So I took 'em down for a couple months and I relisted 'em with new context, called them mini drivers, and they started flying off the shelf.

Wow. Positioning is very important, isn't it?

Absolutely. And you know, it's— what was interesting when I went back into industry, uh, is it turns out everything is marketing. Yes, it is. Whether you're trying to get a teammate to help you with a project, or if you're selling something to management or to a customer, um, it's all marketing. And so when I went back to this, to the eBay sales, it was, how am I going to position this product which is not in demand to where people have to have it. And it's all about the messaging.

100%. I mean, you had to pivot, right, Malaysia, because of pain. Okay. You're like, oh crud, now I gotta go do this. Talk to us about now how you got into online marketing though, a number of years later. Like you come back, we'll fast forward a little bit.

It's COVID. Yes, it's COVID. And I can't do my job anymore. The job that I really wasn't thrilled to do anyway, because it was in the factory. I had to go in the factory, see what they were doing, analyze their problems and help them solve those problems. Well, I couldn't go in the factory anymore. We actually tried to do some GoPro factory visits. Really? Yeah, somebody in the factory would strap a GoPro on their head and walk around and try to show me things. And, you know, I was like, nah, this isn't working. So then I went to do some searching to see what was current in the make money online, like work from home, use the internet, make some money. And I found David Sharpe at Legendary Marketer.

Is this what attracted you to the online? It's like, okay, just those things. Or is it something that you had dealt with previously?

Well, I knew the internet was an opportunity. Again, I started an internet business back in the '90s with domain names and hand-coded websites. Of course. Right. Way back. So I knew the opportunity was there. I just didn't know what it currently was. I had done some affiliate marketing, ironically, with Amazon. Because I had published books, I was part of the Amazon Influencer Program. Got it. And the early days of the influencer program actually was a real good moneymaker. You know, the cookies at Amazon were good for 90 days. The commissions were higher. You could get somebody to go follow your link in November and you would get credit for all of their Christmas purchases.

Yeah, see, and you're talking about cookies, like we're not talking about like Famous Amos. No. We're talking about these tracking cookies that last 90 days. So if they use your link, you're saying in November, and they purchase or they grab it in November, they purchase in December, that you're still getting credit for this.

For anything they purchase, not just what you sent them to Amazon for.

They'll visit any other thing.

Yeah. Exactly. So a guy goes, a guy comes in there in November and looks at something and goes back and buys his whole family Christmas gifts in December, you're getting the commissions for everything he buys. Beautiful. Now that was the early program for Amazon. They have made major, major changes since then. And you can't make money with the Amazon Influencer Program anymore unless you're a huge influencer millions of followers, then you can still make money. But everybody else just gets peanuts out of that.

Peanuts like 2, 3, 2%, something like that.

Yeah. And it's— and the cookie's very short.

Like how long? A week. One week.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

So it's like last touch almost.

Exactly. If they followed your link and bought something, great. If it's next week, sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

So the— this low-ticket affiliate marketing didn't— wasn't appealing anymore. So when I found Legendary program, it was high ticket. Yeah. And there were also courses and events and coaching that went along with his program. And these had opportunities that would solve problems for people. And my whole career was solving problems for people, whether it was, what can I do in your factory to make you make more money? How can I help you in your golf game so you play better golf? It was always about solving people's problems. And so this was a natural fit for me to take the programs that he offered and apply it to my customers' problems, which weren't, how do I make money? They were, how do I take my skill and use it to make money?

So you're in the expert space. You're teaching people to say, whatever it is, let's go out there and teach other people how to do it online.

And it took me a little while to recognize that in myself once I started online marketing again. Because that was not really what Legendary taught. It was in front of you, but they weren't pushing that. The guy who got me over that hurdle was Russell Brunson. Yeah. So ClickFunnels was the platform that Legendary used. 100%. So I became a ClickFunnels user right away and an affiliate for ClickFunnels right away. And now I wanted to see more about what was this ClickFunnels product. Gotcha. And who was behind that and how did that all work out? So that led me to Russell and Todd Dickerson and Russell's approach, the service approach. How do you do the best thing you possibly can? What's your calling? That resonated with me, resonated really deeply. So I took every course that I could in the ClickFunnels world and I absolutely fell in love with that whole path. And that's been, a game changer for me.

That's amazing. So you find ClickFunnels, you register as an affiliate, and then how do we get to where we are today? Because you do some really cool stuff today, and you're, you're really blazing some trails today doing some things nobody else is doing. So how'd you get there?

So what's really fun for me is technology and I have always gotten along very well. So anytime there's a technological hurdle for someone else, it's probably very easy for me. And so I'm able to recognize that and approach that with a solution for them that makes sense. One of the things that we've talked about while I've been here is when you make book sales and you want to sell them off your website, a lot of people don't sell print books because they don't want to deal with buying 1,000 of them, putting them in their garage and shipping them out when orders come in. Well, the, the solution to that is something called print on demand. And with ClickFunnels connected to Lulu, we can automatically do print on demand. They buy the book, ClickFunnels sends the order over to Lulu, Lulu ships it out. Lulu turns out to be the only print on demand vendor that will do that. Nobody else has an open API. So authors don't know that. How do I get an author to put up a book funnel, sell their books for more money directly instead of giving Amazon all the money. And it's through that education process and of course the ClickFunnels services that tie them and their book funnel to not just sell a $3 ebook, but to upsell to the audio, to the, the paperback book, to the signed hardcover. The signed hardcover is the one book they have to inventory, but since they're gonna sell that for $40, you can have 10 of those in stock. And you're doing very well.

So you're combining like an expert kind of track with also, you know, even e-com, that's what's unique about authors, but you're uniquely, I guess, qualified to do this, uniquely qualified to do this because you've written what, 14 books?

Yeah, published 14 books. All self-published? No, I started out trade published and I thought that was it. Well, That was the only way to go. So I sold the rights of 2 books to a trade publisher who then renamed them, changed the covers, re-edited them, took out some chapters.

Changed the author.

I'm just kidding. And I'm like, what happened to my books?

It's not even the same book.

Not the same book. So after 2 years and almost no sales, I was so frustrated, I bought my rights back. Put back in the edits they took out, changed covers again, changed the titles, and republished. And that was 12 books ago. So, you know, 14 books later, they're all self-published now.

Okay, let's, let's dive into this because this is, this is fascinating. Authors is a tough one, right? One, people have an idea, they want to write a book, but there's a physical limitation, I feel like, with a book. You go out and you say, okay, we can sell this hardback book for up to I don't know, let's go high, $60. But beyond that, there really isn't anything. So how then are they making money?

Well, here's where it gets interesting. So I'll start with the books that are not obvious. And this is the fantasy science fiction space. Okay. So fantasy and science fiction are never thought about as an expert skill. It's a writing skill. It's not an expert skill. You don't go on and take a course then. Oh, wait. Right. You can. Guess what?

Because usually upsell-downsell is exactly that. Like, okay, we're going to show you how to do something. That's what this book's about.

So the first time I talked to a fiction author about a book funnel, at the end of our kind of general conversation, I said, "And oh, by the way, you should teach other fiction authors how to write fan fiction because that's a skill." Fan fiction is not just get out a pen and paper and write it. Fan fiction means you have to understand the world you're writing in and you have to extend it in a way that other fans of that world will appreciate it. So if you're going to write a Star Trek fan fiction book, it better be a Star Trek book. It can't be a Battlestar Galactica book.

Right.

And he went, "I can do that, but how do I do that?" So now we're back to my expertise. Is turning his expertise into a course he can sell to people who are interested in writing fan fiction.

I mean, this is, this is such an interesting entrepreneurial track, is you get very good at the thing so you can then teach other people how to do the thing.

Yep. And here's the fascinating part for me. When I started in affiliate marketing, I told myself I had too much integrity to sell a product that I didn't already use myself. So everything I offered as an affiliate, I purchased and learned either enough to apply it myself, or if I couldn't apply it, it wasn't applicable to me, I learned it enough to be able to recommend it to people who it was applicable to.

Give me an example.

How to child— how to train your child, how to potty train your 2-year-old.

Okay.

Okay. That's a product that I provided as an affiliate. Did you have a 2-year-old? Nope.

Okay.

I had 3 kids, but they were well-grown by then. And I did not use any of those methods. That's a longer problem. No, and I didn't use any of those methods to potty train them. And the funny part about it is, why did I offer that? I offered that because a woman I was coaching had a 2-year-old who was always screaming whenever she was on the phone. That triggered the kid, right? She's on a call, the kid starts to scream. And I said, well, giving her advice, right? The old grandfather advice. And finally she says, "Oh, if you could only teach me how to potty train this girl because she just refuses to do it." So I did some research and I looked for a product from a reputable person that taught potty training. And sure enough, I found it. I became an affiliate, went through it. I obviously didn't apply it, but I went through it.

You didn't practice the potty training technique?

I did not practice the potty training. Worked for me. I went through it to see what she was doing and it looked like it made sense. There were a lot of great referrals. And so I turned my customer on to that.. And that was my first affiliate in the potty training, first affiliate sale in the potty training business. I since worked with the author of that course to make a number of her courses available on OfferLab. No kidding. And she, she was a little, she's very internet afraid, which was interesting to me. But she's not afraid of the money that comes from selling her courses online. So she's very happy with what we've done. I ghostwrote a book for her. Oh, I shouldn't say that. Anyway, I ghostwrote a book for her. And while we have some of her courses now out there in the, in the wild, and they're doing quite well. The entrepreneur, right? You gotta, you gotta spin it any way you can where you can help people. And it's all about, and for me, it was helping her because she wasn't getting her message out to people. She had great material not being marketed. And so by helping her with the marketing side, she now has more confidence to create more child development material. Totally. That she wouldn't have done before, so.

Right.

Wow.

You like to teach your students about solo ads.

Oh, yes.

I've never really even heard of this. Break it down.

What's a solo ad? So solo ads are a path I took fairly early on when I was looking at how to add people to my mailing list. And I ran across a very short article that said, Don't spend money on solo ads. They don't work. And I went, oh, what's a solo ad? I don't know what that is. I've been buying ads on Facebook for a long time. I know how that works. But, and I bought a bunch of Google ads. I know how that works, but I don't know. I never heard of a solo ad. So dug in, the engineer in me said, go figure this out. I found a vendor that was in the same niche that I was marketing in, and I bought a bunch of, I bought a solo ad. Now, solo means you're sending one email. To somebody else's list, a solo ad, text only. You're buying clicks from somebody's mailing list.

Are you buying that mailing list or is this a JV?

You are, you are buying clicks from his list. So he sends the email out and you bought 100 clicks and after 100 people click on your link, you're done.

Ah, okay.

So that solo ad is put in front of his list members until you get your clicks and they give you some extra at that point. And the idea here is you're using the list owner's authority. Yeah. To send an offer to his list that he has vetted and said, my list members would like this, so we'll send this to my list. And, and you then can collect their emails on your landing page. That's how you bring them into your world.

Is this in your voice in the email, or is it in the the person who owns the list, their voice?

Great question. You can do both or either. I chose to do it in my voice because my voice is on my landing page. Yeah. My message in the email, my message on the landing page.

Congruency.

My message in the free lead magnet I'm giving away in exchange for their email. So that's why they give me their emails. I'm giving them something free, which is what the email, the solo ad email was all about.

But are you missing any of the authority transfer?

Well, because it's coming from his list, from him, it's coming from him.

So it says from Dante.

Exactly. Okay. So Dante's List members trust Dante. The email is from me and they're used to that because they get both. Okay. They know they're on a solo ad list, right? They're there intentionally. If I give them the right message that gets them to my landing page, which matches my message, Yep. And give them something that helps them, the lead magnet that matches my message. Again, you gotta stay on message here. And only after they download my lead magnet do I present my affiliate offer. So if, here's where solo ads don't work. You write an email that talks about something you're gonna give them. They go to your landing page, which is completely disconnected. And then you put an offer in front of them and that's disconnected again.

It's a different color, it's different branding. Yeah. It's a different vibe.

And they say, "Well, I don't need any of that." And they go away. So I figured out that part early. And what that does is it gives you an opt-in rate, an email collection rate that's above 45%. And that's good.

That's good. It's great.

I still wasn't making any money. They weren't working. I had a good opt-in rate. Nobody was buying. And I didn't understand why. Again, the solo ads don't work message was something that I had a hard time believing, because there were marketplaces.

But you're experiencing like, maybe it doesn't work. I don't know. First try, huh?

Well, I didn't believe it didn't work. I believed I wasn't doing it right.

Yeah. Which is the best attitude to have.

Yeah. And the reason I believe that is because these marketplaces had hundreds of vendors. If this didn't work, there wouldn't be hundreds of vendors in there.

Aha.

So I started looking at the data and thought, you know, When I get them on my list, I need to send them email that introduces who I am. I need to now build my authority, their trust by adding value in a bunch of emails I send them. Stop selling, add value. Mm-hmm. What brought them in? X brought them in. How can I give them X value? Again, stay, keep the messaging. So now you provide a bunch of value emails. Third or fourth email in, you can mention your offer again because it ties to X. Remember, you've kept that continuity, right? So when you put the offer in front of them, it's the same message that brought them in in the first place. But now you've built some credibility with them.

Yeah, I want to key in on one thing that you're saying too, because we talked about this with— maybe it was Trey—

mm-hmm.

It's like, This is so big, the branding and everything else, the voice that you're using, the colors, fonts, everything else. Because the example would be like, I walk into a KFC and all of a sudden the inside looks like a Pizza Hut. I'm just confused. Exactly.

Right.

I wanted chicken. You said it was chicken and now I'm seeing pizza. But what you're saying is, hey, we run through this whole thing. It even came from somebody else's name, but now it's you. You get a lot of these people who opt in. And now you own that traffic. So this can go from you renting this list basically to now owning a segment that opted in.

And, and here's the beauty of that. In the email, the first email is where I give them the lead magnet and I give them a link to download the lead magnet. I don't try to send it as a PDF if that's what it is, because email doesn't like that. So they get a link to download it. In that first email, I say, I introduce myself and I say, Dante, whose list I used. Ah, right. Dante reviewed what I have here to offer. And he liked this so much, he agreed to let me send this to you. And in the second email, I mentioned Dante again. And then in the fourth or fifth email, I mentioned Dante again. But I've transferred that trust now because I'm giving value. Sure. Not selling. Yep. And now they trust me to talk about that, whatever that thing is I'm talking about. They trust me to talk about that and provide more value there. I no longer have to mention Dante. Right. But I did early on in that email process because I have to transfer that authority to me. 100%. So now it's been 7 emails. In the last 2, I mentioned the offer again. And then finally, on the final email, the 7th email in this sequence, the offer goes away. By the end of the day, we get some urgency in here, um, and it's real urgency. I'm not gonna offer it again. Now, if they follow the link a week later, the link still works, but they're— I'm done sending them emails about this offer.

And this is all pushing to an affiliate offer. In this case, it's pushing to an affiliate offer you are going to fulfill on, correct?

You can, sure. But this— when I started this, it was all affiliate marketing. So then that email, we've sent them 7 emails over 10 days. And now what do we do with them? Some of them bought, most of them didn't. We're still trying to recover the ad spend, but we're getting closer. So now in 2 weeks, I send them another email, value. 2 more weeks, they get another email, value.

What do these emails sound like though? I mean, Russell has soap opera, he's got Seinfeld sequences. Are these story-based? Are they giving content? Call to actions, or just like, hey, cool, talk to you tomorrow. Like, I'm curious what your style is.

That's a great question. In the early days, they were all freeform. I had no clue what to do. Okay. Now they're more soap opera sequence.

Yeah.

And then they turn into Seinfeld sequence. Gotcha. Once we go through this whole education process, who I am and what I do, the soap opera stuff, 'cause I want them to open the next one. I want them to open the next one. Totally. And now I'm hitting them one with one-offs every couple weeks.

And I wanna explain to everybody too, like if they don't know soap opera and Seinfeld, like this idea of Seinfeld, a sitcom, right? By the end of the episode, there's resolution, it's done, and we're moving on. Soap opera, like listen, Grey's Anatomy, I, you know, my wife was watching it 10 years ago and I walked through and I'm like, I thought that dude died. All of a sudden the dude's resurrected or something. Like they continue to go on. You hook 'em, hook 'em, hook 'em, to be continued always. And so you're saying that in the emails?

Exactly. So the first, the first 7 emails, you— every email teases you for the next email.

Exactly.

After you then give them a break, you really can't come back with a teaser 2 weeks later, right? So now you're into the Seinfeld style. Everything is resolved in that email.

Well, they've gotten to know you. They know I can trust you a little bit now. And so they're like, oh cool, another, you know, Tim snippet or whatever.

Exactly. So we provide some value. And then in that email, we also remind them about the offer. Now we're still talking about the original offer. But what makes solo ads work is you understand what brought them in. And you have multiple things that can help them in that space as part of your affiliate arsenal, part of your product arsenal. So after my second or third email after the sequence, so I'm into 6, 8 weeks, I introduce another offer. You didn't seem to be interested in X.

We're testing bait here.

Yes. I have something very similar that does this. Would you like to see more about it? And I might not even give them a link there. But I'll follow up then tomorrow with a follow-up email and the link. So now we're 6 weeks in, they went through the sequence, they've gotten a couple of reminders, and now they get a short 2 or 3 email target for a new offer. I see. And then we repeat that over the next 6 months. Now, what makes solo ads work is the follow-up sequence. This sequence that we're doing right now, bringing in more products that are related to why they came in in the first place to try to solve that initial problem, is what makes solo ads work. Because After 6 months, if they haven't purchased, now they go on my general email list and they get all my general stuff. But to make solo ads work, you have to track all of this. You have to know where they came from. So when they buy, you can say, this person came from Dante's list with campaign 3. Ah, and now you can, you can track back after 6 months and say, I spent $100 on ads, 'But I made $4,000 in sales over 6 months.' 'Yeah, let's do that again.' 'We're gonna use Dante's List.' 'Yeah.' And if you don't do that, you don't know if that guy bought from social media. You have no clue why he came in. 'Yep.' And so you don't think Dante's List is any good.

How do you track? Is it just UTMs?

So using short links and ClickFunnels and UTM parameters, I know what brought him in, and then I ultimately know what link he clicked to buy from.

Explain that process just a little bit more, like the UTM thing and short links.

So UTM parameters, um, are something Google invented to track things about a link click. And the beauty of ClickFunnels is it supports something called short links, where you take a really ugly affiliate link that's got—

you're talking like a Bitly kind of concept.

He's talking like if you go register as a ClickFunnels affiliate, you're going to get clickfunnels.com?aff=jklmnoie. Well, that's the affiliate link.

Yeah. Right.

You want one sexy. That's more of a vanity.

Well, when people, people see that link, it scares them.

It's scary. And a confused mind always says no. So if we just share those raw affiliate links, people get nervous and I don't know, is this a robot? Am I going to get hacked? And they don't click. So you're using short links to make them short and sexy. And what they're used to seeing.

And it has my name on it. Yeah. The short links are my branded links. So they've been getting emails from me, from my domain. Now they get a short link to my domain. It's me.

Because it's not like Bitly, it's not bit.ly, it's a short link of your own custom domain. So you just own the domain timhewitt.com and you can make up your own short links now. Exactly.

Yeah. Bridge page goes to the bridge page, not to their direct offer, or it does?

Well, So here's, here's where it's interesting. When they're in your email list, when they're in your email list, you can send them directly to the affiliate offer. You already own the traffic. Yeah. When they're not in your email, that's when you want the bridge page. You have to put them on a landing page where you collect their email. Bingo. So the other reason people fail with, with, with solo ads is they will put their affiliate link in the solo ad. Yes.

And they're not collecting that to make it.

They don't even have any idea who clicked it.

Correct.

Yep. Did, you know, did something happen? I don't know.

This is where I think most of them are making mistakes.

Absolutely is. So the beauty of— so I wrote a book, Solo Ad Secrets, which teaches the whole process of solo ads. And ironically, the section on how to actually do a solo ad is probably the shortest chapter in the book.

Is that right?

The rest of it is all about marketing, follow-up, messaging, what should it look like, how do you track it, how do you tell if a vendor's good, all the stuff that wraps around solo ads that makes them work.

Really? The packaging?

Well, yeah. And again, solo ads work really, really well in certain niches if the vendor's list is ready for that. Now, when I only bought 100 clicks, that was very intentional because I bought 100 clicks from Dante. I bought 100 clicks from Dante's cousin.

Right.

I bought 100 clicks from Rachel.

Yeah.

And I'm testing this traffic to those lists all with the same process, all over an extended period of time, 3 to 6 months, to see whose list is more appropriate for that type of offer. And once you collect that data, you have the answer.

Tim, this is so crazy to me. I think everybody overcomplicates all of these funnels. It's people and then it's data. We can clearly see what they want, what they don't want. And when we find out what they want, we pour gas on the fire.

Absolutely right.

We find more and more from that list.

Exactly right.

And the other interesting thing there is because we can do— we can easily test alternatives, alternate— we can test alternate landing pages, we can test alternate lead magnets.

Exactly.

Against the same list and different lists. It might be that Sarah's list responds better to this type of offer, this type of landing page to the same offer. So when you bring them in.

Right. Yeah, there's a lot of nuance.

There's a lot of nuances here. And I hate to say it this way, but if I'm buying clicks from a woman's mailing list, I make sure that I lean heavily on emotion in the email and the landing page.

More than like logic, you're saying?

Yes. Even though you're always looking at benefits, I make sure that the emotional side of it is highlighted. Because her list has been built more than likely with her messaging.

Totally.

Which is going to be different from my messaging, which is too logical. And I know it's too logical. I force myself to appeal to emotion. The engineer in me keeps dragging it back to feature function. And I slap myself and say, no, no, no outcome and emotion. Thank you, Russell. That's a Russellism. That's right. I always have to think about. But she's built her list primarily. And if you look at the emails on her list, they're mostly women. So, you know, a woman-owned list is going to be majority women. And they came there with an emotional tie to what she was doing. So you market that way to that list. You don't market the same way to that list as you do Dante's list.

Yeah, your, your whole soap opera sequence is very different.

It is.

Your Seinfeld's different.

And so knowing who you're marketing to, even though it's just a solo ad clicks, is just as important as the messaging.

But Tim, this sounds like a lot of work. Why don't I just buy Facebook ads?

I was gonna say the same thing.

The people who are on solo ad lists are already filtered to your target audience for a given niche. So my return on solo ads is 5 times higher for ad spend. Is that right? Than my return on Facebook ads.

Because you know the influencer, know the person that owns the list and can curate that somewhat.

I've— remember, I've tested it. I've tested it with 100 clicks. It's converted for me with 100 clicks. So now when I buy 5,000 clicks, you know what to expect. I know the quality I'm getting. If I buy 5,000 impressions on Facebook, those are just impressions. Yeah. I'm only going to get a fraction of clicks out of those. Yeah.

And not so much direct response either.

No. And well, then the audience isn't vetted. They're just people on Facebook that met my criteria. And they're impressions, not clicks. So huge difference is I know what I paid for from Dante's List is somebody clicking my link and going to my landing page. I know that's what I'm paying for. It's all I'm paying for. Not paying for people seeing my email. So more people are going to see it than click on the link. So when Dante sends that out to his list, 1,500 people might see it for 100 people to click it. Right. I'm only paying for the clicks.

Which, that seems like a crazy shortcut.

Oh yeah.

Well, this is going back though. Okay. Talk to us though about how you go find these lists and what are those agreements like? Is there a database out there? Like, oh yeah, list broker type things. Where does that start?

Yeah. So there are affiliate or affiliate, there are solo ad marketplaces. Where solo ad vendors sign up and become vetted by the marketplace. Okay, you can have some confidence that they're not scammers. There are solo ad resources on Facebook, groups on Facebook where you can find testimonials for solo ad sellers who are individuals. And there are some highly noted individuals out there that are pretty easy to find if you do some searches who will have good reputation, you can ask about them in, in different marketing groups and find out relatively solid advice on whether you could use them or not. I recommend a half a dozen of them in my book that I use.

So you give a list in the book?

I do. And I keep my— so the main marketplace is called Udemy. And the Udemy marketplace is the best one out there for learning how to play solo ads in a safe environment. The vendors are all vetted. If somebody should send you 100 bot clicks, you go back to UDIMI and say, hey, look what they sent me, it's all bots. And they'll refund you and they'll kick the vendor out.

Got it, got it.

So it's a very safe place to start. Good. Some of the best converting traffic, however, is not there. It's on a privately maintained list, which you're paying more per click for. So rather than paying $0.40 a click, I might be paying $1.50. But it's higher quality traffic. The list manager pays closer attention. He only sends offers that are very specific to his list. He might turn your offer down. Say, "I know I'm going to make money online, Space, but your offer doesn't really fit my audience, so no thank you." And that's a good sign. When a list vendor tells you that, I always ask, what is the profile of your list members? What are they interested in? 'Cause he's got a list that's selective.

And you may have an offer that fits that list.

I absolutely might have an offer that fits that.

And you hear him being so selective, that means you're like, wow, his list is really gonna be great. Maybe I wanna go find an offer that I can try on his list.

Oh, exactly. If they're really taking care of their list members, then they're valuable. Right. And you need to have more than one vendor regardless, if you go to Udemy and you're using half a dozen vendors and figuring them out, that's a good thing. Because lists go stale. Even the high quality lists can go stale for certain types of offers. So you might make several successful approaches to a given list, and then the next one goes flat. And then it goes flat again. So remember, we're tracking everything. Yeah, we're still always tracking everything. So every sale that comes down the pike, I go back to how did I get that, that lead? And if it came from a solo ad vendor, I actually keep a spreadsheet which scores every offer against every list so that I can go back and say, I'm no longer going to send anything like this to Dante's list because it just doesn't convert. But Sarah's list is still converting great, so I can still send these offers to Sarah's list. And again, It's all about tracking the data. I'm an engineer. I like data. You have to. It's about tracking the data and then making decisions based on that instead of emotion. Again, the people who, who come to me and say solo ads don't work, when I ask them what they've done, said, oh, I bought, I bought 500 clicks from this list guy and I didn't sell anything. Well, okay, how do you know you didn't sell anything?

Tell me more.

Yeah, yeah. Did anybody on the list behind this buy something in 6 months? Oh, I don't know. They just, you know, they got on my list, you know, I converted them and nobody bought anything. Nobody bought my offer.

Get the data. Get the data.

And so remember, the key to remember is these are still cold leads. They're still cold leads. They trust the list owner.

Right. They're cold to you, though.

And they're cold to you. Yeah. So you have to do that warm-up and you have to do it intelligently. And then they work quite well. So there are limited number of niches in the space. Health is always gonna be out there. Make money online is always gonna be out there. I recently had a customer who bought my book, came back and said, "I don't know why people say these don't work. My offers are flying out the door." She's in the health niche. Turns out the health niche lists are more conducive to purchasing than make money online. They don't see as many offers. So the health niche sees supplements. Yeah. You know, they see gym memberships. They see all kinds of things that really appeal to them. Where the make money online guys will get a lot of stuff that's, you know, here we go, you know, instant AI money, just do this and you're going to make a fortune. And so they're a little more skeptical. Yeah.

Tim, this is crazy, man. You're like blowing my mind on this stuff. It's cool. I always think I've learned this world and I understand it. Yeah, it's not a new concept.

But we need to revisit these things.

Absolutely we do. So I'm curious, do you use Udemy for your testing grounds to like prove an offer and see if there's life and then take it private? Or, or do you skip Udemy and just go right, right to private?

What's your system for that?

So I do both. I have my selected list of vetted vendors that I have tested now, and I know what kind of offers they want. So when I have a new offer, I go back to that list and see what has converted with them before. And I'll test the new offer there. So that might be some Udemy vendors, it might be private, but it's still just a test. Every new offer starts as a test and you don't scale that offer until it's proven to scale. Yeah. And that's really key. You can throw away money very fast buying clicks for something nobody wants. Yeah.

I want to go back, 'cause we're here talking about affiliates. You become a really good affiliate too, especially like for ClickFunnels. But I think a lot of times, you know, when, when somebody does a launch, right? A lot of times people buy from affiliate because they have a good bonus, but that's usually just a launch. When you're talking about something that's more evergreen and like longer, for example, your authors, are you combining, hey, here's ClickFunnels because you can use that within what I'm teaching you. Talk to us maybe about how you like package this.

Sure. So my author services business helps self-published authors get the things they need to be successful. Well, one of the things they need to be successful is a landing page to collect email addresses and a follow-up mailing list. Now, I will actually host that for them for some period of time as part of that service. If they want to go beyond simply collecting the email list, now I need to move them over to their own platform, which of course is ClickFunnels. If we do a book funnel, that immediately puts us into ClickFunnels space. There you go. I'm not hosting that. So that whole migration of their marketing of their books and related services will end up in a ClickFunnels account.

That's amazing. I just think that people need to broaden their like minds to say, okay, how can I maybe backpack onto some of these things and attach it? Because there is huge, huge opportunity you know, combining these things rather than just, oh, I'm going to go push this particular product. But when your product— and that's one of the things David teaches too, like it's kind of a meta thing.

It's huge opportunity. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the beauties of the ClickFunnels platform and everything it offers is I can facilitate a move to that for any of my authors. I don't care what platform they're coming from. They've got a Wix website, they're just got a landing page on bookfunnel.com. It doesn't matter. Whatever they're doing today, I can transition that into a more successful sales platform in the ClickFunnels environment with all the services and functionality available there than what they have today. And it's cheaper. Yeah. So, you know, first they say, oh, I'm real happy. I'm real happy with my WordPress site. You know, it's only $297 a month. And all they got is WordPress. And what are you doing for email? Oh, yeah, well, that's another thing. And I'm, you know, I'm paying $70 for that. And pretty soon you know, you're up in the stratosphere price-wise. And so when I talk about you can do everything you need for the entry-level ClickFunnels account, plus here's the other services you get, and I've got templates for you to get all that stuff started next week.

Genius.

It's, it's a no-brainer. Yeah. There, how fast can we move?

I love that. Great advice. Before we end, We do something here at ClickFunnels, ClickFunnels Radio, where we do rapid-fire questions. Are you ready for some quick back and forth?

Absolutely.

Dante's quick at this. This is brought to us by Funnel Hacking Live. If you do not have your Funnel Hacking Live ticket yet, what are you doing? Make sure you're going to be there. Do not miss it in September in Las Vegas at the Fontainebleau. Go to funnelhackinglive.com/cfr and get your ticket. Are we ready for rapid-fire, Dante?

Here we go. What's the most overrated traffic source right now?

Instagram.

Ah, what's the most underrated?

TikTok. Wow.

Okay, great. What is, what is your favorite funnel type for a new user to start using solo ads?

Lead magnet.

Lead funnel over a bridge page.

A lead funnel. Absolutely.

Why?

Because you have to grow your email list. Your business is in the email list. I don't care what business you're in. Your business is in the email list. If you're— if you think your business is on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, guess what? Those can go away tomorrow.

Yeah, it's just renting.

You're renting space. Your business is in your email list, and most businesses have a cold or stale or no email list.

Absolutely right.

I start there with everybody.

Absolutely right. You talked about your email sequences. 7-day sequence over 10 days. If you could only keep one of those emails in the sequence, what would it be?

It would be a value email.

Which one?

What day? 3 or 4. Yeah. Yeah. Why? In 3 or 4, I'm really establishing who I am, gaining that credibility with them because the credibility is everything.

Great answers, Tim. How are you implementing AI in your business right now?

Oh, AI is fun.

So how can that even be rapid fire?

Right. MarketingSecrets.ai.

There you go. There it is. You're enjoying that, huh?

I'm loving it.

That's so cool.

Yeah, absolutely. It's the best thing I've ever seen come outta Russell and Todd Dickerson.

Ooh, that's a statement right there.

Yeah.

That's a statement, Tim. Okay. Last one for you. Finish this sentence. If you can't be patient, you must be driven. Come on with it, Tim.

Oh, that was great.

Yes, we do. Fantastic. And you pull that out on a rapid fire. You know how many people stumble on that? Good stuff, Tim.

Tim, you are amazing, man. Thanks for being such an awesome member of the community.

Thanks for asking me to be here. This has been fun.

So much fun. Hey, before we go though, if somebody wants to learn more about you, Solo Ads, where do they go to learn more about you, follow you, whatever?

So the easiest way to, to kind of run me down is what I've, I've come up with a generic branding page now for me, www.thewhit.com. Which is the wit if you're, uh, if you're in Peoria.

There you go. Awesome, Tim. Thanks again, man. Great episode.

Thank you.