Ad Swaps
What is an Ad Swap?
Ad swapping, in the internet arena, is where you promote another person’s site to your email list in exchange for them doing the same to their list.
Why would you want to do Ad Swaps?
There are several really good reasons why you should and why all the big internet marketers gurus do email ad swaps:
1. It’s effective. Because you are recommended a site to your list and you have built a relationship of trust with them, your list will be more responsive than regular traffic.
2. It’s quick and easy. Once you have done one or two ad swaps, you’ll find them very easy to organize.
3. It’s free! Unlike most advertising methods, ad swaps don’t cost you a dime.
4. Nothing else will grow your list faster. This is the main point of doing ad swaps.
Email ad swaps are an awesome way to grow your list exponentially.
Imagine you have a list of 1000 subscribers and you do an ad swap with someone with a list of the same size and add 30 new subscribers to your list. You’ve increased your list by 3% without it costing you a cent and with little effort.
Now, if you repeat the process 5 days a week and increase your list by 5% each time, after 1 month your list size will be 1806 subscribers – that’s an increase of over 80%! You’ve gone from 1000 to 1806 subscribers in one month and it didn’t cost you one cent!
Imagine doing this every month; by the end of 6 months, you’ll have 34,698 subscribers on your list!
Some rules for doing Ad Swaps:
1. Set up a dedicated squeeze page for your ad swap partner to send their list to. Make sure you’re squeeze page had a compelling headline, some bullet points of the main benefits of your offer, and an optin form for them to fill out to get the free gift. Don’t add too much else. Keep it simple and powerful.
Don’t have a squeeze page yet? Check out my landing page handbook.
2. Only swap with others that have a similar list size to yours. This is to keep things fair. Otherwise, if your list is half the size of someone that is considering ad swapping with you, offer to email your list twice over a period of about a two weeks.
3. Ad swap with those in the same niche as yours or similar. Doing otherwise will greatly affect your optin rates.
4. Don’t overdo it. Keep your ad swaps to a maximum of 2 or 3 a week.
How do you find Ad Swap partners?
A couple of good sites are:
Be careful when using Warrior Forum to find adswap partners. There’s a lot of scammers out there so be sure to ask for references first.
Want more adswap tips? Check out some of my other blog posts:
This is a great article, but I was wondering what would happen if you did more than 2 or 3 ad swaps a week? Do search engines frown on this?
Marissa
Hi Marissa. No, adswaps don’t affect your SEO efforts in any way. Thanks, John.
I think this is a great idea, especially if you know someone who has a similar kind of customer pool and you think their site is worth you promoting. It can really allow you to open up your advertising capabilities without spending a lot of money.
Yeah, adswaps are cool and I actually was sent to http://makemoneyonlinewithjohn.com by Jit Uppal (I think it was an adswap, but maybe that was a promotion as you have an affiliate program there)
Matt Poc
P.S. Here is another site where you can find JV partners to do an adswap http://www.imadswaps.com/adswaps/ (Jit Uppal consitantly recommends it)
I used to use imadswaps.com but it has become very quiet lately.
I think that doing adswaps 2 or 3 times a week is too much. I found that my list was not very responsive after the first few swaps doing them this frequently.
It pays to be very selective about what swaps you do as well. I always follow them through myself to see what is being offered.
Sandy
I think 2 to 3 ad swaps per week might burn out your list if you are also promoting affiliate products at the same time.
Sure your list will grow but will people open at the same rates as when you had a small list?
any research on this?
James´s last [type] ..Emerging Mobile Marketing Jobs
Hi James, my experience has been that adswaps will burn out your list but because it gets you so many new subscribers so quickly it’s like a catch-20 situation.
What I’m now doing is building up two separate lists… my adswap list and a list I build through my own efforts (e.g. blog, article and video marketing). Right now I’m promoting new product launches to the second list.
The second list is quite new at the moment so I can’t comment on which one is going to be the most responsive.
Hi Sandy, thanks for the input. Yes, it’s important to be selective about who you swap with. I always check the product that is being offered and even the optin process, and if there’s something I don’t like, I won’t do the adswap. It does make a big difference in the responsiveness of your list over time.
I used to think that it would be better to do less adswaps per week than every day but what I found was that my list didn’t get any more responsive because of it. If anything, it made them even less responsive. Maybe this is because I email my list at the same time every single day so it becomes a dependable daily contact.
If you don’t want to do an adswap every day, at least send them an email with a personal message or something else… keep that daily contact.
Should the links be nofollowed if they’re adverts? Or are search engines okay with it, seeing as they’re not “paid” ads?
Good question Sam. I like to look at the destination url… if it has a good page rank and decent content then I’m happy to leave it is a dofollow link. If the website has a low Alexa raning, page rank and is not a good-looking site overall, I’d make the link nofollow.
I have not tried this technique yet. I’ll check out those adswap links.
Good advice, although I’m not sure why you’d assume exponential growth. It seems like the increase in subs from an ad swap would be more of a fixed amount, based on the size of the referring list, rather than a fixed percentage of your own list.
Great question Derek. It’s exponential because as you continue to do adswaps, your list gets larger, and you will be doing adswaps with larger lists.