What Are Safelists?? - An Introduction
Safelists are lists of email addresses, kept on a membership website, where all the members have agreed that their email address can be used by other members to send messages which might interest them
The way it works is that you can join a Safelists program for FREE. In order to join you have to fill in some basic details, such as your name, email address, chose a user name, password etc. Once you have done this you will be required to verify your email address by clicking on a link that is sent to the email address you specified when you joined. This is just a procedure to ensure that you really did want to join, and to protect you against other people signing up "for you" i.e. without your agreement
Once you are a member of the list you can send messages to everyone else simply by logging in to the members area of the Safelist and clicking on "send message" or similar. You messages is then sent out to the whole membership of the Safelist there and then with one click
The whole idea is to provide you with FREE advertising for your product, service or program. You can also upgrade to a paid membership if you wish and this will provide extra features such as sending HTML emails, earning from referrals, receiving banner impressions etc. The Safelist owners can also make money by selling "contact solos's" which are messages sent to the contact email address, rather than the usual "list email" that is used for all Safelist messages
The Downside Of Using Safelists
Nothing in life is ever as straight foward as it sounds!! and while Safelists can be an excellent FREE method of advertising your product or program, there are a number of pitfalls to be aware of
To begin with there may be many members of the Safelist, which means there will probably be lots and lots of messages on a daily basis. Obviously the more messages people get then the fewer and fewer they actually read. Overall the number of email messages that are actually opened and read by Safelist members is very small. This is partly due to the "subject lines" in messages being very poor, and the actual text of the email body being equally poor from an "ad copy" point of view. However the reason is also because people who have been "flooded" with messages, start using a different email account, which they might rarely visit, so as to stop having their inbox full of Safelist emails
As a result you should always temper your enthusiasm for Safelist by recognizing that there is no silver bullet when it comes to marketing online. The most effective way to use Safelists is to subscribe to an auto submitter service. This enables you to send out your ads to several hundred Safelists in one go - sometimes without receiving any return email messages. This could result in you sending out as many as 600,000 - 1m email ads daily. This can be a very effective strategy, especially if you are careful to chose the wording of your ads carefully and track which ads are actually being clicked. Once you are sending out so many emails - correctly worded, and results monitored - then it is only a matter of time before results will start to flow
If you consider sending out say 750,000 emails every day, then even if only say 1 quarter of 1% (i.e. 0.0025) opened the email and clicked through to the advertised site, then that is still nearly 2,000 people per day reading your message. If you compare that with sending out your message once a week to just one Safelist at a time, without an auto submitter, then assuming there were 1,000 members of the Safelist, your message would be read by only 2 people a week. Obviously its going to take lots and lots of weeks, with only 2 people reading your message once a week, to produce a sale or a program join up
For this reason I would suggest you take a look at
the autosubmitter from Ad Submit because this will give you an excellent way to get started sending your ad every day to over 600,000, with no return emails
Responsive Safelists
From my experience of using Safelists over the longer term I would say there is a group of Safelists provided by a number of specialized Safelist Hosts which are much more responsive, and often provide a much better click through rate. Of course you still need to craft your ad correctly and use subject lines which are proven to get a response, however if you post to these lists together, they have quite a large membership and you can post every 48 hours or so even as a free member
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