Do Safelists Deliver The Goods?
The first thing you learn about Internet Marketing is that spam is a giant no-no. It can get you banned, fined, and in more trouble than you ever imagined. Because of that, literally millions of people have turned to safelists. These are gigantic lists of people who have told someone (anyone) that it is okay to send them some information about something. They turn out to be huge exchanges of spam among people who don’t read them.
As an experiment for myself, just to see how they work in general, and to see if they do drive traffic to my sites as promised, I set myself up with four safelists: ListDotCom, Herculist, GlobalSafelist, and Croc-Ads. I picked these randomly from the hundreds (or maybe thousands) available. For all four, I entered the required information for my own email, along with a zippy headline and content. I pictured this going to millions of email boxes, finding its way to an eagerly awaiting biz opp seeker, standing out from the two or three others which safely made their way there.
Instead, my own mailbox was filled to the brim with emails. I got over fifty the first hour, about one a minute. I had over two hundred by the time I logged off for the day. By the end of the week, I was getting over SIX HUNDRED emails every day day, all promising me that I could make the most money for the least effort. Think about that for a minute. Six hundred emails a day. That’s about one every two minutes 24/7. I don’t even scan through them anymore. I just select all and delete.
So, if you really think you have to use one, here is my advice on safelists:
1. Create a new email account first. Gmail seems to work the best, as it can easily handle the volume, but almost any provider will do if they don’t have traffic limits. Just make sure you have an address different from your regular email box.
2. Sign up for only one safe list. When your inbox volume levels out, you might want to add more, but if you start with six hundred a day like I did, you won’t read any of them anyway.
3. Track your results for a specified period of time. If your website is not getting more traffic, cancel your subscription and move on to other methods of hit generation.
My experienced conclusion is that there are several far more effective ways to drive traffic to your landing page. Perhaps they were a good idea at an earlier time, but for now, there is no way to stand out from the crowd.
