Safelist Advertising

If you want free or very cheap advertising, safelists can get you a little or a lot of traffic. How good the traffic is will be dependent on a number of factors. One of the biggest is what you are marketing. Virtually every member of safelists is another Internet marketer. If what you are marketing is of interest to Internet marketers, you have a good shot at getting lots of good traffic.

Another factor is the quality of the safelist itself. I tried a number of safelists that were just wastes of time because they were not active enough. It was pretty obvious when I signed up and received almost no email from the list.

Speaking of getting email -- you never, ever want to use your primary email address or any email address that you use for other things with a safelist. If you register for an active safelist you can get hundreds of email messages per day. Google's Gmail service is a good choice for creating an account just for safelists. Google does not seem to care how many accounts you create, so even if you already have a Gmail account you can create one for safelists.

You will almost always need to use a separate contact email address. I also suggest not using your primary address for this, as most safelists will send you frequent "solo ads" to that address. Solo ads are paid advertising that most safelist operators use to increase their revenue. You should have a generic "junk email address" that you use for things you need to check periodically like account confirmations. This is what you should use for your contact address.

The safelist I have been using with fairly good success is GOT Safelist. They have over 8,000 members and they are very active. You can email 5,000 of them right away with a free account. You can earn more credits by viewing ads and by other means. You can also join for a monthly fee or buy credits.

Paid members can send more frequently than free members. I initially wondered what good it would do to send out messages advertising the same thing multiple times in a day. After I used the safelist for a little while, I understood. No one is going to read anywhere close to all of the messages since there are hundreds per day. That means there is a randomness to who opens what when. Within two days I sent a similar message out four times and had just as much response the fourth time as I did the first.

You need to be a little creative so you catch the readers eye among those hundreds of messages and also to make what you are marketing something that would interest marketers.