Do Safelists Deliver The Goods?

Internet Marketing's first lesson is that spam is something you just do not do. It can get you in more trouble than you ever imagined, including being banned or fined. Because of that, hundreds of thousands of people have begun to rely on and use safelists. These are gigungulous email lists of people who have agreed to let someone (anyone) send them some information about something. They end up being huge exchanges of spam among people who don't read them.

Just to see how they work in general, as an experiment for myself, and to see if they lived up to the promise of driving traffic to my sites, I set myself up with four safelists: Croc-Ads, GlobalSafelist, Herculist, and ListDotCom. I randomly picked these from the hundreds (or maybe thousands) out there. For all of them, I entered the required information for my own email, along with a zippy headline and content. I viewed these emails going to millions of empty email boxes, finding their way to an eagerly awaiting business opportunity seeker, jumping out at them and demanding a click.

Instead, I found my own mailbox inundated with emails. Over fifty the first hour. Two hundred by the end of the day. A week later, I was averaging over SIX HUNDRED emails a day, all promising me the Promised Land. Think about that for a minute. I get over six hundred emails a day. I don't even scan through them anymore looking for the latest and greatest.

Here then, is my advice on safelists: (if you really think you have to use one)

1. Create a phantom email account first. Gmail seems to work the best, as it can easily handle the volume. Just make sure you have a place separate from your regular email box.

2. Start with only one safe list. In a few days your inbox volume will level out. You might want to add one after that, but if you begin with six hundred emails a day like I did, you won't get to more than a few of them anyway. You will spend more time deleting them than reading them.

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 conclusion, based on first hand experience, is that there are far more effective ways to drive traffic than safelists. They might have been a good idea a few years ago, but for now, they offer no way to stand out from the other 599 emails.

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