Safelist Advertising Explained

Do you like free and low cost advertising? Do you like being able to advertise to targeted, pre-qualified prospects? Of course you do!

It is absolutely true that email advertising is one of the best, low cost advertising methods available to today's Internet marketer. That's why it is no surprise that we all get blanketed with spam messages everyday in our email accounts.

The question of every Internet marketer then is, "How can we utilize email as an advertising tool without breaking spam rules and getting shut down?" When answering this question we need to come up with solutions that enable us to email lists of "opt-in" subscribers.

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Opt-in means that the person has signed up and agreed to receive email from a particular party. In order to gain access to opt-in email subscribers you can build your own list, rent someone else's list (such as ezine advertising or solo email ad advertising), or you can utilize safelist advertising. When ezine advertising or solo ad blasts are too costly, many marketers turn to safelist advertising.

A safelist is simply a group of people who agree to receive email advertisements from each other for the privilege of sending their ad to others in return. It is a big opt-in list in effect.

There is a lot I could explain about safelists, but I'll just make it easy by telling you that the best type of safelists to use are the ones that are private and owned by individuals, hosted on their own servers which they own or rent, and not the huge public safelists like ones administered by Yahoo!

There are many categories of these private owned safelists. The categories of safelists are:

1) Free membership safelists

2) Paid only membership safelists

3) Paid membership with a free member option safelists

4) Credit system safelists

5) Paid to read safelists.

Free membership safelists: In purely free membership safelists, it is free to join and send emails. The only problems with these types of safelist are they are usually used and abused. They are many times not taken care of to well by the owners, simply because the owners don't make money from it.

In many cases the owners will use your primary contact address to email you advertisements to make it worth their while to run the safelist. They basically use their created safelist as a lead gathering tool for themselves rather than actually desiring to run a solid safelist for their members.

Free safelists also tend to come and go very quickly making it hard to keep up with them. The only way I would recommend using them is if you use an automated submission tool for posting to these safelists (such as www.safelistboys.com).

Paid only membership safelists: Paid only membership safelists are usually the most responsive type of safelists, but the drawback is that they cost money. In many cases the cost is not worth the results, but in some cases, depending on the size and quality of the list, it can be worth the investment. Initially, when many of the safelists with paid membership options are coming out, they offer specials like "free paid membership to the first 500 members." If you can then get in and join in the first 500 and get a free upgrade for life, and do this with many safelists, you can easily gather yourself up a good number of paid memberships for free Paid membership with a free option safelist:

The next type is the paid membership with a free option safelist. You can join these lists as a free member but usually with certain limitations like only being able to email once per week instead of everyday or only being able to email a small percentage of the lists members. Paid members then get full access to all the features of the safelist. These are probably the best type of safelists to join because if you look enough you can find enough of these safelists that allow free members to email the entire list once per week.

If you join a number of these kinds of lists then over the course of a week you will still have a very large reach of higher quality safelists without having to pay to join any.

Credit System Safelists: Then there are safelists where you earn credits to email others based upon either receiving email from others or clicking links in the emails for credit or by referring others to the safelist and receiving credits for it. These types of lists are usually less desirable because they require a lot more work on your part. Although, the credit based safelists are often time more responsive than others and can sometimes prove profitable as a result. Of course, if you don't have the time to be a member of these types of lists, you can usually purchase advertising to the list without the trouble or earning the credits.

Paid to Read Safelists: Paid to read email is the last type of safelist. In these lists, you must open the email advertisements and click on the link within the email for credit. This credit can then either be converted to cash or used as currency to purchase email advertising to the list.

Again, these lists are usually less desirable because they require a lot of work on your part. However, they are usually much more responsive than other safelists as a result of their credit system. Of course, if you don't have the time to be a member of these types of lists, you can usually purchase advertising to the list without the trouble or earning the credits.

So then, are free safelists even worth it? The answer is that yes, by all means, free advertising is always great and if it is worth it to you, then go for it. You just need to weigh the options. Although the free safelists don't cost you money, they still cost you time. So, it may be more worth it for you to just pay and join a huge paid safelist with 40,000 members, rather than joining 80 free safelists with only about 400 members and spending much time submitting to all those 80 free ones.

Although, if you decide to join a paid safelist, just be sure that you do your due diligence on them first to make sure it will be worth your money. Most likely if the site looks like it was created by a child, does not say how large the member base is, and there is not much information on who runs it then it is likely not a wise choice to join. Just use your head and choose wisely.

You may be wondering, "What's the best strategy for a wide reach of safelists at not much cost of time and money?" Well, the secret is in the mix of using automated submissions services and manually submitting. Although you can join and mail out your ad to safelists all manually, it will become very time consuming. This is time that could be spent on crafting ad copy and utilizing other forms of advertising. So, you will probably find it worth while to use an automated safelist submission tool to submit to all the smaller free safelists. Then, you can combine this with a plan to submit manually to many of the larger paid membership with a free member option safelists to extend your reach. With many safelists, you can even add your own chosen safelists to the automatic submission tool and automate almost the entire process.

Automated safelist submission software can be set up to automatically submit email ads you write to hundreds of safelists on a set schedule.

This software can take a bit of time in the beginning to set up, but will prove to be very useful and save you a lot of time down the road. Now it is an absolute must when joining a safelist to create yourself a new email address for all the safelist email advertisements to go to.

You will get A LOT of emails and will certainly want a separate email account to handle these emails. Although the solution may appear to be simply creating a free Yahoo! account, the issue here is that in most cases these free email boxes are too small. You will need more space to handle all the messages you will receive. To solve this problem, you can try and get a new email address exclusively for safelist use created with your ISP which usually offers you this service as part of your Internet access. You can then access your email through POP3 access and all your messages will be stored on your computer allowing you to handle all the messages. This is important because if messages sent to you start bouncing back because your inbox is over quota, then in many cases the safelist owner will kick you out of the safelist.

At this point, you have probably realized that everyone in a safelist is probably just like you, going into their email accounts periodically and deleting all their messages without reading them. So then, is it even worth it to advertise on safelists? The answer is yes because as people go in to delete their messages they are usually glancing very quickly at the headlines of the emails to see what catches their eye. If something catches their eye, then they read it. Therefore, it is safe to say that the most important part of safelist advertising is the headline. It is amazing at the amount of people I see using safelists with absolutely horrible headlines. It's no wondering many people see no results from safelists. There are a number of good books about email advertising, you should check them up to learn more about crafting good email headlines, but I will give you a quick tutorial on how to create stunningly effective email headlines for safelists.

Check out the three sample inboxes below, examine the headlines and see it you can pick out which one would be the most effective for a person scanning the headlines:

First try...

Email 100 million targeted prospect!! Spam free!!

Make a fortune on Ebay! ----

FREE Sales Letters----

Spycam better than the x10!

It's finally here!

This should help…

10,000 hits per day for FREE!!!

You should have answered

"----FREE Sales Letters----"

Let's try again...

Email 100 million targeted prospect!! Spam free!!

Make a fortune on Ebay!

Spycam better than the x10!

It's finally here! >>>>

FREE 7-day e-course on Safelist Advertising<<<<

This should help…

10,000 hits per day for FREE!!!

You should have answered

">>>>FREE 7-day e-course on Safelist Advertising<<<<"

One more time... Email 100 million targeted prospect!! Spam free!! Make a fortune on ebay!

Spycam better than the x10!

________FREE Report on the Best Lead Sources! It's finally here! This should help… 10,000 hits per day for FREE!!!

You should have answered

"________FREE Report on the Best Lead Sources!"

As you can see from the illustrations above, the most effective and scan able headlines are those which are indented with some type of keyboard art, but still look professional at the same time.

The last point I want to make is one that it is my advice to use safelist advertising as a lead gathering source rather than a direct selling source. For example, in the examples above I said things like "FREE Report on the Best Lead Sources!", "FREE 7-day e-course on Safelist Advertising", and "FREE Sales Letters" to entice people with something free.

I would then proceed to write persuading ad copy to get them to my site where there is a form to subscribe to my list to receive the information.

It is much easier to gain a list of contacts by offering something OF VALUE for free and then marketing to those contacts using an auto-responder system and working them into the sale.

Check safelist

Obviously you should change the logo and the banners.