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