What are Safelists?

A Safelist is a collection of people who have voluntarily submitted their email address to a Safelist owner to receive email from and send email to, all the other members of the Safelist. The usual nature of these emails is advertising, so in principal, you are receiving the right to submit adverts in return for receiving adverts from other people.

This process builds up a list of willing participators, which is generically called a "Safelist".

The reason it is called 'Safe' is because all the subscribers are 'opt in', which means that they have chosen to give their email address. It is not therefore considered to be SPAM, because any mail received would be deemed to be solicited mail. For this reason, it is known as 'Safe'.

You have the right at all times to remove yourself from any Safelist and this will terminate your account and you will not receive or be able to send any more emails.

There are thousands upon thousands of Safelists on the Internet. Many are free to join, and many charge a fee. This could be a small lifetime fee, an annual fee or a monthly fee to retain the privilege of sending emails to the rest of the members of that particular Safelist. Those Safelists that have different options for joining (maybe a free and a paid option) will normally distinguish the levels of membership by how often you are allowed to send mail to the other members. For example, a free member may only be allowed to submit adverts once a week. A paid member may be allowed to submit ads every day. Paid members may receive less ads, or even none at all. There are a lot of variations.

Safelists are also transient, which means that new lists open every day and many close everyday. So the management of your Safelists can take a little time, but if you do a little maintenance every day, your portfolio of lists will remain clean and responsive.

In my opinion, Safelists are a critical part of every marketers armory, and if you do not use Safelists you are missing out on a huge (and very cost effective) form of advertising.

You do need to subscribe to a lot of Safelists to be effective, which does leave a problem if you have several hundred to submit to. If you did this by hand, then you would spend all day just submitting ads. Fortunately, the Internet is a great place for entrepreneurs and there are a number of excellent submitters available on the market. There is a separate section for these elsewhere in this directory, suffice to say that some are reasonably priced, some are very reasonably priced and some are free!

The Process

When you first sign up for a Safelist, you will need to give some information in order to join. It is simpler (in my opinion) to use the same details for each Safelist. To that end, my advice is to download an excellent tool called RoboForm which can remember the fields that you want to fill from a template that you create. This means that you can fill in your Safelist application foms with the touch of a button. You can download this excellent piece of free software from the following link:-

RoboForm

I have found that the following fields are the most useful to fill in.

Name:
Contact Email Address:
List Email Address:
Username:
password:
PayPal Email Address:

And simply fill in the information. It is then readily to hand to automatically fill into the joining fields for each new Safelist that you join.

Name

The 'Name' would simply be your own name. It would generaly only be used by list owners to contact you, and would not be generally available to all other list members.

Contact Email Address

By way of explanation, the 'Contact Email Address' is one where the Safelist administrators or owners may need to contact you. This should be an address that you use regularly, You will get a few adverts to this address, because some list owners (usually those that give you their service for free) but not many, use their Safelists to earn extra income by selling ad space to other members. You also need to be aware that Safelist owners will need to contact you from time to time. If you don't give an email address that you use regularly for this purpose, you risk losing your account with the Safelist.

List Email Address

The 'List Email Address' is the one where the bulk of your adverts will be received. You will receive an awful lot of email, so the box needs to be either very big, or one that you remember to clean very regularly (i.e. empty). You should always scan through your Safelist adverts, because you will often find new Safelists to join, or things that catch your eye. But, you must at all costs avoid letting the email box fill up, because once your messages start bouncing, you will start losing Safelist accounts. It is very time consuming (and therefore costly) to have to re-join them all, so try and avoid this problem.

You can probably get away with using a Hotmail account in the early stages, but many Safelists now ban the use of Hotmail, because they do not offer a great capacity to free members, and people willoften forget to empty them out. So they will bounce mail. My advice is to buy a Safelist specific email box and use that as your List Address. They are not expensive and a necessity in my opinion. Have a look in the resources section for the email box that I recommend.

Username

Try and select a user name that is easy to remember, and also unlikely to be used by anyone else. It saves so much time if you can use the same information for each list. Try and keep the name between 6 and 10 characters if possible, because some (a few) Safelists restrict how many characters you can type into the Username field.

Password

Again, try and select a password between 6 and 10 letters that you will easily remember.

PayPal Email Address

Many of the Safelists will pay you commission if you refer users and they upgrade. Most pay via PayPal, so it is worth obtaining an account (which is free) just in case it is needed for this purpose. Click on the button below and follow the links for your free account if you do not have one.

PayPal is worthwhile in joining. Once you get established marketing on the Internet, it is an easy and convenient way of transferring funds, and manu organisations pay their commissions this way, so once you get established, it will be a necessity.

Clickbank

Although not strictly necessary for what we are doing here, I strongly suggest that you set up a Clickbank account. It is free to join, so there is no cost involved. The reason for doing this is that many products that you come across on the Internet (including some that I recommend), sell their products using Clickbank. The benefit from your perspective of doing this is so that you can get commission from resales of products that you recommend. Some of the programs that I have suggested that you join sell products on your behalf as a sideline to the main business (at no additional cost to you). Many of these generate their commissions through Clickbank, so it is strongly advised that you set up your free Clickbank account, if you don't already have one.

You can join Clickbank by clicking here.

Maintenance

You must go into your submitters and test your logins periodically.

Yes, you will get reminders of changes, and yes you will forget to act on some emails.

It is vital that you keep you hard earned Safelist portfolio in good working order, because they will lose their effectiveness if you don't..

• If you find a dud link, clear the safelist out - there are plenty more where that came from.
• If you find an incorrect login, delete it and if necessary, rejoin.
• Check that you haven't accidentally be set on 'vacation' mode. This might be because an email got bounced, but if this occurs, you won't be able to send mail! This involves no more then setting a switch on the Safelist, but you probably will not be able to send ads straight away. This may seem like a pain, but it is infinitely better then being deleted.
• Keep testing those url's!

If you keep up the good quality of your safelists, you will find that you will have excellent marketing leads for years to come.