Why Use Safelists?

In my view, Safelists are an essential part of any online marketing strategy, especially for the beginner. The cost is next to nothing, and the results that are produced are an excellent return on investment. In terms of running a business, running an online venture is much, much cheaper then running a business in the 'real' world. So, it is an ideal way of generating a second source of income, which could lead, in time, to you being financially independent. However, this doesn't mean that there are no risks. In this respect, being in business online is no different to being to having any other business. This being said, if you are careful, you can reduce the risk to almost nothing, by simply being cautious.

Under other circumstances, there is no way that you could get your business off the ground without spending substantial amounts of money on advertising and promotion. However, the Internet is not normal, and having the opportunity to advertise your business for next to nothing is an opportunity that you should not ignore.

A critical part of the process of marketing online is to check responses to your adverts for their effectiveness. As part of this process I have kept a close eye on how my Safelists perform and the answer is that they always produce excellent click thru rates (i.e. the number of times a prospect has clicked from the ad to my web site). In fact, they often out perform some paid advertisements, which says an awful lot about the quality of the Safelists (and possibly about my poor choice of paid advertising).

As with most aspects of marketing online, success depends on volume; usually on how may adverts you can send out. Safelists are no different. The more you can join and send emails to, the better. I would guess that I send ads to around 1000 safelists. These safelists vary in how often they allow you to send ads, but at worst, they will allow you 1 advert per week, although many will allow more then this (you can usually pay to get your ads sent more often, but I recommend caution before paying money to Safelists). On average, you would have say 500 members per list. This is half a million adverts a week that you can send out, each and every week. For practically nothing!

You can see the downside here I am sure, in that with a large library of Safelists, you have a huge problem of submission. Sending out hundreds of thousands of emails a day can be very time consuming. Fortunately, there are many excellent submitters to choose from which make this process a breeze.

Since most of the Safelists are free, and some of those that are paid for are only nominal amounts, and the submitters are free or reasonably priced, Safelists are a VERY cost effective way of submitting adverts to a huge audience.

Another problem that I am sure you can spot is that if you are sending out hundreds of thousands of emails, then you will also receive heaps of mail yourself! Very true. So what do you do? Some Safelists still allow you to use free email accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo, but many do not any more. The reason for this is that these boxes are usually very small and fill up very quickly. Once they are full, then people who send you email will have their ads bounced back to them, and this is a big no, no. But there is a very cheap way around this, just refer to the resources section for details.

Sooner or later, you will want to start looking at paid advertising. There is no doubt that a good paid ad in a good ezine can produce excellent results. There is equally no doubt that advertising in quality ezine's can cost a lot of money. And one thing you must not do, is waste your advertising dollars. So how can you avoid this?

Safelists!

Test your ads in your Safelists first, before you pay for advertising. If your ad pulls in your Safelists, there is a great chance that it will pull in your paid ads.

So, if you are serious about creating your own marketing business online, you MUST build up a working library of Safelists to submit to. Safelists work for a multitude of reasons, and they should be at the centre of your marketing activities.