Safelists

What are Safe Lists?

Safe Lists are membership programs where each member agrees to get your email in exchange for you getting theirs. This way you can send your advertisements and offers out by email without having to worry about being reported for spam.

It is vitally important that you get your computer set up right for these lists. If you fail to set things up, you will be overwhelmed by thousands of emails and never get anything productive done. Please read this entire page before you join any safelists!

Are All Safelists created equal?

The statistic is, 95% of safelists are totally ineffective, meaning they NEVER have a single response from their members EVER.

How do you find the 5% of safelists that are responsive?

You can join a bunch of safelists and test them over a period of time to see what the response is. This will take a lot of tracking and testing and record keeping.

Or, you can join the safelists on TrafficHoopla.

Traffic Hoopla does all the testing for you so you can just advertise to responsive lists without months of tracking and record keeping.

If you want to use safelists at Traffic Hoopla, login to your account and join safelists from that site. Traffic Hoopla updates their list weekly.

BUT... Don't join any safelists until you read the rest of this page!

Using safelists can be confusing if you don't start out on the right track. It is important to get organized right from the start and stay organized or you will never make good use of these safelists.

Read this safelist information carefully and then read it again. Trying to rush through this will leave you very frustrated and gain you absolutely nothing. Taking one step at a time will leave you with a good set up that will last a lifetime.

Step 1. Do not become loyal to any one safelist. If they leave the list at TrafficHoopla, you leave their list. Things change and owners change plans. The best performing list this week may not be worth your time next week. Keep your loyalty for your friends, family and football teams. This is business and nothing matters but results.

Step 2. Before you join any safelists... consider your username. This is the name that will be presented to the recipient of your emails. You don't want it to be john34853. That means nothing to the reader and they may not even open your email. Pick a username that will sound professional.

Step 3. Make arrangements for adequate email storage. Set up a separate email address to use for safelists only. I recommend at least 100mb. There are a number of companies online offering large email boxes. Many are free. Choose a service that allows you to easily change your email address if needed. Some services also place limitations on the number of email messages that can be received per day. MyWay.com has a free 125mb email service. Gmail also offers a large storage area. Plus, with gmail, you can have the emails go directly to your outlook express or other email client. This will leave your email box empty. (It's a bad idea to use your main email address since most isp's will consider this email spam and you will never get any of it.)

Step 4. Start with one list. Join the top safelist and get to know what it is all about. Read everything they have to offer and make sure you know the rules. Don't send anything out yet.

Step 5. Not really a step, rather a statement from me. I don't plan to give information on this site about the functions of each individual safelist. You can get this information from the sites themselves. They know their plan better than I do and you will get better results if you follow their instructions. Please don't ask me to help you with safelists.

Step 6. Another statement... All safelists will offer you a way to purchase credits. If you are seeing real good results for your offer, this is an option you may decide to use. Do not purchase any credits from any list until you have seen definite sales that you can determine came from that list. Then don't buy credits if you can produce enough free credits from your own efforts. Only buy credits if you know your sales will more than pay for them.

Step 7. A real step... After you join your first safelist, save the link to it in your favorites or bookmarks. Create a separate folder in your favorites that is called safelists. In that folder create two or more folders. Call one "daily" and the other "other". If you want to create more than these two make one for "weekly",  "Every 3 days", etc. As you join the various safelists, add the link to the appropriate folder. As you stop using lists, make sure you delete the link from your favorites.

Step 8. Set up your email for safelists. Read this step here. Very Important! Don't skip this step.

Step 9. Organizing your ads. Create a new folder on your desktop and call it Safelist Ads. Open a notepad or wordpad file on your desktop. Write your ad in that file. Double check all your spelling and punctuation. Add any links that you are going to send with the ad. Double check that your links are valid. Save the ad in your new Safelist folder. Now when you are using the same ad for several different lists or using it more than once, you will just copy and paste the ad into the appropriate form on the safelist site. This will save you tons of time. Don't skip this, or any, step.

Step 10. Send the same ad out to the same list several days in a row. It is a known fact that people need to see the same ad many times before most of them will take action. If you get little or no response after 6 or 7 trys, tweak your ad until you get one that works. Use that same, working, ad on all your lists. When sales start to dwindle, change your ad again.

Step 11. Only use the credit mailer in the safelist programs. These emails will offer credits to those who read them. No one is likely to read email that has no benefit to them. The regular mailer in most cases will be a waste of your time. More information on Types of Safelists.

Step 12. Not really a step, just an important note. Don't join all 20 of the safelists listed on TrafficHoopla right away. Start small and work your way up. When you can easily manage one or two lists, join a third list. When that is manageable, join another, etc. Joining safelists is different from joining traffic exchanges. As soon as you join and confirm your membership on a safelist, everyone in that list will start sending you email. Just because you aren't using the list for mailings, does not mean you won't get mailings. Take this slow and move on only when you are completely comfortable with your current mail load.

If there is anything in the above list of steps that you skipped, please go back and do it. Safelists can work very well and will provide a lot of valuable, targeted traffic to your site(s). Keep in mind, you are going to get thousands of emails every day by using these lists. Take the time Right Now to set things up right and get organized. If you don't, you will be buried in email and very frustrated.

Safelists take a lot of time and learning. If you are short on time, do not use safelists!