Safelists
Safelists are email lists that you join, agreeing to receive email from other members of the list in exchange for the right to send emails out to other members. Safelists are a bit like traffic exchanges, in that the other members don’t want to join anything under you, they want you to join under them (or buy their product, or whatever makes them money).
The best safelists to use are those that are credit based. In a credit based safelist, you can only send out emails if you have credits. 1 credit per member who receives an email is typical. You earn credits by reading the emails other people send you and viewing their websites. This gets your splash page in their view.
The main safelist I currently use is GOTSafelist. GOTSafelist is a free credit based safelist. As a free member you can send an email once a day to 2500 other members, assuming you have the credits available.
You earn a random number of credits from reading other emails and viewing their websites. You can also earn cash and banner credits, so it’s worth setting up a Marketing Pond banner in your GOTSafelist account so that when you earn banner credits, you can use them.
In a credit based safelist, your subject is more important than the text of your email. People will be receiving many, many emails. They cannot possibly read them all, unless they’re obsessive about it. So they’ll read ones whose subject catches their eye to get credits, and delete the others when they get tired of viewing websites. You must have a subject that will get them to read yours. The subject must be on topic with the website they’ll view.
Once you’ve signed up for GOTSafelist, using a brand new Gmail address for your safelist email and your primary email for your administrative email, you need to setup your hotlink. Go to the Advertise Now menu and click “Add Hotlink Sites”. A hotlink site is the website that another member will have to view in order to get credit for reading your email. Add a hotlink site that points to your Marketing Pond splash page. As a free member you can only have one hotlink site setup.
When you have 2500 credits built up, go to Advertise Now and click “Post Safelist Ad”. Make sure your hotlink site is listed as the hotlink to use. Enter your title, perhaps something like “How you can Make Free Money Online”. Or come up with something catchier than that. Enter the text of your email. The text isn’t all that important, but it does help to prepare the viewer for the website they’ll see. So keep it short and on-target, and include a link to your Marketing Pond splash page. Nobody will click that link, they’ll all use the link at the bottom of the email that gets them credits, but it looks professional to have the link in the body of the email.
Be sure to check the box that says to save the ad, so you don’t have to type it out again next time. Click send and your email will go out to 2500 random members. You’ll have to wait 24 hours before you can come back and do it again, but the next time you’ll choose your saved ad from the dropdown box, and everything else will get filled in automatically.
Note that GOTSafelist does provide its members with the opportunity to send solo ads. These ads come to your administrative email instead of your safelist email, and give you lots more credits than a safelist email. It isn’t unusual to get 700 credits from a solo ad email, where you might get 20 credits from a safelist email. The number of these solo ad emails is quite low, perhaps two a day. The boost in credits from them is quite nice.
The key to success with safelists is to keep your website in view every single day, if you can manage it. You won’t always have the credits for it, but send out an email whenever you get to 2500 credits. Many people won’t signup the first time they see the site, but after they’ve seen it multiple times they may be curious enough to click through to see what this Marketing Pond thing is all about.
Also see the page about other safelists.