A is for Advertising

Spam is a giant no-no. It can get you banned, fined, and in more trouble than you ever dreamed. Because of that, millions of people have turned to safelists, which are lists of people who have told someone that it is okay to email them. In reality, they are huge exchanges of spam among people who don’t read them.

Just to see how they work in general, as an experiment for myself, and to see if they lived up to the promise of driving traffic to my sites, I set myself up with four safelists: Croc-Ads, GlobalSafelist, Herculist, and ListDotCom. I randomly picked these from the hundreds (or maybe thousands) out there. For all of them, I entered the required information for my own email, along with a zippy headline and content. I viewed these emails going to millions of empty email boxes, finding their way to an eagerly awaiting business opportunity seeker, jumping out at them and demanding a click.

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.

So, here’s my advice on safelists: (if you really want 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. Sign up for only one safe list. When your inbox volume levels out, you might want to add more, but if you start with six hundred a day like I did, you won’t read any of them anyway.

3. Track your results for a week or so. If your website is not getting increased traffic, (actually, increased CONVERTED traffic), cancel your subscription and move on to other options.

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.