A is for Advertising

The first thing you learn about Internet Marketing is that spam is a giant no-no. It can get you banned, fined, and in more trouble than you ever imagined. Because of that, literally millions of people have turned to safelists. These are gigantic lists of people who have told someone (anyone) that it is okay to send them some information about something. They turn out to be 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, if you really think you have to use one, here is my advice on safelists:

1. Create a junk email account first. I have found that Gmail works the best, as it can handle the volume easily. Just make it something separate from the mail box where your regular email comes.

2. Start with only one safe list. In a few days your inbox volume will level out. You might want to add one after that, but if you begin with six hundred emails a day like I did, you won’t get to more than a few of them anyway. You will spend more time deleting them than reading them.

3. Track your results for a specified period of time. If your website is not getting more traffic, cancel your subscription and move on to other methods of hit generation.

My experienced conclusion is that there are several far more effective ways to drive traffic to your landing page. Perhaps they were a good idea at an earlier time, but for now, there is no way to stand out from the crowd.

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