How many lists should you join?

No more than you can manage! Safelist advertising can be time consuming. To be effective, you need to use the lists as often as your membership level allows. This requires constant monitoring of your accounts and your email accounts.

You will need two "safelist friendly", "bottomless" accounts. One for your contact address and one for your subscription address.

Using free email services such as yahoo, hotmail, msn, lycos, every1.net, or any of the other hundreds available online will only get your list accounts put on vacation status or deleted.

Do not use your personal email address through your ISP as most of them have "SPAM" blockers in place and do not accept messages from safelist servers.  If yours does allow the messages, your inbox will be flooded with email and your personal messages will be buried like needles in a haystack.

DO NOT use an email address with an autoresponder or a "vacation" response, or with a "SPAM" filter. All of these result in messages being sent back to the safelist server (none of them are seen by anyone) - they just clog up the server so your email messages can't be sent. They also cause an enormous amount of work for the hosting company. Any of these will result in immediate deletion of your account.

Your subscription address will receive upwards of 10,000+ emails a day depending on the size and number of the safelists you join. Sign up for an email address from UltimateInbox with an autoclean feature.  That way if you are unable to go through your messages one day, the inbox is cleared for you to keep your mail from bouncing. The cost is very low and if you get others to use the service, yours may end up being free.

Your contact address will receive admin messages and possibly Paid Solo Ads. Be sure your contact address does not bounce as most admins will delete your account immediately. If you do not want to receive Paid Solo Ads, then do not join lists that send them out. Harrassing the admin because of too much email to your contact address will only get your account deleted and possibly banned.

How do you keep up with all of your information?

This is a really crucial part of using safelists. You need to maintain a list of the Safelists you have joined, including the login URL, your username and password, the frequency you are allowed to send your message, your level of membership, and your referral URL if there is an affiliate program and you might want to know the number of members in a particular list.

First thing is to set up a file in a spreadsheet format (my preferred software is Excel but any spreadsheet software will work). Label the columns as follows: Safelist Name, Login URL, Send Frequency, Membership Level, Referral URL, Username, Password, Member Count.

To make everything easier to remember, it is best to use the same username and password on all lists. There are a couple of submitters online that do not allow this and I will go into that later.

When you join a list, you will receive a validation email at your subscription address and, in most cases, an account information email at your contact address. Not all lists send the message to your contact address so you will need to keep track of the lists you join. The following are steps to take when signing up for a safelist:

1. Join the safelist

2. Validate the signup by clicking on the link in the verification email received at your subscribe address. You will not be able to send messages until this step is completed and your account will be deleted if not validated with a certain number of days (usually 5)

3. When you click on the verification link, you have the opportunity to login to your account. Use it!

4. When the login page loads in your browser window, bookmark it and place it in a favorites folder entitled Safelists.

5. Copy the URL into the spreadsheet file under Login URL.

6. Now login to your new safelist and check your profile to be sure the information is correct.

7. Check out your affiliate url and paste it into your spreadsheet

8. Record the other information (if available) such as member count and frequency for sending.

9. You can send your first message now.

10. Check out the other features and options for your new list.

Should you really pay for all of those upgrades?

Honestly! NO – watch your admin emails, we are always offering specials for upgrades. Hosting a safelist costs the admin anywhere from $5 - $25 a month.  Members that pay keep the safelist management worthwhile for the admins. You would be surprised what $1 will buy. Also, take advantage of the FreePro offers when they come up. Your admin emails will be full of these too! Some of the new lists will even offer FreeExec level memberships. Grab them before they’re gone. You will be able to send your ads more often and will usually receive fewer messages from the list.

These opportunities to join at a paid level for free may require you to manually submit to the list unless you have software on your computer that allows you to load any list you want for submission. There are several available and I will go over them a little later.

How do you know if your messages are being read?

• How many times have people checked out your offers?

• Is your subject line interesting enough for people to open your message?

• Do you know your ROI for your safelist advertising?

It’s just good business to know if the dollars you spend on advertising bring you any sales. A hit counter only lets you know how many people visited your site but it doesn’t tell you where they came from or how they heard about your product or service. Unless you have an adtracking system, you’ll never know!

To keep track of your successes and failures, you need solid data. You need to know if anyone is opening your messages sent to XYZ Safelist. Using a system like URLTrak.com gives you the information you need to determine the success or failure of your ad campaign.

If you’re getting a low number of clickthroughs with one subject line, try a different one and see if the results improve.

If your clickthroughs are sufficient but sales are not being made, then you might want to consider changing your website to encourage more sales.

There are other adtrackers online and most of the new safelist scripts offer their members an adtracking service. Be sure you use a system that tells you which campaign the click comes from or else you’ve wasted your time, effort and probably dollars.

Do Solo Ads work?

You’ve seen them! Messages advertising cheap contact address solo ads – But…. Do they work? In a word – YES!

You can get your message sent to the contact addresses for 1,000’s of safelist members for a few dollars. I can personally testify that ads sent to contact addresses receive a much higher percentage of clickthroughs than any other form of advertising, so… if you have a couple of dollars to spare, give them a try. Watch your admin emails for special solo ad offers from the different safelist owners and you can get a real bargain basement advertising price. Many of the lists now have an option on the main page of your account allowing you to purchase solo ads without having to go through the admin of the list.  These are usually quite inexpensive.

Now let's talk about submitters!

Here a couple of the most popular online and the features offered are pretty representative of any that are not on this list.  The number of submitters grows daily and it would be a full time job to keep track of them all.

SafeListBoys - one of the first and still one of the best.  This submitter requires a download to your computer.  You then choose the safelists you want to join from their list.  The cost is still just $4.99 per month.  A very good deal!

iPostAd - Called "The Black Tie of Safelist Submitters" because it has every automation feature you can think of and some that you would never think could be included.  You can auto-join, auto-post, auto just about everything.  The only drawback to this submitter is that you can not select your username and password.  They are randomly assigned for you which means that you will probably end up with duplicate accounts in several safelists (which breaks the rules of 90% of the lists).  They currently have two levels of membership - Master Level is $24.95 and Freshman Level is $12.95 per month.

I will say there is a great difference between the cost for each of the above.  Everything from $1.99 to try out SafeListBoys for a trial period to $24.95 for iPostAd monthly.  Check each of them out carefully before signing up.  Be sure you understand what you are getting for your money. Also, new submitters come online weekly.  Just do a google search for "safelist submitters" and you'll get a response of 670.

Safelist Submitter Software?

There are several and you can find them by simply putting in a search for "safelist submitter software" in the search engines. Except for the Free Snazzy version, all of the others will cost between $29.95 and $50.00 but they do give you the freedom to send to lists of your choice instead of the ones signed up for the online web-based submitters.   These submitters require that you remain connected to the internet while submission is taking place.  I usually set mine to run when I'm ready to go to bed or have to be away from the computer for a couple of hours.

Snazzy Free Submitter - this is the free version and has some limitations. Just enter your safelists and your ads and click submit.  

Snazzy Submitter Pro - The freeware version does not support turing lists! Get Submitter Pro for an even more powerful safe list submitter.

There are others, use keywords "safelist submitter software" on Google.

If there are any questions about the above information or if you just don't understand part of it, send me an email and I will try to answer your question.

Better yet, take me up on my free ebook offer below!