What Is A Safelist?

A Safelist is a collection of people who have voluntarily submitted their email address to a Safelist owner to receive email from and send email to, all the other members of the Safelist. The usual nature of these emails is advertising, so in principal, you are receiving the right to submit adverts in return for receiving adverts from other people.

This process builds up a list of willing participators, which is generically called a "Safelist".

The reason it is called 'Safe' is because all the subscribers are 'opt in', which means that they have chosen to give their email address. It is not therefore considered to be SPAM, because any mail received would be deemed to be solicited mail. For this reason, it is known as 'Safe'.

You have the right at all times to remove yourself from any Safelist and this will terminate your account and you will not receive or be able to send any more emails.

There are thousands upon thousands of Safelists on the Internet. Many are free to join, and many charge a fee. This could be a small lifetime fee, an annual fee or a monthly fee to retain the privilege of sending emails to the rest of the members of that particular Safelist. Those Safelists that have different options for joining (maybe a free and a paid option) will normally distinguish the levels of membership by how often you are allowed to send mail to the other members.

For example, a free member may only be allowed to submit adverts once a week. A paid member may be allowed to submit ads every day. Paid members may receive less ads, or even none at all. There are a lot of variations.

Safelists are also transient, which means that new lists open every day and many close everyday. So the management of your Safelist portfolio can take a little time, but if you do a little maintenance every day, your portfolio of lists will remain clean and responsive.

In my opinion, Safelists are a critical part of every marketers armoury, and if you do not use Safelists you are missing out on a huge (and very cost effective) form of advertising.

You do need to subscribe to a lot of Safelists to be effective, which does leave a problem if you have several hundred to submit to. If you did this by hand, then you would spend all day just submitting ads. Fortunately, the Internet is a great place for entrepreneurs and there are a number of excellent submitters available on the market. There is a separate section for these elsewhere in this help system. Suffice to say that some are reasonably priced, some are very reasonably priced and some are free!

Why Use Safelists?

In my view, Safelists are an essential part of any online marketing strategy, especially for the beginner. The cost is next to nothing, and the results that are produced are an excellent return on investment. In terms of running a business, running an online venture is much, much cheaper then running a business in the 'real' world. So, it is an ideal way of generating a second source of income, which could lead, in time, to you being financially independent. However, this doesn't mean that there are no risks. In this respect, being in business online is no different to being to having any other business. This being said, if you are careful, you can reduce the risk to almost nothing, by simply being cautious.

Under other circumstances, there is no way that you could get your business off the ground without spending substantial amounts of money on advertising and promotion. However, the Internet is not normal, and having the opportunity to advertise your business for next to nothing is an opportunity that you should not ignore.

A critical part of the process of marketing online is to check responses to your adverts for their effectiveness. As part of this process I have kept a close eye on how my Safelists perform and the answer is that they always produce excellent click thru rates (i.e. the number of times a prospect has clicked from the ad to my web site). In fact, they often out perform some paid advertisements, which says an awful lot about the quality of the Safelists (and possibly about my poor choice of paid advertising, and why I am reluctant to invest too heavily in them).

As with most aspects of marketing online, success depends on volume; usually on how may adverts you can send out.

Safelists are no different.

The more you can join and send emails to, the better. I would guess that I send ads to around 1000 safelists. These safelists vary in how often they allow you to send ads, but at worst, they will allow you 1 advert per week, although many will allow more than this (you can usually pay to get your ads sent more often, but I recommend caution before paying money to Safelists). On average, you would have say 500 members per list. This is half a million adverts a week that you can send out, each and every week. For practically nothing!

You can see the downside here I am sure, in that with a large library of Safelists, you have a huge problem of submission. Sending out hundreds of thousands of emails a day can be very time consuming. Fortunately, there are many excellent submitters to choose from which make this process a breeze.

Since most of the Safelists are free, and some of those that are paid for are only nominal amounts, and the submitters are free or reasonably priced, Safelists are a VERY cost effective way of submitting adverts to a huge audience.

Another problem that I am sure you can spot is that if you are sending out hundreds of thousands of emails, then you will also receive heaps of mail yourself! Very true. So what do you do? Some Safelists still allow you to use free email accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo, but many do not any more. The reason for this is that these boxes are usually very small and fill up very quickly. Once they are full, then people who send you email will have their ads bounced back to them, and this is a big no, no. But there is a very cheap way around this, just refer to the resources section later for details of specialised email boxes.

Sooner or later, you will want to start looking at paid advertising. There is no doubt that a good paid ad in a good ezine can produce excellent results. There is equally no doubt that advertising in quality ezine's can cost a lot of money. And one thing you must not do, is waste your advertising dollars. So how can you avoid this?

Safelists!

Test your ads in your Safelists first, before you pay for advertising. If your ad pulls in your Safelists, there is a great chance that it will pull in your paid ads.

So, if you are serious about creating your own marketing business online, you MUST build up a working library of Safelists to submit to. Safelists work for a multitude of reasons, and they should be at the centre of your marketing activities.

The Process

When you first sign up for a Safelist, you will need to give some information in order to join. It is simpler (in my opinion) to use the same details for each Safelist. To that end, my advice is to download an excellent tool called RoboForm which can remember the fields that you want to fill from a template that you create. This means that you can fill in your Safelist application forms with the touch of a button. You can download this excellent piece of free software from the following link:-

RoboForm.

I have found that the following fields are the most useful to fill in.

Name:
Contact Email Address:
List Email Address:
Username:
Password:
PayPal Email Address:

And simply fill in the information. It is then readily to hand to automatically fill into the joining fields for each new Safelist that you join.

If you do not want to download RoboForm, then a simple trick to use is to create a plain text file on your desktop

•	Find an open space on your desktop.
•	Right click with the mouse.
•	Click on 'New'.
•	Click on 'Text Document'.

This will create a blank text document on your desktop. Save the file with a meaningful name, such as SafelistInfo.txt and add the information to it (name, email addresses, user name etc).

When you are joining lots of Safelists, this can save a lot of time.

Name

The 'Name' would simply be your own name. It would generally only be used by list owners to contact you, and would not be generally available to all other list members.

Contact Email Address

By way of explanation, the 'Contact Email Address' is one where the Safelist administrators or owners may need to contact you. This should be an address that you use regularly, You will get a few adverts to this address, because some list owners (usually those that give you their service for free) but not many, use their Safelists to earn extra income by selling ad space to other members. You also need to be aware that Safelist owners will need to contact you from time to time. If you don't give an email address that you use regularly for this purpose, you risk losing your account with the Safelist.

List Email Address

The 'List Email Address' is the one where the bulk of your adverts will be received. You will receive an awful lot of email, so the box needs to be either very big, or one that you remember to clean very regularly (i.e. empty). You should always scan through your Safelist adverts, because you will often find new Safelists to join, or things that catch your eye. But, you must at all costs avoid letting the email box fill up, because once your messages start bouncing, you will start losing Safelist accounts. It is very time consuming (and therefore costly) to have to re-join them all, so try and avoid this problem.

You can probably get away with using a Hotmail account in the early stages, but many Safelists now ban the use of Hotmail, because they do not offer a great capacity to free members, and people will often forget to empty them out. So they will bounce mail. My advice is to buy a Safelist specific email box and use that as your List Address. They are not expensive and a necessity in my opinion. This is the email box that I recommend.

You can view a quickstart tutorial on its use here.

Username

Try and select a user name that is easy to remember, and also unlikely to be used by anyone else. It saves so much time if you can use the same information for each list. Try and keep the name between 6 and 10 characters if possible, because some (a few) Safelists restrict how many characters you can type into the Username field.

Password

Again, try and select a password between 6 and 10 letters that you will easily remember.

PayPal Email Address

Many of the Safelists will pay you commission if you refer users and they upgrade. Most pay via PayPal, so it is worth obtaining an account (which is free) just in case it is needed for this purpose. Click on the button below and follow the links for your free account if you do not have one.

PayPal is worthwhile in joining. Once you get established marketing on the Internet, it is an easy and convenient way of transferring funds, and many organisations pay their commissions this way, so once you get established, it will be a necessity.

Clickbank

Although not strictly necessary for what we are doing here, I strongly suggest that you set up a Clickbank account. It is free to join, so there is no cost involved. The reason for doing this is that many products that you come across on the Internet (including some that I recommend), sell their products using Clickbank. The benefit from your perspective of doing this is so that you can get commission from resale's of products that you recommend. Some of the programs that I have suggested that you join sell products on your behalf as a sideline to the main business (at no additional cost to you). Many of these generate their commissions through Clickbank, so it is strongly advised that you set up your free Clickbank account, if you don't already have one.

You can join Clickbank by clicking here.

Maintenance

You must go into your submitters and test your logins periodically.

Yes, you will get reminders of changes, and yes you will forget to act on some emails.

It is vital that you keep you hard earned Safelist portfolio in good working order, because they will lose their effectiveness if you don't.

If you keep up the good quality of your safelists, you will find that you will have excellent marketing leads for years to come.

And finally, make a habit of the following