First of all…what the heck is a safelist?
I’d never even heard of a safelist before 2 days ago! In Big Idea Mastermind’s 30 days to $10k program, he spells out exactly the steps you need to take forinternet marketing. Day 3 taught about safelists and even though he walked us through how to create a campaign, I still didn’t know what exactly it is!
A good safelist definition from SafeLister.com:
A safelist is a closed loop (aka: “double opt in”, “opt-in list” or “closed community list”) e-mailing list of like minded persons. These people agree to accept email ads from the other safelist members. In return for a chance to send their own email advertising to the group. If one agrees to belong to a e-mailing list it is not UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email).
There are also different models of safelists including free, free and paid, free credit based and free credit based with a paid option. Safelist advertising is a free or very low cost way to increase your web traffic and profit.
How Do Safelist Work?
There are several different kinds of safelists so there several different ways they work. In general, an owner operates a website program that allows people to join as “members”. When members join the email address they supply is added to a mailing list. The mailing list is kept on the server that runs the website safelist program. The members on the list never see the actual mailing list to maintain privacy of members.
The website safelist program provides an username and password to each member when they sign-up to the list. At sign-up the safelist website program sends the new member an automated welcome email. The welcome email normally contains the member’s username, password and other information about the safelist. It will also include an unique string (aka: token, validation URL, secret key, etc.). The unique string or URL must be clicked or submitted by the new member. This is required to show they in fact wanted to join the list. Also proves they control the email account they submitted as their list email (and contact email addres). Once their email address(s) are verified they are in most cases enabled to send email to the list.
Normally their level of membership determines how often they can send email but not in all cases (such as safelister). In general once they are verified they would login to the safelist website and access the member area. Then they would click some link to access the mailing form. At that point they would type or paste their email subject and body (message) into the form and click the send button.
Their email would then be sent out to some set number of reciprocates. Some safelist have different levels of membership that decides what section of the list and how many they will be able to send to.
The theory is that everyone on the list is interested in roughly the same subject matter. The sender sends out an ad and the receiver opens the email. The receiver likes what they read and becomes involved (buys) what the sender is selling.
Ok, now what?
So once I understood what I safelist is, now I can begin using it. **And FYI even reading the definition didn’t fully clarify it until I received my first emailings and started clicking for credits!**
- Vick from BIM recommends using Directory of Safelists. So I signed up for a free membership.
- Then I watched the how to videos on there and signed up for a free account on Viral Inbox. I chose a .vibox.me account. And it’s .me not .com! I mixed that up and had a lot of trouble logging in. Ooops! DO NOT USE YOUR REGULAR EMAIL ADDRESS – IT SENDS HUNDREDS OF EMAILS!!!
- I signed up for 2 safelists so far. AdCheiver and Safelist Extreme. Midnight Sun wouldn’t let me join with a .vibox.me email address so I held off for now.
- Then I started doing the free route of clicking for credits on AdCheiver. I got 138 credits total (from about 15-20 emails I believe).
- Now I just sent out my first mail campaign to 138 members for those credits. Fingers crossed I get some new followers on my blog!!
