Safelists — Can Safelists Help Build Your Business?
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, and to see if they indeed drive traffic to my site, I set myself up with four safelists: GlobalSafelist, Croc-Ads, Herculist, and ListDotCom. I basically picked these randomly from the hundreds available. For each one, I entered the information for my email, which I pictured as going to millions of unsuspecting email boxes, standing out from the two or three others which safely made their way there.
Instead, my own mailbox was inundated with emails. I got over fifty the first sixty minutes. I had over two hundred by the end of the day. In a week, I was getting over SIX HUNDRED emails every day, all promising me the latest and greatest. Think about that for a second. I get over six hundred emails a day. I don’t even scan through them anymore.
Here then, is my advice on safelists: (if you really think you have 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. 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 conclusion, based on first hand experience, is that there are far more effective ways to drive traffic than safelists. They might have been a good idea a few years ago, but for now, they offer no way to stand out from the other 599 emails.
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