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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 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, 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. Begin with only one safe list. Wait for your inbox volume to level out. You might want to add another one, but if you start with six hundred emails a day like I did, you won’t read any of them anyway. You will spend more time deleting them than reading them.

3. Track your results for a week or so. If your website is not getting increased traffic, (actually, increased CONVERTED traffic), cancel your subscription and move on to other options.

Safelists might have been a good idea a few years ago, but for now, they offer no way to stand out from the other 599 emailssomeone is getting. My conclusion, based on first hand experience, is that there are far more effective ways to drive traffic than safelists.

Filed under: Internet Marketing