Safelists are one of my favourite ways of getting the message out fast and recruiting new affiliates every day.

A safelist is a a kind of mailing list where all the members are allowed to send email to each other. Because every member has opted in and confirmed their email address, safelist users need not worry about spam complaints from recipients of their emails.

People typically use safelists to promote business opportunities to other members.

Just as with other marketing methods, safelists vary greatly in quality as well as in size of membership. It is much better to use a  safelist with an active membership of 3,000 subscribers, than a much larger safelist with 20,000 unresponsive members.

Credit Based Mailers

The kind of safelist that I recommend uses a “credit-based mailer.” That means you can only email your ads to the safelist if you have accumulated enough credits to do so. Usually, 1 credit gives you the right to email 1 other member.

Depending on their membership level, upgraded members will usually receive several thousand credits every month, which they can use to send out messages to the other members.

Another way to accumulate credits is to open incoming emails from other safelist members. Inside the message there will be a link and you will earn credits if you click through to the promotional page and view it for a few seconds.

In this way, credit-based mailers have a built-in incentive for members to read each other’s email messages, which means that YOUR messages are more likely to be opened and read on a credit-based mailer.

Even so, you are doing well with a safelist if you get anything above a 3% open rate and a 1% clickthrough rate, although some of the best safelists can achieve higher rates for you.

It is a good idea to set up a separate gmail account for your safelist emails as you will receive a lot of emails every day once you join a few safelists.

For more info about how a safelist works, and how to earn credits, watch this video by Solomon Huey, the owner of Elite Safelist :

Here is an overview of my top-performing credit-based safelists. To factors I look at are the “open rate” and “clickthrough rate”:

• Open rate = the percentage of emails that are opened per mailing.
• Clickthrough rate = the percentage of clicks (from the link in the email to the advertised web page) per mailing.

Email Hog

Email Hog is run by Marty Petrizza, who I “met” online in the Affiliate Power Group forum. She emerged a few years ago as one of the best traffic exchange and safelist owners in the industry.

Email Hog is unique because it GUARANTEES a 2% clickthrough rate for every mailing. For every 1,000 mailing that you send out you will get at least 20 clicks to your web page, which means that the email open rate is even higher, so Email Hog is a very responsive safelist.

Join Email Hog

Bweeble

Bweeble is much newer and very responsive safelist (a 4%-5% open rate is not uncommon) with a very good social networking feature which allows you to brand every page you promote, even standard affiliate pages, with a modular template and use it on all the other mailers and traffic exchanges.

You can also win cash prizes for opening the emails you receive.

Join Bweeble

Viral Mail Profits

Viral Mail Profits is both an effective safelist and it is also a safelist manager. I log into it twice every day to check which safelists are ready to mail and to send out emails. With Viral Mail Profits I can get a safelist email out in less than a minute to any of the safelists that I have added to VMP.

Here is a useful video that shows you how Viral Mail Profits works:

Join Viral Mail Profits

Best wishes,

David Hurley