Become a Pro Safelister for Free

By Cathy Wagner
Posted Friday, August 6, 2004

What is the best way to use safelists? Marketers who believe safelists are still an effective way to reach prospects generally agree on several points:

- Bigger is not necessarily better. Safelist members who receive a huge amount of mail are far less likely to look at messages before they delete them.

- Pro membership has a great advantage over free membership. Pro members usually get to send ads everyday, they can send html ads and they do not generally get mail from free members. Many lists also offer additional perks to encourage pro membership, like extra sign up credits or a link on their pro member page for example.

- Subscribing to new safelists that are offering free pro memberships in order to build their membership is the most cost effective way to use safelists and it insures that you won't be overwhelmed with mail, at least not until the lists grow.

With this in mind, I think you will be interested to know that if you search at Yahoo for "limited time free pro membership safelist" (do not include the quotes) you will find more new safelists offering free pro memberships than you would have believed possible.

Don't go crazy! Mail from 20 small lists can be just as bad as if you were subscribed to a really large list. I suggest you sign up for one a day; see how much mail and how much of a response you get from each.

Test you results. As always, I urge you to track your advertising results. If you are not getting any clicks from your safelist ad no matter which list you use, change your ad and try again. If you get less of a response from one list than you do from all of the others, consider replacing it.

Remember, of course, that list size must be factored into your response rate; 10 clicks from a list of 100 people (10%) is better than 20 clicks from a list of 2000 (1%).

About the Author - Cathy Wagner is the owner of (http://www.onestopinternetbusiness.com) which is being hailed as the Mother Lode of free and low cost marketing tips and tools. She is highly committed to helping members succeed with whatever business they choose and offers unparalleled marketing support for all members, regardless of their membership level.