Safelists, fundamentally speaking, are lists of people who have agreed
to receive promotional emails from other members of the safelist in
exchange for the privilege of being able to send their own
promotional emails to the safelist. In other words, "I'll take your ads,
if you'll take mine." Done this way, promotional emails can be exchanged
without charges of spamming being thrown around.
Opinions differ as to the effectiveness of safelists, but they persist,
and certainly some people claim to do very well from their use.
There are literally thousands of safelists available, and they vary in
membership to less than one hundred to tens of thousands.
Many safelists have free and paid membership options. The privileges of
free membership are not as great as those of paid membership. There are
generally more restrictions on the number of members to whom free members
can send their emails, and they cannot send with the same frequency as
paid members. There are also often restrictions on the number of emails
that a paid member is required to receive.
One of the principle difficulties with safelist promotion occurs
as a result of the fact that to be effective one needs to join many
safelists. This procedure involves filling out an online form at the
safelist website, submitting it, and awaiting a confirmation email. Upon
receipt of this email (which hopefully, you do not have to wait too long
for), you click on the confirmation link, and from there you are generally
taken to a login page, from which you can login using your nominated
username and password.
If you are only joining a few safelists, this procedure is not too
onerous, but if you really wish to have serious crack at it, then joining
many would be the way to go, and the repeated signup procedure becomes a
time-consuming task. There are services and software available that enable you to
signup for many safelists all at once, and some even enable the
confirmation process to be automated. One such piece of software is
SafelistBuddy.
