How to Succeed with Safelist 2

How do these programs work?



As mentioned previously, safelists are membership programs. This means in order to participate, you must first register an account with the safelist website.

Start with one list. Join the top safelist and get to know what it is all about. Read everything they have to offer and make sure you know the rules. Don't send anything out yet.


Once you complete the sign-up form, you will be required to validate one or both of the email addresses you registered. This is the double opt-in feature mentioned earlier.

The list you have joined will send you a confirmation email that contains a special validation link. Simply open this confirmation email, click on the validation link (should be clearly marked) and you will be taken to a page with a confirmation message that reads something like "Your email is now validated, and you may login and send your ads".

Once you are a verified member, you may post your ads to the other safelist members in accordance with the schedule set by the safelist administrator. Often, your mailing schedule will depend on your level of membership. For example, free members might be allowed to mail once each seven days, while upgraded members (members who pay a small monthly fee for additional benefits) might be allowed to mail every 24 to 48 hours.


All safelists will offer you a way to purchase credits. If you are seeing real good results for your offer, this is an option you may decide to use. Do not purchase any credits from any list until you have seen definite sales that you can determine came from that list. Then don't buy credits if you can produce enough free credits from your own efforts. Only buy credits if you know your sales will more than pay for them.

To send your adverts, just look to the menu in your safelist member area and find the link that reads Post Ads, Mail List, or something of this nature. This menu link will take you to an online email form. From here, you just enter your subject line and email body, then click the send button to mail your ad to the other safelist members.

All safelist programs require you to register two different email accounts. One of these accounts will be your contact or admin email, the other will be your list or subscription email.

Your contact email is the address that will be used by the safelist admin to communicate updates, answer support requests, and (in some cases) send solo advertisements. We recommend you set aside a contact address just for use with their safelist accounts, and others simply use their primary email as a contact address.

Due to an ever increasing amount of spam, many email providers are working hard to improve the performance of their filtering systems. This makes it rather difficult to receive emails from safelist programs, as often these emails will contain key recognition words like free and opportunity that are likely to trigger spam filters. If your emails are rejected by spam filters, you could lose your safelist account, as a functional email address is required for continued participation.


My advice would be to use the web mail feature on your hosting account to set up your safelist email addresses. If you don't have web mail, or if you just don't want to use it for some reason, be sure to add the domains of any safelists you join to your email provider's white list.

Your list email is the address that will receive the adverts sent by other members of the list(s) you join. This account is likely to receive several hundred, even a few thousand, emails each day, so it's very important to set up an account with plenty of storage space. Should your inbox get full, incoming messages will be bounced back to the safelist mail servers, and you could lose your accounts with those lists. A minimum of 100MB of storage is highly recommended for your list email and more than that if you use more than just a few.


NOTE: The directions on these pages refer to free Google email accounts because they have been found to be the most reliable to date.Gmail also offers a large storage area. Plus, with gmail, you can have the emails go directly to your outlook express or other email client. This will leave your email box empty. (It's a bad idea to use your main email address since most isp's will consider this email spam and you will never get any of it.)


As you begin to join free safelists, you will notice that many of them will not allow you to join using yahoo, aol, hotmail, juno, Netscape, net zero, inbox, Comcast and a host of others, for GOOD REASON. These email providers typically bounce or totally block safelist verification emails as well as list messages from other members.

Use Gmail. It's not 100% trouble free, but nothing on the internet is. Everyone I've spoken with who had email problems using other providers ELIMINATED those frustrations when they switched their safelist contact and list email address to Gmail.



I mentioned spam filters and white listing earlier. To white list an email address simply means to flag it as an acceptable sender. Here is a quick breakdown of how to white list an email addresses, and how to use your mail provider's filter system to best advantage.
Almost all email account managers will have an Options or Rules link somewhere on the menu. This link will take you to a page that allows you to ban email addresses, and to use your mail provider's filtering system to specify the folders incoming emails will be organized into.

To white list a sender, simply place the domain or email address into a filter and select Inbox as the destination folder. It also helps to add your white listed email addresses to your contact list or address book.

You can also use the filter system for more specific management tasks. A bit of initial set up time will take a good deal of unnecessary work out of your safelist marketing efforts in the long run.

For example, one of the first things I do when setting up a list email is to create a new folder called Validation. I then define rules through the filter system and have any emails with words like validation, verify, confirmation, confirm, etc. sent directly to the Validation folder. With this filter in place, I no longer have to worry about searching through hundreds of emails for my validation link each time I join a new safelist, because my confirmation emails are automatically placed into the Validation folder.

You can use the same method to sort all your incoming emails by sender, subject content, and even ad body content. You can use default folders to catch your sorted mail, or create your own folders for specific categories and groups.

So now you know how to set up your email accounts in a well-organized, professional manner.