Safelist's Saga

I was clearing my desk this afternoon when I chanced upon the three old notebooks that I used when I was involved in internet marketing. These notebooks contained my accounts and passwords to the various programs that I have joined in my short 2-year stint in online money making schemes.

I was doing advertising through e-mail marketing and paid ads on surf sites. I was actually shocked to find out that during the peak of my crazy internet episode I was a member of about 10,000 safelists. Now, you may ask, what the heck is a safelist?

A safelist is a type of e-mail marketing and advertising where the members signed-up and agreed to receive each others messages of advertising. Usually, the safelist administration reserves the right to mail its members. A member logs in into his account and types in his ads and send it to the safelist's members. Types of safelists include: Paid, Credit Based and Free.

I did not actually log-in to each of my accounts. I had three safelist submitters where I just typed in my ads and have it sent to available safelists of the day. Being a member to more than 10,000 safelists translated to approximately 100,000++ sent e-mails. Sometimes, I pay extra for a one-time send to 5 million e-mail addresses. Effective?

I sent 4,000 credit mailer with the subject Check this Out. A credit mailer gives you credit to advertise once you view an advertiser's site. Anyway, out of the 4,000 email ads I sent only 56 emails were credited or clicked through. That is only 1.4 % of 4,000 which means the click-through rate is not good.

Maybe the heading was not catchy enough. The content of the ad, none . All I wrote in the ad was my blog's URL. Anyway, the experiment resulted in 56 additional surprised (as in what the heck am I doing viewing this blog?) visitors to my site.