I am thinking of trying out safelists as well as traffic exchanges to market my business. I get mixed feelings from other internet marketers. Can you please share your experiences with these two methods?
There are many good free safelists out there, but honestly I have not tried them in a while. I cannot tell you which ones are good and which ones not to bother with. I used them a long, long time ago for something and it did work! But things are different since social networking is in. But it is worth a try. I mean they are time consuming, but there may be some good submitters out there. I am interested in hearing what others have to say about this too. Miriam
Traffic exchanges work great if you want to promote traffic exchange tools and services, but anything else does very poorly. Most are not in the buying mindset. I sent 11,000 visitors and ended up with 3 leads, and my page was devoted to helping those using TEs achieve more results. Safelists that don't use credits are quite a waste of time. I track all my ads and sent out ads to 30,000 people per week and got only a few clicks. I know how to write headlines and subject lines, but they aren't there to read your ads, they are there to send out their own. Credit based safelists get better results, as people have an incentive to view your ad, resulting in more views. The key is to remember that they want their ad seen more, so if you offer something to help them accomplish that, you will receive better results. THEN lead them to your business after they are on your mailing list. The top notch free email marketing solution is viral list builders. I personally use 35-38 of these amazing pieces of marketing. As a free member, I can send out once per week (I recommend upgrading to mail as often as every 3 days), and I get between 20-30 leads every week from these resources alone. It may not sound like a lot, but hey, its free!
The only Traffic Exchange I use is Traffic Swarm, where I send people to squeeze pages. I regularly get a few sign ups from this, but I don't spend any time on the site. I get all my credits from referrals. Also, I occasionally use a couple of credit based safelists, but again only to a squeeze page.
If you are thinking about using traffic exchanges or safelists to promote your website, then i would go with traffic exchanges and leave the safelists. Why? traffic exchanges are a great way to build a list, while safelists do very little at all. I only ever joined 2 safelists, and they were a complete waste of time i found out. When you send out a mailing it will just end up getting buried in the receivers spam folder along with thousands of other emails from people, and it will never get read. Of course some people may have had better experiences with them, but for me i would never join one again.
It's embarrassing to say I went through this phase in the past. I even still get traffic from TEs to some landing pages and the credit comes from my referrals. As Gabriel said above, only traffic exchange and their tools that convert on traffic exchange. When I was using those I had better conversion for my time from safalists, and the best was from text ad exchange solo ads (at least 30 times more time efficient in terms of leads per hour of work). That was in the past. Later I realized that I was wasting my life for nothing because: 1. the websites receiving this kind of traffic got penalized by search engines, so I used those domains for generating leads and then sending the opt ins to the target websites via email follow ups. 2. the time I was spending collecting credit would have made me 5 times more money if I had a minimum wage job for the same amount of time. Life is short, and time is precious. So if I were you I wouldn't. One more thing that's so important: if you have any kind of contextual advertising on your site you can not send the traffic straight to those sites. You got to use a loop (buffer page).
I have always heard good and bad to TE's. I think the main thing is to be consistent "IF" you are going to use them. Pick just say, two or three and surf there EVERYDAY at the same time so that you are always in rotation or at least in rotation at the same time as other people that live by habit. What happens is people get used to seeing your picture, name, ad, whatever and you will have a better chance of them trusting you and/or looking into your product or service. Remember it takes the average adult about 7-8 times of doing something to learn it. I think the same goes for advertising?!
Marketing on TE and Safelist is effective mainly if you are doing more attraction marketing things such as providing people a way to get leads, and other marketing tools to build their business. I would not say don't do it ever, but it is low tier online marketing and one just needs to understand that.
One thing to consider when using safelists is they can take up lots of time to earn credits. You get sent emails each day from other people trying to promote their opportunity. After spending so many seconds on their page you then earn credits and can send your ads. Honestly though you need a very attractive splash page. Something that screams you want to check me out. Why? Because just like you they are spending time going through all these websites just to earn points to send off their own opportunity.
It is important not to use your affiliate sites on TE's you should be using a squeeze or splash page so you can capture leads after you have done that you can then build a business relationship. These days the timers are to short for anyone to read a full page. Work on getting the attention quickly for that 6-15 seconds or less enough so the surfer will request more information you will have time later to get them to your site. Michelle
mbasa Hello My name is Simon. So safelists. They work if they are done properly and you know what you are doing. The people that give safelist a bad name are doing something wrong and this is why they think they do not work. Simon
