The main advantage of email advertising is that you can send out thousands of emails in a few minutes. A disadvantage, of course, is that if people do not want those emails, you get labeled a spammer and may even face legal action. The solution is to use safelists, downline builders, or list builders. (All of these have merged to the point where there is little difference between them. Thus, I will refer to them all simply as safelists.)
Safelists let you send emails to their membership list, people who have already agreed to receive your emails. In exchange, you agree to receive emails from other members. (You will receive a lot of emails. Before you sign up, create a new gmail account just for your safelists so you can keep your other regular email account free.)
As with traffic exchanges, you want your advertising to be effective. Thus, use the TrafficHoopla list of the most effective safelists.
TrafficHoopla Top 12 Safelists
I do not recommend Affiliate Funnel’s list, as it seems to be a random collection of good and bad sites in random order. Without going into details, let me just say that two programs on the list, ViralHosts and ListBandit, are useless and another one, ViralURL, allows members to send so many emails that they were forced to shut down for a time in 2010.
There are two additional tools you should consider. Both of them help you to format emails and send them to multiple safelists with less work and in much less time. I regularly send emails to 15 different safelists. I consider these programs to be essential. There are free versions of each, which are adequate if you mail to 5 or fewer safelists. Beyond that, you’ll want to upgrade.
Viral Mail Profits is more flexible. It was a bit confusing to me when I started, because each thing you do requires a separate step. But once I actually read the directions then followed them a few times, it became quite easy to use. There is a list of safelists built in, plus you have the option to add additional safelists just by typing in some basic information about them.
Traffic Zipper is faster. You write the email, choose which safelists to send to, and Traffic Zipper formats and sends your emails all at once. The drawback is that you are limited to the list of safelists within the program, and some of the larger safelists are missing.
Many of these safelists include some information about techniques for writing good email advertisements. In addition to that, I recommend Jerry Iannucci’s book Safelist Marketing Tactics.