Do You REALLY Know Your Audience?
I've been lurking here on the Warrior Forum for a long time. I check in periodically to see what people are talking about.
But I've been involved in internet marketing since the days of Adam Curry and Compuserve classifieds. I remember working on my first website and tearing up at the Oaklahoma City bombings at the same time. So yeah, I'm an old head.
Every year I embark on what I call an "Impossible Project." Something that many internet marketers claim doesn't work, sucks or won't generate any income. The Warrior Forum is a good place to find Impossible Project ideas.
Anyway, my Impossible Project for 2013 was to figure out how to make money with safelists.
The general consensus here on the Warrior Forum is that they're a complete waste of time.
But it was Alexa Smith who said that marketers who thought they were useless probably didn't understand how to sell to the audience. Here's that post from 2012. I was intrigued by that thread and wanted to see if it was true.
In February, I started signing up for safelists and credit mailers. I opted for paid accounts because free accounts require way too much clicking to get the credits you need to send out your own mailings. (A definite case of working smarter vs. working harder.)
Like most have said here, the amount of email I got was intense. Each safelist generates dozens of emails a day. And I was on 15+ lists from the beginning.
I immediately started looking for offers that I thought would appeal to the safelist audience. Initially I found 3 different sites to promote (as an affiliate).
My first mailing got over 1,200 clicks, but 0 sales. It bummed me out because I thought for sure this was an excellent service to promote.
My second mailing received a similar number of clicks and again 0 sales. I tried promoting the same site one more time, but it was in vain. No sales.
By the 4th mailing I decided to see if I could get people to opt in to my list (a new list) before redirecting them to a completely different affiliate offer. Prior to that I was sending them directly to a sales page.
Bingo! I got 3-4 opt-ins and my first $7 affiliate commission.
I noticed some critical errors I made in the 4th and 5th mailing. So at the 6th mailing I started tweaking my landing page and the thank you page. These changes generated 10 opt-ins and another $7 commission from someone who had subscribed from the previous mailing.
By the 10th mailing (around $40 earned) I was nervously hooked.
Opt-ins definitely don't come in as quickly as regular solo ads. But they were coming and these people were actually reading my weekly mailings and buying things I recommended. The audience was way more receptive than I expected.
Now to be fair, I think I have an advantage in that I know how to write copy that produces results.
I also had a few hundred dollars to blow on premium memberships. And trust me, I did blow some money figuring out which ones were worth participating on. Safelists that claimed they had 6K members, were barely generating 4-5 clicks per mailing. And there are quite a few of them like that.
But I forged on and here I am back 7 months later to say that Alexa was spot on in her observation.
Once I tested and tweaked, I did figure out what safelist buyers want.
Yes... it is true that many of them click for credits so they can get their own ads seen. Yes... it is true that 1-2 (or even 5-6) safelists won't cut it. This is a volume game. You need to reach a lot of people to get sales.
But that doesn't mean these people are cash-poor.
Far from it, okay.
Instead of putting up irrelevant offers (which is where I know a lot of marketers go wrong), I studied the audience and learned what these people wanted.
I started rotating my ads and pulling in a steady $40-$60+ a day, WITHOUT having to mail to my own list.
And I don't have to rely on Google's whims or SEO or social media. This is money made strictly by mailing offers to the safelists I'm a member of.
When I first started, I was only promoting affiliate offers. Today I promote my own sites and affiliate offers. (I created sites/services specifically for the safelist market.)
I can't say that I've had success with every Impossible Project I've embarked on.
But I will say that this years project has produced a sustainable sideline biz. It hasn't replaced my main sites. But it has produced a very decent (and fairly predictable) weekly income.
And it all started because I observed my audience, wrote great copy and sold them what they wanted.
It's such a basic concept. But it's well worth repeating.
I know this is a crazy long first post. But I hope you were able to get something out of it because this advice pertains to much more than safelist marketing.
Internet marketing is just as much about basic marketing concepts as it is about more technical stuff we seem to get wrapped up in. If you don't know how to sell what people want, no amount of SEO and backlinking schemes will save you from failure.
Good luck!
But I've been involved in internet marketing since the days of Adam Curry and Compuserve classifieds. I remember working on my first website and tearing up at the Oaklahoma City bombings at the same time. So yeah, I'm an old head.
Every year I embark on what I call an "Impossible Project." Something that many internet marketers claim doesn't work, sucks or won't generate any income. The Warrior Forum is a good place to find Impossible Project ideas.
Anyway, my Impossible Project for 2013 was to figure out how to make money with safelists.
The general consensus here on the Warrior Forum is that they're a complete waste of time.
But it was Alexa Smith who said that marketers who thought they were useless probably didn't understand how to sell to the audience. Here's that post from 2012. I was intrigued by that thread and wanted to see if it was true.
In February, I started signing up for safelists and credit mailers. I opted for paid accounts because free accounts require way too much clicking to get the credits you need to send out your own mailings. (A definite case of working smarter vs. working harder.)
Like most have said here, the amount of email I got was intense. Each safelist generates dozens of emails a day. And I was on 15+ lists from the beginning.
I immediately started looking for offers that I thought would appeal to the safelist audience. Initially I found 3 different sites to promote (as an affiliate).
My first mailing got over 1,200 clicks, but 0 sales. It bummed me out because I thought for sure this was an excellent service to promote.
My second mailing received a similar number of clicks and again 0 sales. I tried promoting the same site one more time, but it was in vain. No sales.
By the 4th mailing I decided to see if I could get people to opt in to my list (a new list) before redirecting them to a completely different affiliate offer. Prior to that I was sending them directly to a sales page.
Bingo! I got 3-4 opt-ins and my first $7 affiliate commission.
I noticed some critical errors I made in the 4th and 5th mailing. So at the 6th mailing I started tweaking my landing page and the thank you page. These changes generated 10 opt-ins and another $7 commission from someone who had subscribed from the previous mailing.
By the 10th mailing (around $40 earned) I was nervously hooked.
Opt-ins definitely don't come in as quickly as regular solo ads. But they were coming and these people were actually reading my weekly mailings and buying things I recommended. The audience was way more receptive than I expected.
Now to be fair, I think I have an advantage in that I know how to write copy that produces results.
I also had a few hundred dollars to blow on premium memberships. And trust me, I did blow some money figuring out which ones were worth participating on. Safelists that claimed they had 6K members, were barely generating 4-5 clicks per mailing. And there are quite a few of them like that.
But I forged on and here I am back 7 months later to say that Alexa was spot on in her observation.
Once I tested and tweaked, I did figure out what safelist buyers want.
Yes... it is true that many of them click for credits so they can get their own ads seen. Yes... it is true that 1-2 (or even 5-6) safelists won't cut it. This is a volume game. You need to reach a lot of people to get sales.
But that doesn't mean these people are cash-poor.
Far from it, okay.
Instead of putting up irrelevant offers (which is where I know a lot of marketers go wrong), I studied the audience and learned what these people wanted.
I started rotating my ads and pulling in a steady $40-$60+ a day, WITHOUT having to mail to my own list.
And I don't have to rely on Google's whims or SEO or social media. This is money made strictly by mailing offers to the safelists I'm a member of.
When I first started, I was only promoting affiliate offers. Today I promote my own sites and affiliate offers. (I created sites/services specifically for the safelist market.)
I can't say that I've had success with every Impossible Project I've embarked on.
But I will say that this years project has produced a sustainable sideline biz. It hasn't replaced my main sites. But it has produced a very decent (and fairly predictable) weekly income.
And it all started because I observed my audience, wrote great copy and sold them what they wanted.
It's such a basic concept. But it's well worth repeating.
I know this is a crazy long first post. But I hope you were able to get something out of it because this advice pertains to much more than safelist marketing.
Internet marketing is just as much about basic marketing concepts as it is about more technical stuff we seem to get wrapped up in. If you don't know how to sell what people want, no amount of SEO and backlinking schemes will save you from failure.
Good luck!