Safelist Training 101

Improve Your Safelist Marketing:
What Is Working And What Isn't.

All online marketing has one great thing in common. It doesn't matter if you are using safelists, purchasing ads, or witting eZine articles, you can always learn exactly what you are doing that is effective!

To know with certainty what works and what doesn't, you have to be systematic. You have to work like a scientist to isolate variables and then test each variable.

In safelist marketing, these are the variables that you must isolate and test to learn what's working and what isn't:

The safelists you are using - Every safelist is different. Testing each safelist to see how responsive it is would be very time consuming if you are submitting to hundreds of lists, but you should at least test the responsiveness of safelists that you spend money on or that you send solo ads to.

The submitting methods you are using - Many safelist marketers think they are sending their ads to safelist when in fact their ads never make it into safelist users' email inboxes. You cannot learn if your ads are actually being sent without testing your submission methods!

The subject line of your ads - This is obvious, and most safelist marketers know they need good subject lines. However, the only way you can know if a subject line is effective is by testing it.

The body of your ads - The body of your ad must make people want to read all of your email, or it must make them want to skip ahead to the call to action. If the body of your ad doesn't do this, you'll never get a decent response.

The call to action of your ads - This is how you get your prospects to go from reading your ad to clicking your link for your doorway page. You need a call to action that is clear and compelling, and testing is the way to learn if your call to action is a good one.

The effectiveness of your doorway pages - By using doorway pages you are not at the mercy of poorly designed affiliate pages. Doorway pages also enable you to focus on capturing leads (getting people's contact information) so that you can stay in front of them with follow up emails. However, if your doorway pages are not well designed, then you still get no results. There are three main components you have to test within your doorway pages:

The headline of your doorway pages - This is like the subject line in your safelist ads. You can check out an example of a headline by going to SafelistTraining101.com. You'll see that my headline is the first thing people see when they come to my website, and it lets them know why they should keep reading the rest of the page. Your headline must show people in a few seconds why they need to keep reading your website. You have to test your headlines to see if this is happening.

The the body of your doorway pages - This is like the body of your safelist ads. You must test to make sure your visitor are read everything on the page or at least skip ahead to the call to action.

The call to action on your doorway pages - This is like the call to action in your safelist ads. You have to test to see if your doorway page call to action is getting your website visitor to go from reading your website to joining your email list!

Your follow up emails - Your follow up emails are what make your sales. Each follow up email also has three basic components: the subject line, the body of the email, and the call to action (the call to action in the follow up emails are used to get your leads to purchase from you). As with the safelist ads and the doorway pages, you must test each one of these three components independently.

To isolate and test each of these variable you need to use ad tracking software to track the links in your safelist ads as well as the links in your follow up emails.

You will need to change one variable at a time and see how that affects your results. For example, you could start by changing your subject lines on your safelist ads to see which ones give you the best results. Next, you could use the subject line that worked best in solo ads that you submit to safelists, setting up a different tracking URL for each safelist. You can continue this process by changing one variable at a time and creating tracking URLs to test each variable.

When you do all this tracking, it is vitally important for you use ad tracking software that will do two things:

1) Your ad tracking software must allow you to create an unlimited number of ad tracking URLs. You will need to create many tracking URLs to test all these variables and you do not want your software to limit your ability to do this.

2) Your ad tracking software must allow you to identify where your hits come from AND where your subscribers and sales come from. Most ad tracking systems only show you where your hits come from, which is isn't enough information. Here is an example. You are paying for two safelist solo ad at $5 each. One safelist is a points based list that encourages people to click on every ad they receive. This safelist gets you 70 hits and 0 subscribers. The other safelist has no point system it gets you 35 hits and 20 subscribers. If you are using ad tracking software that only shows you where your hits come from, you would incorrectly think the point system safelist was better. You might continue spending money on solo ads for both lists or even worse, you might decide to drop your second safelist membership, the one that generated 20 subscribers for you. This example clearly demonstrates why your ad tracking software must allow you to identify the source of your subscribers and not just the source of your hits.

By using the right kind of ad tracking software you can isolate and test each of the variables I outlined above. You can then use this information to inform how to change and modify your marketing approach on an going basis, which will insure that you continually improve your safelist marketing results!

For information about how ad tracking can help you find a winning marketing strategy that is virtually guaranteed to flood your inbox with orders every time you use it, click here.