The first site I want to review is “A State of the Art Mailing System“.  State of the Art Mailer is a relatively new safelist created by Jay Pause and Brad Webb which launched a few months ago.

A State of the Art Mailer System appears to be using a unique mailer script.  I would say it’s more of a safelist than a viral list builder but there are number of unique features that makes State of the Art Mailer stand out from other sites.

One of the things you will notice is that when you join you are first asked to look at 5 websites belonging to other members before continuing.  I guess this is the “viral” aspect of the program because when you refer people your ad gets displayed in the 2nd position for your downline members to view and when they refer people your ad appears in the 3rd position.  Upgraded members can also have their ads randomly displayed in the other positions.  This is supposed to generate hands free traffic to your pages.  I’ve never been crazy about these kinds of systems but whatever.  I have referred 2 people and my pages have so far gotten 8 hits.

You only have to do this when you first join.  Otherwise you get presented with a login offer from Jay and Brad along with an advertiser’s full-page ad.  You can earn credits if you view the full-page ad for 20 seconds or you can skip it and go right into the site.

The members area first appears a little confusing with 20 different menu options being presented to you.   The most important items are right at the start though with “Mail Now” being the very first.

So what makes State of the Art Mailer special?

SOTAM uses a unique mailing method called the “Button Escalation System” which rewards active members with the ability to send their ads to more members.  It’s a little confusing but there’s a really good video on the site which explains it:

Basically when you start out as a free member you can email 500 members every 7 days.  However if you are active and read enough credit emails from other members you can get bumped up to higher level buttons which let you reach more members.

You can also upgrade your membership which gives you automatic access to the higher buttons as well as the ability to email every 3 days instead of 7.  I purchased the 5000 button upgrade when I joined and so far have had no trouble reaching the 7500 button which allows me to email almost the entire membership every 3 days.

It’s been about 2 months since I joined and so far the results have been excellent. They even post live mailing stats in the members area so that you can see exactly how well the system is working.

According to my own personal stats from last month I received 3,430 visitors to my splash pages which resulted in 13 new sign-ups to my program.  That’s a pretty decent conversion rate but the fact that a site this new is producing numbers like this is very impressive.

There’s a bunch of other unique features such as the “profit sharing pool” for active members (I earned a whopping $2.09 last month) as well as an “instant recruiting” system which apparently is still being worked on and hasn’t been added to the site yet.

Overall I am very impressed with the State of the Art Mailer.  The site isn’t real pretty but the results are what counts.  I think Jay and Brad have created something really unique here and I am looking forward to what they have planned for the future.

To join A State of the Art Mailing System for free click the image below.

Click Here to Join A State of the Art Mailing System

Not a lot of news to report for last month.  I did weed out about half a dozen smaller safelists that I had been using which were not producing a lot of sign-ups.  It was hard because most of these safelists were still bringing in a few sign-ups every month but as my list of safelists that I use daily continues to grow I find myself having less time to focus on the sites that are bringing me the best results.

That means I now have some free time to test out some newer sites and to retest some sites that I haven’t used in a very long time.  While I don’t have stats for them yet you can expect to find List Zillion, State of the Art Mailer System, and Reactive Ads in here next month.

Speaking of newer sites…  There are a lot of good programs out there that go right over my head because I can’t always distinguish them from all of the junk.  If you know of any safelists or viral list builders that are working for you but you haven’t seen me mention here feel free to post your referral link in the comments.

Ok, time for the stats.  Over the last few weeks I have been promoting my splash pages in Sweeva and have gotten some really interesting feedback.  I decided that instead of just advertising one splash page in my safelist ads I would put three of them into a rotator and advertise that instead.  I’ve been doing this for the last two weeks.  So far so good.  All of the splash pages that I am promoting on these safelists are being used to promote my site Safelist Marketing Tactics.

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.  I ranked these safelists by sales but it is also important to look at the other numbers to determine how responsive each safelist really is.

Not a great month, actually.  List Effects managed to hang on to the top spot again but just barely.  Everything else seems to have either stayed the same or dropped slightly.

As usual I should point out that these are my own personal stats from  promoting my own personal splash pages.  These numbers are only meant to be a guide to help you decide which safelists and viral listbuilders are worth trying.  Your results will probably be different from my own so the only way to know for sure which sites work best for you is to track your own results.  You can get a free link tracker from TEToolbox.

Ok, now that i’ve gotten my April Fools joke out of the way… Happy April!

It seems that there is not much news to talk about in the world of safelist marketing this month.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  Global Safelist just hit 10,000 members.  That’s a pretty big milestone in anybody’s book.  Congratulations Doug!

List Building Maximizer just announced that they are giving away $1,000 in their referral contest which is running through May 31.  I’m pretty sure they are still giving away $1.00 per referral as well.  I can’t find any info about that on the site but I do keep finding random $1.00 payments in my account so it must be true.

Ok, That’s it for the news… let get to the stats!  These stats come from advertising my video splash page for Safelist Marketing Tactics.

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.  I ranked these safelists by sales but it is also important to look at the other numbers to determine how responsive each safelist really is.

Once again List Effects is killing it!  I just wish understood why.  The site is brand new and to be honest it’s not very pretty but somehow it is managing to blow away all of the competition.  I guess I gotta give props to Frank Salinas & Jon Atwood for releasing one very responsive site.

List Building Maximizer also continues to impress me.  For just being a regular credit based safelist it has managed to hang with the big viral list building two months in a row.  Same goes for Elite Safelist which seems to get better and better every month.

It’s great to see List Auction and List Joe back on top again.  I was getting a little worried last month when they started to slip in the rankings.  Both of these sites have been consistent performers for me and I would have hated to lose them.

I guess that’s gonna do it for this month.

Of course I always need to point out these are my own personal stats and depending on what you are promoting your results may vary.  I provide this information as a guide for trying out new safelists that you might not already be a member of.  It is important that you track your ads to find out which safelists work best for you.  You can get a free link tracker from TEToolbox.

First, the big news last month was all about the rise in popularity of safelist cheat software and the safelists owners efforts to fight it.  Well, I am happy to report that the war is over… and WE WON!  Mostly.  Andrew Baxter, the creator of the most popular software made an appearance at Net Marketing Forum and agreed to stop selling and supporting his software.  You can read the whole thread here.

Andrew also states that the developers of several other safelist cheat programs had sent him very angry emails because he had made his software so public resulting in the safelists adding anti-cheat devices.  I guess that confirms that there are still other cheaters out there but at least the anti-cheat stuff is working.

Also I want to remind everyone that while there are people using bots to click your safelist credit links this doesn’t hurt the effectiveness of safelist advertising.  When you spend your safelist credits your credits are used whether or not someone opens your email.  The bots just allow people to earn credits they don’t deserve.  This could result in more emails in your inbox but that also means more credits for you to earn.

There was a pretty huge launch last month.  List Effects is the new viral list builder from two of the biggest names in the safelist and text ad exchange industry.  To be honest, the site isn’t really pretty.  In fact, it looks a little too much like the inside of a text ad exchange… but it’s the results that matter.  And WOW is List Effects kicking butt.  Check the stats below and you will see why I am so excited about this new program.

A not so new program that I finally joined last month is List Building Maximizer.  I don’t know why I waited so long to join this one.  I guess I figure that newer sites aren’t going to have enough members until they have been around for awhile.  Obviously I was wrong.  Based on the stats below List Building Maximizer is crushing it!  If there are other great safelists like this out there that I am missing out on please let me know.

Ok.  Here are my safelist stats from last month.  These stats come from advertising my video splash page for Safelist Marketing Tactics.

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.  I ranked these safelists by sales but it is also important to look at the other numbers to determine how responsive each safelist really is.

Not counting the two new sites it looks like I had a slight drop in my overall results from last month.  That could be a result of me playing around with my subject lines.  I am surprised that List Auction continues to drop.  This could be a result of how few emails they are sending out which means less credits for me to earn for my own ads.  It’s nice to see Got Safelist and Elite Safelist doing really well again.

Obviously the biggest winners this month are List Effects and List Building Maximizer. If you are not a member of these two programs yet you are missing out on some seriously good traffic.

I guess that’s about it for this month.  As usual my stats are a result of my efforts and the pages I am promoting.  Your results may not be the same but you can use my stats as a guide for deciding where you should be promoting this month.  How do I know which safelists work best for me?  I track my results.  If you aren’t tracking you are wasting a big chunk of your time.  You can get a free link tracker from TEToolbox.

And it couldn’t have come at a better time because frankly last month sucked.  Not so much for the safelists but for my own productivity.  You can tell just by looking at how many times I updated my blog last month.  I spent yesterday doing absolutely nothing in preparation for being extra productive today.  Considering this is my second post of the day I guess that good but I had also planned on having this done at least 6 hours ago so maybe not so good.

Safelist news!  Oh boy we had finally had some excitement around here.  Usually not much usually happens in this industry but a few months ago some scum bag named Andrew Baxter thought it was be a good idea to create a software product that allows people to cheat credit based safelists.  Basically this software downloads all your safelist emails and clicks all the credit links for you meaning you never need to actually view the ads of other members.

This is exactly the type of software that nearly killed the safelist industry a few years ago.  If everyone started using this software then nobody would be viewing your ads which would make posting to safelists useless.

I happy to announce that last month many of the larger safelists began fighting back by implementing “cheat protection” in their emails in the form of captcha codes that must be entered before you can earn credits.  This and some other techniques appear to be working so far.  It’s also a great a way to find out who the cheaters are so their accounts can be removed from the safelist.

This change couldn’t have come soon enough.  It’s got to be assumed that there are always going to be a small percentage of people cheating but nobody has ever been stupid enough to do it so publicly.  These new security changes should hopefully make safelists even more responsive while cutting down on the number of emails being sent by the cheaters.

Here is the list I have so far of the safelists that have added some form of cheat protection last month for their members:

AdTactics
Elite Safelist
FreeSafelistMailer
Smart Safelist
Target Safelist

If you know of any others please let me know.

Update: Feb 2, 2010
Supreme List, List Building Maximizer, and Global Safelist have also added cheat protection.  Global Safelist is actually using a number matching test like you would see on a traffic exchange.  That’s awesome!

Oh, and if you one of the people who bought the cheat software from Andrew Baxter feel free to ask him for a refund.  I am sure he will be happy to assist you.  If not, I bet paypal will.

Ok, now the fun part.  Here are my safelist advertising stats from last month.  These stats come from advertising my video splash page for Safelist Marketing Tactics.

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.  I ranked these safelists by sales but it is also important to look at the other numbers to determine how responsive each safelist really is.

It seems like I received a drop in sign-ups from the big 3 list builders.  It should be noted that these sites are also sending out far fewer emails than they had been a few months ago.  It’s rare now that I am ever able to earn enough credits to send to the maximum number of members.  That means my ads are reaching less people but at least I don’t have to spend all day clicking for credits any more.

Everything else looks pretty normal though it will be interesting to see if the new cheat protection scripts will have much of an effect when I check my stats again next month.

As usual, these are my own personal stats and depending on what you are advertising your results may vary.  This information is simply intended to be a guide for trying out new safelists that you might not already be a member of.  Also, don’t forget to track your ads to find out which safelists work best for you.  You can get a professional link tracker from TEToolbox.

Is it really 2010?  I was just getting used to the 00′s.

2009 was a great year for me and safelists.  I guess because of the success of my ebook some people have actually started referring to me as “the safelist guy”.  I don’t think I deserve that title yet but I do have some big plans for 2010.

Let’s get to the news..

It appears AdSolutionline upgraded their surf bar.  It now features a cool graphic spinny thing.  Unfortunately my sign-ups there started to go down around the same time.  Not sure if it’s related but I just put in a support email to make sure everything is working ok.

Elite Safelist had some problems last month too.  Seems there was a hard drive crash which took the mailer down for about a week.  Luckily the problem got solved and everything there is running smoothly again.  Unfortunately, the missed week did bring down my numbers down for last month.  Here’s hoping this month puts Elite Safelist back up where it belongs.

Probably the biggest news last month was the launch of Viral Mail Profits.  This thing is really sweet as it manages all your safelist accounts from one location.  I am told they will be adding a mailer to the program very soon and I expect it to really blow up after that.  If you haven’t joined Viral Mail Profits yet, do it now!

Ok, let’s get to the stats:

“Clicks” is how many people viewed my splash page.  “Action” is how many people clicked the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale”.

I should probably mention that these stats came from promoting my SMT splash page.  So depending on what you are promoting, your results may vary.

Are you tracking your ads?  Don’t just rely on my numbers.  When you use a link tracker to track your ads you will always know which sites get the best results for you.  To get you own free link tracker… CLICK HERE.

Are we really one month away from 2010?  I still haven’t figured out what this decade is called.  The Oh’s?  Oh well.

After the dismal results I had last month I decided to make a new splash page for my Safelist Marketing Tactics site.  I went with a “video splash page” because everybody keeps telling me how effective they are.  I wasn’t real crazy about the idea of sitting in front of the camera doing a boring pitch so I decided to something a little different.  Here’s what I came up with:  http://www.safelisttactics.com/splash/index.htm

That’s the general one.  I made some specific pages for each of the safelists I use as well as for a few traffic exchanges.  They seem to be working great so far.

No big industry news to report, so let’s get on with the stats…

“Clicks” is how many people views the splash page.  “Action” is how many people click the link on my splash page to go to the main site.  “Sales” is how many people joined my site.  CTA and CTS are I think “clicks to action” and “clicks to sale” or something like that.

Happy to see a nice jump in my number of sign-ups compared to last month.  The rankings are about the same as usual except Got Safelist seems to be working better again.  Yay!

As usual the viral list builders dominate the list.  Maybe I shoulda wrote a book about them instead.  Or maybe I will?  Hmm…

Speaking of viral list builders… a new site launched today which automates all of your mailings on the top viral list builder sites.  I’ve been playing with it for the last few days and it’s really cool.  It will actually login to all of your accounts, tell you how many credits you have left, tell you when your next mailing is, and let you send an email all with one click.

It’s free to join.  Check it out here: http://trafficzipper.com/index.php?af=457

That’s all for now.  I’ll probably try out a few more viral list builders this month so hopefully I will have some more numbers for you next month.  As always, my stats may be different than yours so make sure you are tracking all of your ads so you can know what works best for YOU.

For those of you who are still not tracking your ads (shame on you) I am going to recommend a new tracker for you this month.  It’s called TE Toolbox.  It was created for the traffic exchange industry but works perfectly fine for safelists, viral list builders, and any other traffic sites you want to use.  It’s free to join and it’s got a ton of killer features beyond just a link tracker.  Click the image below to join.

As usual, I am advertising my splash pages from Safelist Marketing Tactics.

I’ve been looking forward to checking out last month’s stats for awhile.  Partially because I have been testing out some new safelists and I wanted to see how they stack up against the competition.

I just pulled up my stats a little while ago and I have to say that the results were very poor.  Looks like i’ve had a huge drop in the number of sign-ups i’ve been receiving from safelists all across the board.  I think this means it’s time to get off my butt and start testing out some new splash pages.

I did find a new safelist that is producing better than expected results for me.  Smart Safelist currently has less than 2000 members but is giving me excellent results even as a free member.  They seem to have a good grasp of just giving out just enough credits to keep people coming back and reading their emails every day.  Worth checking out.

Last month I mentioned that I had started seeing a drop in the response from AdTactics since they changed to a 3-day mailer (send 1 email every 3 days) for free members.  I spoke with the owner about it and he said I was the only person who was having a problem with it and that others had seen increased response.  They are trying it out now as a 2-day mailer.  My sign-ups went up last month but only slightly.  We’ll have to see how it works after I get my new splash page up and running.

That’s all the news.  Let’s see who’s on top this month.

ViralAdStore – Hits: 1,811  Clicks: 89  Sign-ups: 20
List Auction – Hits: 1,354  Clicks: 90  Sign-ups: 17
List Joe – Hits: 1,766  Clicks: 111  Sign-ups: 15
Got Safelist? – Hits: 2,942 Clicks: 47  Sign-ups: 7
Elite Safelist – Hits: 1,746  Clicks: 32  Sign-ups: 7

It’s nice to see Elite Safelist back on top again.  Very surprised to see Got Safelist? only got me 7 sign-ups though when I had 17 last month.  That’s with an upgraded membership too.  Not very good.

I guess that’s about it for this month.  Hopefully I will find the time to make some new splash pages after my new website launches on Wednesday.  Oh, did I mention I am launching a new website on Wednesday?  I don’t want to “give away” too much info yet.  You’ll just have to wait and see for yourself.

And don’t forget to track your ads cuz tracking is half the battle.  If you need a link tracker you can get one for free by clicking the link below.

Click Here to Track Your Ads with HitsConnect

Like last month I am mostly going to be focusing on safelists as that is where most of my sign-ups have been coming from lately.  I am still promoting the same splash page for my Safelist Marketing Tactics site though I do have a new splash page in the works that I will be split testing very soon.

Lots of interesting stuff going on in the safelist world right now.  For one, AdTactics has decided to only allow free members to send credit ads once every 3 days instead of once every 24 hours.  As a result i’ve gone from getting 1,300 hits per month down to about 300 with only 1 new sign-up last month.  They say they are just testing this new format and can decide to change it back.  Let’s hope so.

On the flip side AdSolutiOnline has increased the number of credits you can earn from clicking their emails.  It used to be almost impossible to click enough credits to email your ads to the entire membership every 24 hours.  Now it’s not a problem.  Clicks and sign-ups went down slightly but not enough to make a big difference.  AdSolutiOnline didn’t make it into the top 5 but I did manage to get 8 new sign-ups in September.

Let’s see who’s on top for last month…

ViralAdStore – Hits: 2,170  Clicks: 110  Sign-ups: 29
List Joe – Hits: 2,366  Clicks: 175  Sign-ups: 26
Global Safelist – Hits: 2,383  Clicks: 84  Sign-ups: 20
List Auction – Hits: 1,263  Clicks: 83  Sign-ups: 20
Got Safelist? – Hits: 2,550 Clicks: 54  Sign-ups: 17

Not much change there.  ViralAdStore still manages to blow me away every time I check my stats.  I guess I expected it to be on par with List Auction but I never expected to find something that would compete with List Joe.

I’d like to welcome Got Safelist? back to the top safelists for me.  I actually broke down and upgraded to a paid membership at Got Safelist? and what a difference it made!  With a free membership I was getting about 450 hits a month and an average of 4 or 5 sign-ups.  I’d say jumping up to 17 sign-ups in a little less than a month is worth the upgrade.

That’s all for this month.  I’m gonna go curl up on the couch and watch some scary movies (they always make me feel better).  Remember, if you’re not tracking your ads you have no way of knowing where to advertise.  These are just my results.  What works for me might not work as well for you.

If you need a link tracker you can get one for free by clicking the link below.

Click Here to Track Your Ads with HitsConnect

I guess that means it’s time to dig out the stats and see what happened last month.  Looking at the numbers… apparently not a whole lot.  Commissions were still good but I only personally referred 192 people to my Safelist Marketing Tactics website as opposed to 378 in July.  I suppose it could have something to do with the mythical “summer slowdown” but I suspect it probably had more to do with me spending more time in front of the Playstation instead of on my computer generating traffic.

I think I spent only a few hours total surfing the traffic exchanges last month.  As a result I only received 4 sign-ups from them.  Not even worth mentioning where those sign-ups came from.

Text Ad Exchanges were about the same.  10 sign-ups all together spread out over about a dozen exchanges.  The only one worth mentioning again is Muscle Mail with 4 sign-ups.

It’s not surprising that the majority of my sign-ups last month came from safelists.  Of course it helps that I am promoting a product that directly targets safelist users.  Let’s see how we did.

Safelists

ViralAdStore – Hits: 1,291  Clicks: 89  Sign-ups: 29
List Joe – Hits: 2,752  Clicks: 205  Sign-ups: 19
Global Safelist – Hits: 2,129  Clicks: 76  Sign-ups: 15
List Auction – Hits: 1,045  Clicks: 55  Sign-ups: 10
AdSolutionline – Hits: 1,967 Clicks: 58  Sign-ups: 7

The big news here… ViralAdStore rocks!  I think this is the first month something has outperformed List Joe which is impressive since ViralAdStore didn’t launch until the second week of July.

I decided to purchase an upgraded membership at Global Safelist last month.  I bought a 3-month upgrade and so far it has already paid for itself.  Well worth the 15 bucks.

Ok, that’s all for now.  Hopefully I will be a little more productive this month and get some more updates for you along with a brand new website at the end of the month (knock on wood).

Keep in mind that all the stats above are only from my personal experiences and your results may vary.  The important thing is that you track your own results to find out what works best for you!  If you need a link tracker you can get one for free by clicking the link below.

Click Here to Track Your Ads with HitsConnect