Are We All Just Advertising to Each Other?

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Marketers promote safelists and traffic exchanges while others look bored or earn advertising credits.

Hello!

I’ve been involved with safelists and traffic exchanges for more than 20 years, and every once in a while I stop and think about what we’re actually doing.

We all want people to look at our advertisements.

So we click other people’s ads to earn credits, which we use to show our ads to people who are clicking to earn credits so they can show their ads to us.

Round and round we go.

It’s like walking into a room full of salespeople where everybody is trying to hand out business cards, but nobody particularly wants to take one.

Everybody’s selling.

But who’s buying?

Seriously. Are we actually advertising to potential customers, or are we just advertising to each other?

And if that’s what we’re doing, why does any of this work?

Let’s Admit Why Most of Us Are Here

I don’t think there’s much mystery about why people use safelists and traffic exchanges.

They’re trying to promote something.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait to look at 100 advertisements for random affiliate programs today!”

Well, maybe somebody does. I’ve met some pretty enthusiastic surfers over the years.

But I’m willing to bet most people wouldn’t spend nearly as much time looking at advertisements if there weren’t credits involved.

I certainly wouldn’t. I’ve spent plenty of years earning credits myself.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how these systems are designed to work.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Getting somebody to look at your advertisement because they want credits isn’t the same as getting somebody to look because they’re interested.

That’s a pretty important difference.

So are we all just wasting our time?

I don’t think so.

We’re Not Exactly Strangers

One thing that makes safelists and traffic exchanges interesting is that a lot of us know each other.

Maybe not personally. I’ve never met most of the people I see advertising every day.

But I recognize their names.

I recognize their websites.

I know which programs they’ve been promoting.

And when somebody I’ve seen around for years suddenly starts advertising something new, I notice.

That’s especially true when a new program launches.

You start seeing it everywhere. Familiar advertisers begin promoting it. People get curious. Some join. Others sit back and watch to see what happens.

There’s an entire little community operating underneath all those credits.

And I think that matters.

We’re not necessarily looking at thousands of completely anonymous advertisements. We’re repeatedly encountering people and businesses we’ve seen before.

Familiarity doesn’t automatically create trust. Somebody can become well-known for all the wrong reasons.

But recognition gives an advertisement something that a completely unfamiliar advertiser doesn’t have.

A history. A reputation. A reason for somebody to think, “Hey, what’s this person promoting now?”

That’s not something a traffic counter can easily measure.

Somebody Must Be Paying Attention

I’ve run enough advertising campaigns over the years to know that most visits don’t turn into anything particularly exciting.

But some do.

People sign up. They join mailing lists. They discover new programs. Sometimes they even spend money.

Last July, I ran my Safelist Attention Project through 45 safelists to see whether people were actually paying attention.

Instead of promoting a product, I sent visitors to a page where they could voluntarily click a button confirming they’d noticed it.

After cleaning up the data, I ended up with 8,392 visits and 143 deliberate button clicks.

That’s a 1.70% interaction rate.

Not exactly a number that makes you want to run out and buy a yacht.

But here’s the thing.

Nobody earned any extra credits for clicking that button. They’d already done what they needed to do to get their credits.

Yet 143 times, somebody took that extra step.

Does that mean the other 98.3% weren’t paying attention? Of course not. Some may have read the page and moved on.

But it does tell me that at least some people were doing more than blindly clicking their way through another batch of advertisements.

They were paying attention.

And that’s really all I’m getting at.

People can be clicking for credits and still notice something that interests them.

It happens.

Maybe We’re Advertising to Exactly the Right People

Here’s another possibility.

Maybe advertising to other advertisers isn’t nearly as ridiculous as it sounds.

Think about the things most of us promote.

Safelists. Traffic exchanges. Affiliate programs. Advertising tools. Autoresponders. Lead capture systems.

Who’s the ideal customer for something like that?

Probably somebody who already does online marketing.

And where do you find a concentrated audience of people actively involved in online marketing?

Well…

Safelists and traffic exchanges.

Imagine that.

Of course, this doesn’t mean every offer belongs here, or that every advertiser is going to succeed.

If you’re promoting the same tired opportunity that everybody has already seen 500 times, you’re probably going to have a hard time getting noticed.

But the same thing that makes this audience difficult to advertise to might also make it valuable.

These people understand online marketing. They need advertising. They use marketing tools. And many are always looking for the next interesting program.

Maybe the audience isn’t the problem.

Maybe we’re just not always giving them something worth noticing.

So, Are We All Just Advertising to Each Other?

Yes.

To a considerable extent, I think we probably are.

I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I own advertising sites myself, so I’m certainly part of the system.

Most of us are here to promote something, and the credits are what keep the whole thing moving.

But that doesn’t mean nothing worthwhile happens along the way.

People recognize names. They discover new programs. They follow what other marketers are doing.

They join things. Sometimes they buy things.

Most of the time, they’ll probably just collect their credits and move on. That’s the reality of this kind of advertising.

But every once in a while, something catches their attention.

Maybe the real problem isn’t that we’re advertising to each other.

Maybe it’s that too many of us forget there’s an actual person on the other side of the advertisement.

Someone with interests, problems, preferences, and money to spend.

They just happen to be earning credits while they’re doing it.

And that brings me to one final thought.

If you found this article through a safelist, there’s a pretty good chance you clicked the link because you wanted credits.

Yet here you are.

Reading an article about people clicking advertisements for credits.

There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about that.

And maybe it proves at least a small part of my point.

Yes, we’re advertising to each other. But “each other” isn’t nobody.

Thanks for reading,

Jerry

Introducing Plus 1 Ads: Why I Built Something Different

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Plus 1 Ads logo with connected icons representing program discovery, sponsors, portfolios, and results.

Hello!

If you’ve been following my last couple of blog posts, you know I’ve been talking about finishing projects and deciding when they’re ready to launch.

Well, now you know why.

On October 12, I officially launched my newest program, Plus 1 Ads!

I’ve been working on this one for quite a while, and I’m excited to finally share it with you.

Plus 1 Ads is a little different from the safelists, traffic exchanges, and other advertising programs you’re probably familiar with.

And that’s exactly what I had in mind.

Why I Built Plus 1 Ads

I’ve been involved in online marketing for a long time, and I’ve seen an incredible number of programs come and go.

Some were great. Some weren’t. And plenty of good programs probably never received the attention they deserved.

One thing I’ve noticed is that we’re all pretty good at promoting programs, but we’re not always very good at discovering them.

Think about your daily advertising routine.

You visit safelists, surf traffic exchanges, read emails, and see dozens (sometimes hundreds) of advertisements.

How many of those programs do you actually stop to investigate?

If you’re like me, probably not very many.

We recognize the same names, see the same advertisements, and move on.

Meanwhile, there are probably interesting programs out there we’ve never even heard of. And there are marketers trying to get those programs noticed.

What if discovering new programs could become a regular part of our marketing routine, while giving participating marketers a fair opportunity to be discovered themselves?

That’s the idea behind Plus 1 Ads.

So What Exactly Is Plus 1 Ads?

At its core, Plus 1 Ads is a program discovery and referral network for internet marketers.

It’s a place to find programs, keep track of the ones that interest you, and connect with the people promoting them.

Instead of simply showing you an advertisement and hoping you click, Plus 1 Ads encourages you to explore.

You might discover a safelist you’ve never tried, an interesting traffic exchange, a marketing tool, or another program that catches your attention.

Find something interesting? Save it to your personal Portfolio and come back to it later.

But there’s another side to it.

If you’re already promoting a program, Plus 1 Ads gives you an opportunity to introduce it to people who are actively exploring.

You can discover programs worth joining while helping other people discover yours.

How Does It Work?

I wanted the daily routine to be simple.

When you join Plus 1 Ads, you can participate in Today’s Discovery.

Today’s Discovery lets members explore programs in a simple daily routine.

Each day, you’re presented with programs to explore. You can take a closer look, save anything that interests you, or move on to the next one.

Complete seven discoveries and you’ve finished your daily participation.

That’s it.

No spending hours clicking advertisements or collecting credits.

If you’re already a member of a program you’d like to promote, you can add your referral information and choose it as your Active Program.

By continuing to participate in Discovery, you create opportunities for other members to discover the program you’re promoting.

And you can follow your results to see how that exposure turns into interest, sponsor choices, and referral visits.

You Can Choose Who You Join Under

Here’s something else I wanted to do differently.

Normally, when you click an advertisement for an affiliate program, you’re taken straight to someone’s referral link.

You might not know anything about that person.

With Plus 1 Ads, discovering a program and choosing a sponsor are two separate things.

When you find a program that interests you, you can learn more about it and, when sponsor choices are available, see some of the marketers promoting it.

You can visit their profiles and decide who you’d like to join under.

I like that idea because the people behind these programs matter, too.

Maybe you recognize someone. Maybe you like the programs they promote. Or maybe their profile gives you a reason to connect with them.

Instead of automatically sending you through whoever happened to place the advertisement, Plus 1 Ads gives you a choice.

Participation Matters More Than Spending Money

One of my goals was to give everyone a fair opportunity to participate.

I didn’t want Plus 1 Ads to become another advertising system where the people spending the most money automatically receive the best exposure.

There is a Pro membership with additional tools and features, but paying doesn’t buy better sponsor priority.

Free members can participate in Discovery, promote a program, and have opportunities to be discovered just like Pro members.

I wanted participation to matter more than the size of someone’s advertising budget.

It’s Live. Come Take a Look!

Plus 1 Ads officially opened on October 12, and it’s been exciting to finally see people using something I’ve spent so much time building.

Members are exploring programs, building their Portfolios, and participating in Discovery.

Of course, it’s still early. I’m sure there will be plenty to learn as more people join.

For now, I’m just happy to finally share it with you.

And you don’t even need to create an account to take a look.

You can browse the public Directory, explore the available programs, and even give Discovery a try.

If you like what you see, membership is free.

Come check out Plus 1 Ads!

And if you do give it a try, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.

Until next time,

Jerry

My Daily Mailer: Year 1

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My Daily Mailer Year 1 featured image with a morning workspace, coffee, laptop, and sunrise view

My Daily Mailer is officially one year old.

That feels a little strange to write.

A year ago, I had an idea I thought was pretty cool. I knew how I wanted it to work. I had spent a lot of time thinking through the logic behind it.

But there is always one question you can’t answer until you put something in front of real people:

Will it actually work?

After one full year of My Daily Mailer, I finally have an answer.

I think it did.

And looking back through the numbers, I may actually like the idea behind it more now than I did when I launched it.

The Idea I Really Wanted to Test

I’ve been using safelists since 2003.

I’ve promoted on them, tracked them, written about them and operated them. I’ve watched the industry change quite a bit while the basic mechanics of a safelist stayed surprisingly similar.

One thing kept bothering me.

The economics of a traditional mailer don’t naturally balance themselves.

Members earn credits. Sites give away credits. Upgrades create credits. Promotions create credits. Balances accumulate.

Eventually, those credits turn into mail.

But there isn’t necessarily any connection between the amount of mailing power being created and the amount of activity available to support all that mail.

That was the problem I wanted to play with.

With My Daily Mailer, one Mail Token has a very specific value: one mailing.

But that’s not the clever part.

The part I still think is coolest is this:

The amount of MT members earn for reading changes based on how active the mailer is.

The economy responds to the mailer itself.

Member activity helps determine how much future mailing power gets created.

As conditions inside the site change, the earning rate can change with them.

Instead of constantly trying to force balance from the outside, the system is designed to move toward balance on its own.

It’s a little nerdy.

I know.

But I still love it.

The Members ARE the Economy

That’s also why My Daily Mailer depends so much on participation.

When somebody reads an email, they’re not simply clicking to collect an arbitrary pile of credits.

Their activity is part of the system.

Reading creates the conditions that allow mailing.

Mailing creates new messages to read.

Those reads create more mailing power.

And around it goes.

That’s the experiment I wanted to run.

Could a safelist economy regulate itself based on what the members were actually doing?

A year later, we’ve had enough real activity to give that idea a pretty serious test.

Year 1 By the Numbers

I pulled a full 365-day report directly from the My Daily Mailer database for this anniversary.

During Year 1:

  • More than 2,700 members joined My Daily Mailer
  • Members sent 28,305 mailings
  • Those mailings produced almost 15 million emails
  • Members earned 32,531 MTs
  • The mailer delivered more than 1.76 million reading hits
  • More than 100 members made upgrade payments

Those are real numbers from a real year of people actually using the site.

And I’m proud of them.

But there is another part of the report I like even more.

Month 12 Tells Me More Than Month 1

Launch numbers are fun.

They’re also dangerous.

You can launch something new and get a flood of curiosity.

People join because their friends are talking about it.

Affiliates promote it.

Everybody clicks around to see what’s new.

Then six months later…

Crickets.

So when I went through the Year 1 report, I wasn’t especially interested in proving that My Daily Mailer had a good launch.

I wanted to know what happened after everybody stopped caring that it was new.

September 2026 was month twelve.

During that month, members sent 2,621 mailings.

Those mailings generated more than 1.35 million emails.

The system delivered 174,812 reading hits.

And on an average day, about 144 members were actively reading mail.

That’s month twelve.

Even more interesting, the mailing volume throughout 2026 was remarkably consistent.

Not one giant launch spike followed by a slow fade.

People found a rhythm.

They read.

They earned MTs.

They mailed.

Then they came back and did it again.

Some Members REALLY Use My Daily Mailer

The Year 1 report also reminded me how much of the site is driven by a relatively small group of extremely active members.

There were 270 members who completed at least 500 reads during the first year.

Together, those members accounted for more than 1.13 million completed reads.

And 243 of those heavy readers also sent mailings.

I love that.

Because that’s the system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The people doing the reading aren’t trapped on one side of the equation.

They’re earning the ability to become senders themselves.

Read.

Earn.

Mail.

Repeat.

The economy keeps circulating.

And to those members who have spent hundreds—or thousands—of reads helping keep that cycle moving:

Thank you.

My Daily Mailer would just be software without you.

Then I Accidentally Tested It Against Everybody Else

One of my favorite moments of My Daily Mailer’s first year didn’t actually happen inside My Daily Mailer.

Earlier this year, I ran a safelist experiment for this blog.

I sent the same simple page through 40 different safelists.

There was no sale.

No opt-in.

No prize for clicking.

Visitors were simply asked to look at the page and choose whether they wanted to interact with it.

I wasn’t testing My Daily Mailer.

I wasn’t trying to prove anything about my own site.

I was testing attention.

And when I looked at the results, My Daily Mailer stood out.

By a lot.

Its visitors interacted with the page at a dramatically higher rate than the other safelists in the test.

Now, there are several possible reasons for that.

Members know me.

Lucky Letters give people a reason to pay attention.

The member base is active.

And the structure of the mailer may encourage a different kind of reading behavior.

I can’t separate all of those things perfectly.

But seeing My Daily Mailer stand out in an experiment I hadn’t designed to make it look good was pretty satisfying.

Especially because one of the things I wanted from the beginning was a mailer where activity actually meant something.

Year 1 Wasn’t Just Running the Site

Of course, I didn’t launch My Daily Mailer and then spend twelve months admiring it.

I tinkered with it.

A lot.

Lucky Letters became part of the experience.

I built a better contest system.

We now have reader contests and weekly reader sprints.

I added clearer guidance for new members who hadn’t yet figured out how to earn their first MT.

I watched the activation reports.

I changed things.

Then I watched again.

Some ideas worked.

Some didn’t.

Some things that seemed obvious to me were apparently not obvious at all once a new member landed on the site.

That’s one of the biggest differences between designing something and operating it.

Real members find every assumption you made.

That’s a good thing.

They make the product better.

The Site Is Still Evolving

My Daily Mailer is not finished.

I don’t really expect it ever to be.

That doesn’t mean I’m constantly trying to reinvent it.

The basic idea has held up remarkably well.

The self-balancing economy is still the part I believe in most.

But there are always ways to make the experience clearer, smoother, more useful or more fun.

Sometimes that means a new feature.

Sometimes it means changing a paragraph.

Sometimes it means staring at a report and realizing new members aren’t doing what I thought they were doing.

And sometimes it means spending far too long adjusting something that nobody except me will ever notice.

That’s part of running a site.

If You’ve Never Tried My Daily Mailer

If you’ve never joined, Year 2 seems like a pretty good time.

You can join for free.

You don’t need to understand the economics before you start using it.

Just read some member emails.

Watch your MT balance.

Earn a mailing.

Then use it.

You’ll figure out the rhythm pretty quickly.

And underneath that simple process is a system that’s constantly responding to the activity of the people using it.

That’s the part I’m proudest of.

Join My Daily Mailer

To Everyone Who Made Year 1 Possible

I built My Daily Mailer.

But I didn’t create what it became during Year 1.

The members did that.

Every person who opened an email helped create the economy.

Every person who sent a mailing gave somebody else something to discover.

Every affiliate who referred a member helped it grow.

Every Prime member who decided the site was worth paying for gave me another vote of confidence.

Every contest participant, Lucky Letter hunter and regular reader added a little more life to the place.

That’s what I see when I look at the Year 1 report.

Not 15 million emails.

People.

People using something I built.

People coming back.

People making the system work.

A year ago, My Daily Mailer was an idea I wanted to test.

Today, it’s a working mailer with thousands of members and a full year of real activity behind it.

That’s pretty awesome.

Thank you for Year 1.

Now let’s see what happens in Year 2.

— Jerry

My Daily Mailer

At Some Point, You Have to Launch

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Rocket launching from a website interface surrounded by design tweaks and launch notes

Hello!

My last post was about how just because something works doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready.

That’s true.

But there’s a problem on the other side too.

At some point, you have to launch.

“Ready” Can Become a Moving Target

I’ve been working on my new project for quite a while now.

And lately, I’ve noticed how easy it is to keep finding things to improve.

Rewrite this sentence.

Move that button.

Adjust the padding on that box.

Make this section a little wider.

Change the wording again.

Then change it back.

I wish I were exaggerating.

There is almost no end to it.

And the tricky part is that most of those changes really do make things a little better.

That’s what makes it so easy to keep going.

You aren’t necessarily wasting time.

You’re improving things.

But eventually there comes a point where another hour spent adjusting padding probably isn’t going to teach you as much as letting a hundred real people use the site.

Real Users Change Everything

I can click through every page.

I can test different screen sizes.

I can create test accounts.

I can try to break things.

But there’s one problem.

I already know how everything is supposed to work.

That changes the way I use the site.

A brand-new member doesn’t know what I expect them to click next.

They may completely miss something I thought was obvious.

They may misunderstand wording I thought was perfectly clear.

They may use a feature in a way I never considered.

They may find some strange combination of clicks that I never thought to test.

And once a few hundred real people start moving through the site, I fully expect them to uncover a whole new list of things that need fixing.

Honestly, I’d be surprised if they didn’t.

That doesn’t mean the launch failed.

It means I finally have information I couldn’t get by testing everything myself.

How Do You Know When to Launch?

Before launch, a lot of improvement is based on prediction.

Will people understand this?

Will they notice that button?

Will this page make sense?

Will they know what to do next?

You can make educated guesses.

You can test.

You can stare at the page for the 50th time.

But eventually you’ve learned about as much as you can from testing it yourself.

After launch, the questions start answering themselves.

Instead of wondering whether people understand something, you can see whether they actually do.

Instead of guessing which features matter, you can see what people use.

Instead of polishing things nobody notices, you can spend your time fixing the things people actually struggle with.

That seems like a much better use of effort.

And Yes, I Still Haven’t Launched

There is some obvious irony in me writing this.

The project I’ve been talking about still isn’t live.

I’m close.

Very close.

And there are still a few things I want to finish before I open the doors.

I think they’re worth doing.

But I’m also becoming very aware that there will never be a morning when I look through the entire site and think:

Perfect. There is absolutely nothing left I could improve.

That day isn’t coming.

There will always be another sentence I could rewrite.

Another button I could move.

Another little bit of padding I could adjust.

Eventually, the next useful step isn’t another tweak.

It’s letting people in.

Because you don’t stop improving a product when you launch it.

You just finally start improving it with real users.

Why “Finished” Isn’t the Same as Ready

by
Progress bar at 90% with a magnifying glass highlighting the final 10% before a project is truly ready.

Hello!

I’ve been working on a new online project for quite a while now.

I’m not ready to talk about what it is yet, but lately I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time on something I thought I had already done:

finishing it.

At some point, all the important pieces were working.

The main features were there. The pages worked. Nothing major was obviously broken.

That feels like the finish line.

It isn’t.

Once I started going through everything more carefully, I kept finding little things.

A sentence that sounded awkward.

Something that didn’t look quite right on my phone.

A step that made perfect sense to me because I already knew what was supposed to happen.

None of these were big problems.

But together, they made me realize there’s a big difference between something that works and something that is actually ready.

You Already Know Too Much

I think this is one of the hardest parts of working on anything yourself.

You know what everything is supposed to mean.0

You know the backstory.

The person seeing it for the first time knows none of that.

So instead of asking:

Does this work?

I’ve started asking:

Would this make sense if I had never seen it before?

That’s a much better question.

And it doesn’t just apply to building websites.

This Applies to Marketing Too

This is where I think it gets useful for almost anybody working online.

Think about something you’re promoting right now.

Maybe it’s an email, a landing page, or an ad you’ve been running for a while.

You probably know exactly what it is, what it does, and what you want people to notice.

But would somebody seeing it for the first time know the same thing?

That’s where things get interesting.

Look at your promotion without filling in the blanks yourself.

Is it immediately obvious what it’s about?

Is the next step clear?

Could something be simplified?

Sometimes improving a promotion isn’t about adding more.

Sometimes it’s just about making what’s already there easier to understand.

The Same Thing Happens With Almost Everything

We finish something, make sure it works, and move on. That makes sense.

The problem is that “finished” makes us stop looking.

Sometimes one more pass is where you catch the friction — something confusing, unnecessary, or not nearly as obvious as you thought it was.

Those can be small changes, but they can completely change how something feels.

I’m Learning to Respect the Last 10%

I used to think getting the major pieces done meant a project was basically finished.

Now I’m starting to think the last 10% is where you stop looking at what you made as the person who created it and start looking at it from somebody else’s point of view.

That applies whether you’re building something big or writing a short email.

Before you call something done, give it one more look.

Not as the person who made it.

As the person who is about to see it for the first time.

You may be surprised what suddenly jumps out at you.

Talk soon,

Jerry

P.S. Pick one thing you’re currently promoting and look at it with fresh eyes today. Don’t ask whether it works. Ask whether it’s obvious. That’s a much tougher test.