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Viral Marketing - Lesson 7SafelistsSafelists are email exchange lists which you can join. The way they work is that you post email advertisements in exchange for receiving advertisements from others on the safelist. The list of email addresses belonging to everyone on the safelist is distributed to all the members of the list. There are several such lists available from email list services on the Internet. Exchanging email advertisements using safelists are only effective if done in bulk because they can be time consuming. You will need to use group mail software to send your advertisements to hundreds of lists at once. The emails you will receive from being a member of hundreds of lists will be in the thousands per day so it is good to create a separate "throw-away" email address to receive these emails.A great place to get started on safelists is Yahoo! Groups. Go to the Yahoo! Groups website and search for lists that allow advertising. By joining one or two groups you can become familiar with the way safelists work. You may not get any results from the advertisements you post to just one or two groups but you should use the opportunity to learn how safelists work. Announcement ListsAnnouncement lists are similar to safelists but the difference is that they deal with announcing new sites rather than advertising. Unless you obtain your lists from a very trusted source, you should read the rules for each list carefully before posting so that you can keep your posts within the guidelines for the list.Viral MarketingViral marketing is designed to circumvent the spam rules by having the recipient of the email forward it on to the people in his or her address book. You do not forward your original email to these other persons directly and therefore you are not spamming. The viral marketing concept is that the email will spread to numerous recipients like a virus. Each recipient receives the email from someone with whom they have a pre-existing relationship.Many Internet marketers have been able to get a lot of coverage for their emails through viral marketing. This distribution technique is quite powerful when you develop an email that is attractive and catchy so that people would be interested in forwarding it. People decide whether to pay attention to an email based on two factors. The first is the source and the second is the subject. By definition, viral email comes from a trusted source. You should give the email an attention-grabbing subject. A very effective type of viral marketing is sending sincere communication to someone who you know does not mind receiving emails from you. Do not make it sound like an advertisement in any form. Let your email be a sincere sharing of your experience. The recipient in turn may become interested in your product or service and buy based on your success and sincerity. If they do, they may later refer your product to others that they know. This process may continue to spread in a viral manner. |