Spamming or sending unsolicited email can get you into all sorts of trouble with your Internet Service Provider if enough people complain.

Safelists have also been defined as being like a club where the members are typically webmasters and Internet marketers. They are people who have websites that they want others to visit, products they want to sell, or affiliate programs they are promoting.

Safelists are not considered to be among the top marketing methods in use such as Pay Per Click, article marketing, solo ads, ezines and so on. They are good to use as a list building tool because they are populated with internet marketers, however they are far from perfect and many Internet Marketers feel they are useless.

They are loved by some, hated by others and almost unheard of outside of the online marketing community.As with most other Internet Marketing strategies safelist marketing can be productive if it is done correctly.

There are basically two types of safelists. First there is the regular, everyday, run of the mill type where you can send to other members and they can email their offers to you. Whether you choose to look at the email is entirely up to you.

However if you want the other members to open your email advertisements it might be a good idea to scan through your inbox and open the ones that interest you.While a regular safelist allows you to post during a certain time frame, such as every 2 or 3 days, they also offer other types of advertising.

You can usually purchase banner impressions or text ad spots to be shown in the member's area. You can also purchase contact solo ads which are sent out to the contact email address of the entire member list which can be very effective.

The second type, and more effective of the two, is the credit based safelist program. These programs require members to accumulate and spend credits, or points, in order to send their ads to the list. The primary method of earning credits is reading the emails sent to your list address by other members and clicking on special credit links contained in these messages.

For this reason, the ads you send to credit-based lists are more likely to be opened. Some lists offer the same amount of credits in every email you read, some offer a random amount of credits, and some only offer credits in random emails. Most programs offer the occasional bonus credits which can get you anywhere from tens to thousands of credits at a time.

Most of these lists, if not all of them, allow you to purchase credits, too. This can happen in the form of an upgrade or a straight out purchase. These credits are primarily used to send your ads to the safelist, but some lists allow you to trade your credits for banner impressions and text ads.

There are a few variations of credit-based safelists. In addition to the standard model mentioned above, there are sites that require you to log in to view ads rather than having them mailed to you, and sites that require you to wait for a timer to count down before you earn credits.

These days there are a lot of safelist hosting companies that make it easy for anyone to start a safelist program very cheaply. This usually results in communities on the Web with dozens, even hundreds of cookie-cutter safelists that look nearly identical; they usually have no graphics and some meaningless text and only a couple of hundred members.

These should be avoided because they are only a waste of time. If you decide to include safelist marketing as a tactic in your internet marketing strategy be careful which list providers you choose and this will help make your safelist strategy a success.