Over the past several days, I've been doing some testing with safelists and start page programs. I used them over the years and stopped when I shut down my previous websites. I started testing again, just to see what kind of hits they are and how long the people stay on the websites. My conclusion… they don't work. In fact, if you're reading this as a result of a safelist message or viewing it through a start page program, be aware that you won't see be reading or seeing it that way after today.

Safelists are the worst. You're marketing your wares or whatever to other people that are doing exactly the same thing. Think about it. You're a seller trying to sell to a seller. Oh, you may get a few hits, but that's about it.

Start page programs are a little better in that they at least get your page viewed by everyone else who uses the program (manual surfing, not automatic surfing).

There are other marketing schemes that I've investigated over the years, some legitimate, some not. The majority work, but only for a finite period of time. You see, a lot of them are based on "ponzi" or pyramid schemes that eventually collapse.

You're much better off getting involved with a legitimate affiliate program. Be forewarned, however, against using bulk email to send out solicitations. It's considered spam and more and more states/countries are making it illegal to send out unsolicited email.

The solution is to create a website (and putting some effort into making it look good), continue to add content, submit it to the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) , continue to add links and banners to your affiliate programs, and then wait. If you're heavily involved in your website(s), and you use creative keywords and descriptions in your meta tags, you should get some activity with your affiliate programs and advertisements.