eZines you can advertise in Free

Easily confused with Safelists, there are many eZine services that sell Solo Ad mailings to their big, loosely harvested lists, and sometimes they’ll even offer a free emailing just to get your business. Of

course they want to sell you a much bigger eMailing down the road.

It is common to see an ad from a company that looks like a legitimate eZine “collector” company, offering a free Solo Ad submission to a list around the size of 5,000 – 50,000 recipients. I haven’t tested too many of these because of the hoops they make you jump through and the long lines you have to stand in.

In my experience, these companies have the power to collect and sort such a list out of their main, untargeted list and use it as described above in a sort of “bait & switch” routine.

I can’t verify if they all do business this way, but I have seen it happen more than once. The free mailing will go fine but you’ve got to buy a second mailing… So you choose a package, pay $67 or more for the mailing, and a month later when it’s your time to be featured, the much larger list doesn’t convert nearly as well as the little one did!

Let’s not overlook that you really have no way of knowing how many recipients got the email, or if they were safelist boxes, completely untargeted, etc… So any time you see the words “eMail your ad to 2,000,000 people for only $X,” just remember that there are many more than 2 million safelist email boxes online!

The only way to take advantage of this technique is to keep using the “little lists,” by jumping from service to service, never paying for a bigger mailing. However, there is usually a few weeks or more of waiting in line to get through each time, and from time to time an outright scam can occur.

One of the few times I attempted this I used PayPal to send the company $1 to “hold my place in line.” They said I’d even get the dollar back so I said ok, not even caring about the buck.

Three weeks later the 5,000 subscriber mailing went out, and I got a paltry 115 people to show up on my very closely targeted website. Naturally I wasn’t going to sign up for a bigger package, so I didn’t contact them again, not caring about the fate of my $1.

I won’t make that mistake again! Apparently their fine print said that the $1 was a “down payment” for the bigger solo ad later, and if I took no action within 30 days, my default package was the $89 Solo Ad to their 150,000 general subscriber list! My PayPal account was charged $88 a month later and I had no clue what it was for!

Getting out of these kinds of situations, especially when dealing with companies that don’t have a phone number, is just not worth anyone’s time. Making this technique work requires a lot of searching and a thick skin to hassle.

If you want to try your luck, however, simply google the phrases “Free eZine mailing” or “Free eZine Ad Blast.” You’ve been warned though. It’s a tough road.

See “Safelists” and “Blasting” for more on this subject.