The Validator: A success story

(Publishers Note: Email marketing remains wildly popular. From consumer products to opportunities, marketers use email to advertise their goods and services. While bulk email is often employed, safe lists are probably the venues most used by on line marketers. This ususally means having one or more safe list submitters and then broadcasting to hundreds, sometimes thousands of lists. All those lists must first be validated. This article is from the creator of an extremely useful service called THE VALIDATOR.)

In 1998 I started using Safe lists, just a handful to begin with, logging in daily and sending ads by hand. As you can imagine I did not receive much of a response to my ads! So as we all do, I took the plunge and joined a big safe list submitter, there weren't many of them around at the time and there was no such thing as automated validations!.

Hundreds of validation links came flowing into my email account along with ads from admin owners that validated my account by hand. For 4 days I was getting buried in emails hiding my validation links.

It became that bad in the end I gave up my submitter membership after 5 days, which had just cost me $24.95, swearing never to use a submitter again!

After a couple of days of calming down I started to wonder what could be used to save all the hassles of validating these links and approached a very good friend of mine that was extremely good at writing programs and scripts. He laughed when I told him what I had gone through and looking back so did I.

We sat down and came up with the first The Validator but it had its problems although it downloaded validation links it also downloaded all the other links we receive in emails as well! So my first attempt brought in 22,000 links the program dutifully clicked through them all but took 38 hours and 20 minutes precisely! The other problem we had was it also downloaded virus links, so you can imagine the chaos that caused!

Finally The Validator was created. It has been improved a lot since then, generally our time for processing validations is around about 2 hours. It searches out any virus' found in emails and will NOT download them, this email is then deleted from the web server and validations carry on.

A lot of people have asked "why should I use The Validator when my submitter has an onboard validation service".

My answer to them is simple ask your submitter admin if they also process validations for contact email addresses, most safelist hosts now require this, their answer will be NO. The onboard validation script can only validate one email account per set of safe lists. You can read more about this on our site Impressions-hosting.com

Whilst The Validator is processing your validation links we watch over everyone of them so if there was a large number of safe lists that were down on their servers we can inform you of this and re-send The Validator at another time, something else that an onboard validation script cannot do!

Although The Validator is an industrial strength program it is operated by human beings that you can talk to if needs be.

Fastads and Postads were the first submitters to start offering THE VALIDATOR (independent from the on board validator). Since then, many other submitters now use the service including XtreamNet Marketing Center.

Once The Validator was running smoothly we decided to offer everyone on the internet the chance to join a modern day Safe list Submitter with The Validator included so ALL safe lists could be validated. This way no matter what submitter you belong to or how many, you can always get your validations done.

Our service is now used by people from all over the world! It is hard to believe that our service is almost 7 years old now and just as valuable now, if not more so, than before. Safe list marketing remains very popular, and I can't imagine doing that kind of marketing without The Validator taking care of those thousands of validation emails everyone has to deal with at least once when doing email marketing.

(Debra Challinor is the author of Safelist Warrior, Inside Safelist Secrets Revealed" and an innovator in on line services including the One Buck No Bounce Wonder commercial email service and SafeAdLists.)

2Daily crashes and burns

2Daily has stopped paying members, stopped answering emails and has closed its doors permanently, and in otherwise short order left the buiding after only a brief (like couple months?) sojourn on the Net, possibly breaking an all time record in the flash, splash, crash and burn on-line business model, and, no doubt taking those who did actually invest money with them (in high hopes of the promised high returns) firmly to the cleaners

When it first appeared, many were excited and an equally number puzzled. The burning question was how could it possibly support the claims of large payouts for miniscule amount of surfing? How? A traffic exchanges' life blood is in the surf. That is what makes it all WORK. You simply cannot attract advertisers without active member surf stats. Plus, you simply cannot just give money away along with free memberships combined with small payout levels. All that eventually comes back to haunt you. Quickly in 2Daily's case.

Of course, 2Daily was on the fast-track to burn out from the onset: promising a. free money b. free memberships c. low (like non-existent surf requirements) and (most fatal of all) d. quick payouts within the first 30-days for all members - including free. They apparently had not noticed that "free" members means no one spends money. If you pay free members to surf every month, they tend to stay that way. Plus, if you set the surf standards too low, you basically have a whole lot of people doing - nothing. And nothing does not pay the bills, does not attract advertisers, does not encourage members to upgrade.

Nothing then means you have no money to pay the members. Unless you have really deep pockets and another agenda for starting the whole affair to begin with, of course you are doomed. Of course you cannot pay. Of course you have no substantial or loyal or (God forbid) WORKING membership. Everyone along for the gravy train and the free ride and no one noticing the rather ill concealed lumps or the sink holes in the road. For those lured by promises of EVEN BIGGER PAYOFFS by investing their money in the ill-fated enterprise...

2Daily has stopped paying members, stopped answering emails and have shut the doors permanently.

So, what does that say about the paid-to-surf industry? Is it a sham, scam, and a rip-off? In my opinion, absolutely NOT.

There are scammers and mis-guided and/or unscrupulous owners for sure. There are the sharks absolutely. There are those who have no clue - as in all sense and sensibility has left the building. Does this cast a shadow on the paid-to industry as a whole. Yes. But shadows are meant to be stepped out of.

There is a number of very successful and ethically run paid-to-surf programs on the Net. Some are very well established, some are new. Some have successfully employed the concept of free accounts and free money. Studio Traffic is the most notable (and probably the most emulated).

However, for every Studio Traffic there are THOUSANDS (or more) which fail. The primary reason for failure is that free money and free membership combined with LOW PAYOUT time frames and membership levels is inherently unstable. As a veteran of many paid-to sites, I know for a fact that the majority of them have very high payout levels for free members and there is a sound business reason behind this. By the time a free member finally reaches payout, the site has garnered a. many paying members b. many paying advertisers. These are the entities which actually pay a. hosting bills and b. the free members.

I belonged at one time to a number of paid-to sites where the payout was set at well over $150.00 for the free members. At .002 per click, well let's say it was a whole lot of reading required to make payout level. And then of course I didn't make $150.00. Nope. That was the LEVEL I had to accumulate. Sigh. I got paid anything over that. I never did reach payout. Kinda the whole point in the industry somewhat. That was 2003 - 2004.

Then, we started to see the backlash to all this. First there was all those programs which claimed to pay you $5, then $10 then $50 and THEN $150 per email. Yikes! One of them was supposedly paying out at $15,000. Like HOW?? (My all time favorite was the site that supposedly taught you how to earn $1 million reading emails. Right. My question was WHO WAS PAYING THAT? That what I wanted to find out because THAT was the business I wanted. Lol. I wanted to be the admin who PAID out that mil to members - plural.)

Point is: paid-to anything is a business. It must follow good, sound business practices and laws. Anyone can PROMISE anything. A promise is no good unless fulfilled. Ethical business owners know and appreciate this fact. They follow solid business models which guarantee success for the customers/members first. This guarantees them success. When looking for a good paid-to program to invest in ASK QUESTIONS! Analyze the situation. Does it MAKE SENSE? Then, proceed with caution always.

- Cherie Halliday http://xtreamsurf.com/XtreamNet/viewtopic.php?t=350