HercuList Review – Does a Safelist Really Work?

HercuList is one of the longest-standing what I call, “me, me, me” sites. It allows you to join free and advertise your business to other members. But you also get a lot of annoying ads from others, so the key is to ignore all the ads and focus on what you’re promoting. You’re in it for money, you gotta sell yours first, never mind what the other members are up to. 

So this HercuList review will raise the same question that comes up over & over again. If all the members are like-minded people, trying to sell their products, never mind what others are up to...then what’s the point? 

Some users say that they see “good results” but what kind of results are they? There’s one ad that reads “make $1,000 a week on autopilot!” Then there’s an ad by another member that says “make $1,200 a week on autopilot!” Would you care to take a look at these two ads and compare them? Or why not put a similar ad yourself and counteroffer $1,500 a week on autopilot? 

What Is HercuList Plus?

HercuList is an ad-exchange site that promotes the safelist marketing method. It allows registered members to promote their businesses to one another mainly in the form of emailing as well as browser surfing. You get to join for free, earn credits by clicking other members’ ads and use the credits to advertise yourself. Premium options are also available, allowing you to pay to advertise to a larger number of members with fewer credits.

Adult/porn niche is prohibited, and so is anything illegal, but other than that, you can promote businesses in any niche. 

According to the domain registry, herculist.com was first registered in 2001 and is owned by John Gloeckner, making it one of the most original traffic and ad exchange sites.

What Is Safelist Marketing?

Safelist marketing is essentially, an email spamming method that’s agreed by both senders and recipients. Usually as a user, when you receive unsolicited mail, you can mark it as spam so that the ISP (internet service provider) will blacklist the sender’s email address. Any subsequent emails from the same sender will be sent straight to the junk mail folder.

With safelist marketing, you join a closed group where members bombard campaign emails with each other. Nobody can complain about you as long as your campaigns are in line with the terms set out by the group. So the list is “safe”.

Problems with HercuList and Safelist Marketing

Personally, I really do believe ad exchange and safelist marketing are outdated strategies. It may have worked a couple of decades ago when the "internet was new", how eye-opening it must have been to make money online... Nowadays they're facing some critical problems. The following are some of the typical ones that also apply to Herculist.

A Serious Number of Promotional Emails

The moment you sign up with HercuList, you'll be bombarded with promotional emails via the HercuList mailer. I mean, you'll receive one or two emails literally every 10 minutes throughout the day and night. Almost all of them are about generating wealth, promoted by other members. 

All the emails are going straight to my spam folder, and I daren't whitelist Herculist. I wouldn't if I were you - you wouldn't want your inbox filled up with 200+ emails from Herculist every single day. The sheer number of emails you receive is completely out of order.

Member's Dashboard - Bad Usability

The member's dashboard of HercuList Plus is full of in-your-face flashing ads. It's ugly, too chaotic, and confusing. I guess it's the peculiar nature of an ad exchange site, it's designed to distract users because no one visits primarily to view ads and spend money.

However, I feel HercuList's navigation is particularly poor. Most of the top menu items are branded such as "theZONE", "HercuBlurb", "MonsterBLURB", so you have no idea until you find them out. And each time you click a menu item, you're interrupted by a whole page ad which you have to close every time to proceed. So it's unpleasant as far as usability is concerned.

No Target Audience

And as an email recipient, if you were to receive 200+ emails a day, you wouldn't take any of them seriously, would you? If you are new to online marketing, you may be curious to know what others are promoting, but you'll quickly get tired of checking the emails. 

It means from the sender's (other Herculist members') point of view, you are NOT their target audience. Because you too are in Herculist to promote your products. Do you see what I mean? Everyone's busy trying to promote their business to other members, who are all busy trying to promote theirs. 

Users Are Either New or Very Old

So to sum up, if you don't realize that ad exchange and safe mailer sites like Herculist only get you to sell your products to your competitors, you have a problem. Users of such sites are typically either new to online marketing or old ones who never keep up to date;

• The beginners - they're still learning what's going on. They tend to over-exaggerate sales copies. (e.g. "I've already seen amazing results in the past 24 hours!")
• The old marketers - their landing page designs are a decade+ old. That shows that they stopped learning new techniques years ago and still believe in outdated marketing methods.

Membership Options

There are 3 membership options; Free, Pro ($29 per year), or Gold ($39.99 per year). The paid membership options will allow you to spend less time watching other members' ads while allowing you to reach out to a larger number of members. Here are the main differences;

Put differently, this is ironic as is typical for ad exchange sites. The paid members are privileged to spend less time watching other members' ads, which means the majority of the audience are free members, i.e. you'll be advertising your products to those who are least likely to pay.

Is There Anything Good About HercuList?

That kind of "ad exchange" only works if there is a variety of immediately recognizable innovations in the community. Like a gadget convention or a bakery trade fair - if you were a baker, you'd still enjoy tasting your competitors' bread & pastries. Whereas with HercuList, the majority of the members promote more or less the same thing. "Amazing Daily Profits!", "100% Bitcoin Commissions!"

Taking that into consideration, I can think of two things you can do.

#1 Learn Marketing Techniques

You join HercuList in the evening, wake up in the morning, and find 100 new promotional emails. You don't have time to check one by one, neither does anybody. Imagine one of them is from you - it would quickly be buried before hardly anyone noticed it. 

So you can skim through the subject lines and try figuring out which ones truly scream out to you.

And when you click the link in the email and visit a landing page, again, you won't want to waste a lot of time reading 1,000 words to find out whether it's worth taking up the offer or not. So you can find good and bad landing page examples and learn some marketing techniques. For example;

• Page design - whether you are promoting affiliate products or not, you'll need to create a landing page in the future anyway. So you know how a simple, modern-looking, fast-loading landing page is more effective.
• Copywriting technique - use the fewest possible sentences to tell the audience what you're selling. Be direct! Don't embellish stories!

The skills you learn are universal, can be taken away and used elsewhere. So you can either test them on Herculist or elsewhere such as solo ad marketing.

#2 Promote An Attention-Grabbing Niche

Well, it's not like I've tried and tested it myself, this is only a suggestion. Among the thousands of boring "make money" emails, the only ones that caught my attention were non-wealth-related campaigns.

If you're still willing to promote something as an affiliate on HercuList, why not promote a rather unique niche, e.g.

• Psychic/clairvoyance?
• Space tourism? (Though I don't know if such an affiliate product is available - guidebooks, perhaps.)
• Physical products - necessities such as household items? (Although HercuList cannot geo-target the list.)