Innovate or Die! Remember Business World List? Where are they now?
Innovate or die. Business World List was a great safelist for many years. In fact, it was one of the longest lived successful safelists, ever. But they forgot one very important rule: Innovate or die.
The internet is the fastest-moving information and communication system ever imagined, at least in known history. It is ever evolving. It is evolving at the speed of thought. It flashes past anyone who isn’t keeping up.
Innovate or die! Any business that fails to innovate will disappear. Countless relatively young companies already have. A business model that works today isn’t going to work tomorrow. That is just the fact of our times.
Business World List advertised itself as:
“A New, And Powerful Breakthrough In Safe-List Advertising –Reverses The Downsides Of Email Marketing, And Generates Guaranteed Ad-Views, Website Visitors, And Increased Sales In Just Minutes After You Start Using It…”
“…Making This The MOST VALUABLE ‘Sales Generating Machine‘ For Website Promoters Of All Time.”
Unfortunately for them, this is the way they advertised themselves for years!
Taking stock of a lack of innovation
I did a little exercise to show in a hopefully memorable fashion the error of not innovating. I took the advertising they used to the bitter end and edited it just slightly to reflect what happened. They did not innovate and they died.
“Back in the day, you would have agreed with we that The Benefits were Worth a Hundred Times More Than ANY Safelist On The Internet…”
If you were searching for information on reaching large audiences and getting more traffic to your website, then you probably came across the Business World List safelist. And, if you were like me, you probably wondered what the story was behind this popular safelist. But now you’re probably wondering what happened to it.
Well, here’s the truth: This list was the real deal. But I digress…
Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that I was hesitant when I first decided to join Business World List. But after I started advertising my website on this list, I was literally blown away by the effectiveness of it.
The first thing I noticed as soon as I gained access to their member’s area was that it was a lot more than just a safelist — the members’ area was jam packed with innovative tools to improve traffic and sales. I know that this sounds like an ridiculous amount of information, but one of my favorite things about their website — which you would have discovered right away — was that it was very user-friendly and easy to reach a large audience (more than 46,500 subscribers).
For example, as soon you logged in you could create your ads in HTML format without knowing any HTML coding. Have an ad ready? You skipped to the next step; just copy and pasted your ad into the safelist mailer and clicked a button — your ad was instantly sent out to over 46,500 on their mailing list.
If you think that this was the only advantage you’d get, think again. You got internal announcements (adAnnounce feature) to the entire mailing list (announce your offers to the entire list, 100 times a day if you wanted), ad tracking, other submission tools, and so on…
And the best part was that you could see responses as soon as you started using the tools. (I really loved that feature!)
But what impressed me most about this neat tool is that if you upgraded for just $12/month you could easily make your investment back ten times over (with the right product), the first time you used it. That was once very true. Innovate or die! I wish they had done the former before the latter happened!
Business World List was considered by many marketers as the most effective marketing list, since it reached a mass audience with the click of a button. Thousands of marketers used this safelist on a daily basis and swore it was The Best Safelist out there. I once gave this product my absolute highest recommendation.
But that was then. Unfortunately, while others innovated, Business Word List did not. Competition is fierce in the online world. Others who did innovate passed them by and eventually just blew them out of the water. They are no more.
Don’t make the same mistake! Innovate or die.