FFA comes from: Free For All site,
and are sites that allow anyone to submit a
link to them. This links are free of cost and
you don't need to link back to the page, as
it's usually required in the link exchange programs.
Whether a FFA submission is useful
or not it's still being discussed. Some people
claim that FFA web sites produce so little traffic,
that's useless to consider submitting a link
to them.
Others say that investing resources
on search engine optimization and other methods
of traffic improvement it's much better. And
many point out that if your alternative is having
a free link in a FFA web site or having nothing
at all, then the FFA web site's link is always
better than nothing.
You can be sure that if you post
your link into a FFA web site you will get a
real flood of e-mail!...
SPAM
e-mail !
E-mail that comes from hundreds
(even thousands) of people that want to tell
you about their business and have captured your
e-mail address from the sites with special programs
that do so.
Will you also get e-mail from
people interested in YOUR offer? ... Only a
few!
FFA web sites are more a waste of time and
effort than a good deal
If you still would like to try with them,
don't post to them one by one, a good autosubmitter
can get you pretty good results in a minimal
amount of time.
NEVER use your personal e-mail addresses when
you post to a FFA web site, you must use a
free (disposable) account.
Be sure that the URL address you submit doesn't
have any e-mail address that can be harvested
by spammers
Using FFA autosubmitters it might look as
a good idea, but in fact it doesn't work,
because your link rolls off from the pages
as fast as other people submit their sites
via the same tool.
Submitting manually to FFA web sites it's
even worst, for the same reason than before
and because it takes too much time per submission.
If you want a better positioning, submit with
autosubmitters more than once a day
HAVING YOUR OWN FFA WEB
SITE
Absolutely! It's much better to
own a FFA web site than to post to FFA web sites!
You might wonder what's the gain
of creating a page that allows OTHER people
to post their links to YOUR ffa site for free?
The gain is that with a good CGI
script...
You would get their E-mail
addresses!
Then you can use that e-mail address
to send out a "thank you for posting" message,
which it's just an excuse to include an advertisement
for some of YOUR products.
Some webmasters send also a second
e-mail telling their users when their link roles
off the page, in this message, they tell the
receiver that his link is no longer available
at the FFA web site and they invite him to come
back and submit it again.
As you can probably guess, if
you run the FFA web site this is your second
opportunity to include another advertisement
in this message as well..
So, as you can see these are the
reasons of why the FFA web sites exist...
NOT to give you the opportunity to contact
people
BUT to give the owner the opportunity to harvest
your e-mail address for marketing purposes
If you go around sending information
about your business opportunity to people that
haven't asked for it, you can be accused of
spamming. However, if people give you their
e-mail address in order to be accepted in your
FFA web site, and therefore accepts that will
receive confirmation e-mail, they can't complain
about it.
It isn't very good anymore.
Many people use autosubmitters
to submit to hundreds or thousands of FFA web
sites at the same time, they get a throwaway
account and direct the flood of e-mail caused
by the submission to that address.
As they use a throwaway account,
they never go and read those messages.
Only a few use their personal
e-mail address, but they get so many messages
that just can't possibly read every single one
of them. So, the chances of your message being
among those that get read are closer to 0 %
than to any other number, because...
Very few people do read those postings
HOW TO MAXIMIZE FFA WEB
SITES PROFIT
Once you get the e-mail addresses you should
make sure that they are real, and the easiest
way to do it, is to request via e-mail that
all submitters confirm their submissions by
replying to the message. (So they don't use
a fake one)
Send your confirmation mailings two or three
days after the submission. If the submission
has being made using an automatic submission
tool, the user will get a ton of mail, so
an immediate reply might get buried among
thousands of others.
Always notify the user why you're mailing
him, and if you promised to send one or two
reply e-mail, send only one or two e-mail.
We have now covered why people
run FFA web sites and how to improve the benefits
they can bring. But is that hard work worth
it in the end? I wish I could say otherwise,
but I believe that the answer is no. It takes
quite a lot of effort to get a FFA web site
run flawlessly and even when you manage to achieve
that, the negative sides of running a FFA web
site will always be with you.
Is it worthwhile doing all this
work? My idea is that the answer is no. It will
take you too much effort to get a FFA web site
run flawlessly and you can expect only little
result. Unless you run a PAID service.
Why would people pay for a FFA
service? They will do it if they see that you
consciously filter all the automatic submissions,
and offer a copy of the e-mail address of all
the daily submitters to your customers.
What kind of problems can you
expect with a FFA web site of your own:
Some people might post ads with e-mail addresses
that belong to someone that they would like
to disturb, and you can be accused of SPAM
(so you need to keep a copy of all the requests
that you receive)
Massive autosubmitters will hammer at your
host (no solution for this).
Even if it's not allowed, some people will
post obscene links on your page (you need
a human being that reads all of them to filter
them).
FINAL
ADVICE:
Keep
away from FFA web sites!
