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Can FFA pages benefit you?

By: Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi, Thu Dec 8th, 2005 08:16:44 PM

WHAT ARE THE FFA PAGES?

FFA comes from: Free For All pages, 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 beeing discussed. Some people claim that FFA pages 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 improvemente it's much better. And many point out that if your alternative is having a free link in a FFA page or having nothing at all, then the FFA link is always better than nothing.

You can be sure that if you post your link into a FFA page you will get a real flood of email!...

SPAM email !

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 FFA pages with special programs that do so.

Will you also get e-mail from people interested in YOUR offer?

Only a few!

MY OPINION

FFA pages 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 FFA, 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's 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 SITE

Absolutely! It's much better to own a FFA site than to post to FFA sites!

You might wonder what's the gain of creating a page that allows OTHER people to post their links to YOUR 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 page and they invite him to come back and submit it again.

As you can probably guess, if you run the FFA page 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 pages 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 site, and therefore accepts that will receive confirmation e-mail, they can't complain about it.

THE MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION ABOUT FFA PAGES

Do FFA pages work as a traffic builder?

It used to work well in the past

It isn't very good anymore.

Many people use autosubmitters to submit to hundreds or thousands of FFA pages 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 PAGES 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 promissed to send one or two reply e-mail, send only one or two e-mail.

We have now covered why people run FFA pages and how to improve the benefits they can bring. But is that hard work worth it in the end? I'd wish I could say otherwise, but I believe that the answer is no. It takes quite a lot of effort to get a FFA page run flawlessly and even when you manage to achieve that, the negative sides of running an FFA page will always be with you.

Is it worthwhile doing all this work? Mi idea is that the answer is no. It will take you too much effort to get a FFA page 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 conciously filter all the automatic submissions, and offer a copy of the e-mail address of all the daily submitters to your customers.

FFA PAGES COMMON PROBLEMS

What kind of problems can you expect in a FFA 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).

Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi

About the author: Dr. Roberto Bonomi is a successful e-book writer that shares his home business experience at: http://www.easy-home-business.com If you already have, or are looking for an Internet Home Business, you can't miss the free knowledge that you'll receive at his site.

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