FFA -- Should You Or Shouldn't You?
FFA - Should You Or Shouldn't You?
Whether you are an experienced online marketer or just starting
out in your own home based business, you've probably heard
someone tell you to FFA.
No, they were not being rude!
Actually FFA stands for Free For All, and Free For All sites
are advertising sites. Whether you should use them or not is
your choice.
In order to help you make an informed decision, I offer you
this article.
There are literally millions of FFA sites on the internet. All
one has to do is to go to any search engine and type FFA into
the search box. With most of them you have to register before
you can submit an ad and there is good reason for this, as you
will see below.
Normally all you get to put on FFA sites is a one line ad
linking to one URL. You usually get the opportunity to choose a
category for your ad, so that may help a bit. Unfortunately, you
can't say much in one line so you better make your ad stand out.
Another thing you should know is that most of the people
visiting FFA sites are other advertisers placing their ads. That
could actually be a plus if you are advertising something that
online marketers may be looking for.
Of course, there is always a downfall to that. Today many
marketers have access to programs that will submit their ads to
the FFA sites automatically, therefore there may actually be
very few visitors to the site.
Something else you should be aware of is that every time you
place an ad on a FFA site you will receive an email back
confirming your submission. If you place hundreds of these
daily, you are going to get hundreds of emails. A good idea is
to get yourself a free email account (such as Hotmail, Yahoo,
Lycos, etc) and use that email address instead of your normal
home email address. It won't take long before it is overloaded
with spam.
Now you may ask yourself, why use FFA sites if I can't say much
about my product, nobody is going to read it anyway and I'm
going to get tons of spam?
Good question.
Remember I mentioned about registering? Well, the owner of the
FFA site gets to send a confirmation email out to every
advertiser who posts an ad. If you think about it for a minute
you will see that could mean sending hundreds of emails a day.
And hundreds of ads!
That's right, every confirmation email will have the owners ad
in it. And that, my friends, is the upside of FFAs. Free
advertising for you! You simply sign up for a free FFA site of
your own, set up your email using the site's autoresponder and
let it do it's thing. Every time someone places an ad, they
automatically receive your email with your ad in it. And, if you
have your own web site, simply put a small ad on it somewhere
giving people the opportunity to place free ads and send them to
your FFA site.
Most FFA sites will also let you upgrade, for a fee, and be
able to collect the email addresses of every person who posts an
ad. This could help you build your own email list, however,
unless you have something of value to keep them interested, most
of them will unsubscribe.
There is another small plus for using FFA sites. If you are
advertising your own web site all of the ads you place using
your web site's URL gives you another link back to your site.
Although most search engines place little value on this type of
link for ranking purposes, I believe any link back to your site
is of value, especially since many search engines use spiders to
find sites by following links.
So there you have it, FFA sites, should you use them or not?
It's up to you.
Randy Justason