FFA marketing involves using free-for-all pages to promote
your site. In my opinion FFA pages are one of the most
overrated forms of Internet marketing there is.
No serious web marketer spends much time with this method
of marketing because the results are far from positive but
are in fact very negative meaning you're worse of after using
them then your were before using them. Sound strange? Well
it's not really strange, it's what the industry calls a scam,
a scam which benefits the owner of the FFA page.
The idea is that these things will get you more traffic because
you're getting links on other peoples websites which you
don't have to reciprocate. It sound good at the start but
the problem is that nobody visits these pages while surfing
normally, the only people that visit these are webmasters
trying to get extra traffic to their sites. As well as webmasters
software bots designed to add links and of course the dreaded
email harvesters will visit. This means that your link will
be up for a day or two at most and will then be replaced
by the next web marketers link. Rarely do real people visit
these pages.
In fact the most visits you could expect from a FFA posting
campaign would be about 20 and in saying that around ten
of those visits would come from email harvesters. Usually
FFA submission software can submit to 500+ FFA pages and
500+ pages is what I mean by a 'FFA posting campaign'. So
you've posted your link to 500+ webpages and you've got 10
real visitors, even after using some automatic software it's
just not worth your time and effort.
Once again it's simply not worth your effort to post to these
things. The results aren't positive, far from it, OK you
get about ten people to your site but where's the catch?
What do the FFA page owners get? Well like it or not they
get to send you about 30 spam emails each, some send more
but generally after a month of being spammed constantly with
useless ads you'll start to see a drop-off in the amount
you get each day.
The first ones usually a confirmation email with a few ads
and from then on they'll use your email address to send you
lots of spam everyday even if your link has gone from their
FFA page. That's why they started the FFA page in the beginning,
to have people to advertise to.
If you do decide to try your hand at FFA pages make sure
you use some good software to do the job and what's most
important is to use a throw away email account like a Yahoo
or Hotmail one. Never use your personal or official website
email because you'll have great difficulty in locating the
real emails from the spam emails sent from the FFA pages.
One more thing to tell you about FFA pages, yes you guessed
it, it's a negative thing. The quality of the small amount
of visitors you do get is very low, many visitors stay for
only a few seconds and will never buy anything as they're
mostly webmasters who were posting themselves and came across
an interesting sounding link and decided to check it out.
They're currently online to promote their site not to buy
anything from you so they'll quickly continue on to the next
FFA page on their list.
The bottom line is that FFA pages are a waste of time and
always will be. You should be concentrating on marketing
methods that work if you want to make money online.