In the battle to be noticed on the web and share with the world
our dreams, ideals, advice and products -the strategies are many.
When you have a limited budget, it also greatly limits the ways
to gain exposure. Some of the major search engines are now
ranking according to link popularity or how many dollars you can
pay them to be listed. It's getting harder for the "little guy"
to get into the game without a second mortgage on grandma's gold
teeth. The argument for and against paid submission I won't
explore now.
Have you ever come across those sites that offer to submit your
URL to 8,567,291.1 sites for FREE? Then no doubt you have
probably heard the term FFA, as this is where the majority of
your submissions will go.
So what is FFA?
FFA stands for Free For All site. They have been in existence
since around 1995. These are pages with the sole purpose of
listing links. Practically anyone can post their "ad" on these
pages for free. The ad usually takes the form of a descriptive
link and a one to two line description. These listings are
usually limited to around 50 and constantly rotating. A once off
submission will last, if you're lucky, around one week. These
pages are hosted around the world.
While trying to keep up with information regarding what the
search engines are doing and investigating other options for
promotion, I have been discouraged from using FFA sites to
promote mine on a number of occasions. A couple of weeks ago,
curiosity got the better of me, I ignored the advice and visited
my friendly neighbourhood FFA blaster (a site dedicated to
submitting to thousands of FFA pages).
After navigating through a series of pop-ups, I was presented
with a form to fill in requesting my details, my site's url and
description. With one click of my mouse button, I had supposedly
submitted my url to around 8000 other sites. The whole process,
from the first click to the FFA site, navigating to the
submission form, filling out the form and submitting it, to the
exiting click from the site took around 10 minutes.
Did I get traffic?....some, but nothing to get excited
about..... As I mentioned earlier, the link lists are constantly
turning over. On some of the FFA pages, my link lasted
approximately 15 minutes before it was pushed down then off the
list by new submissions. On some pages that I have located, the
link has been visible for 6 days.
How many fellow surfers have you heard comment, "I spent the
night cruising FFA sites"...my guess is not many.
....A word of warning.......(well, quite a few words)
Be prepared for a suddenly influx of email - many, many emails!
As part of the submission agreement, each FFA page successfully
submitted to can generate 1 email to you from that particular
site - a confirmation of submission. These "confirmation of
submissions" of course contain numerous advertisements. My
submission saw me receive approximately 420 emails over the next
three days. But after this initial influx, things settled down
pretty rapidly and I am not being spammed.
I don't think that I will submit to FFA's on an ongoing basis,
purely because of the "confirmation of submission" emails I
received which probably totalled around 1.4 megabytes. I'm not
comfortable with receiving emails that I have sparked off
knowing that they are headed straight for the recycle bin - a
waste of bandwidth in receiving them. It has been worth the
experience, just to see how it works and to pass the information
on to others.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Another option to drive traffic to your site and being able to
send one of these "confirmation of submission" emails containing
your advertisement is to establish your own FFA page. From what
I could ascertain, this is a simple process. If you feel that
this may benefit your site, be extremely careful and do your
research regarding implementation. As word gets around that you
have an FFA page, you will be undoubtedly bombarded with links
to, shall we say, sites containing questionable material which
may have negative legal and moral implications for you. If
submission screening is not set up correctly, you may also
receive very nasty emails from people whose email addresses have
been used fraudulently to create these submissions. Also be
aware that many of those emails that are sent out from your site
will never be read.
Michael Bloch michael@tamingthebeast.net
http://www.tamingthebeast.net Tutorials, web content and tools,
software and community. Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development
solutions. _____________________________________________
Copyright information....If you wish to reproduce this article,
please acknowledge "Taming the Beast" by including a hyperlink
or reference to the website (www.tamingthebeast.net) & send me
an email letting me know. The article must be reproduced in it's
entirety & this copyright statement must be included. Thanks.
Visit www.tamingthebeast.net to view other great articles FREE
for reproduction!
About the author:
Michael is an Australian Information Technologies trainer and
web developer. Many other free web design, ecommerce development
and Internet articles, tutorials, tools and resources are
available from his award winning site; Taming the Beast.net
(http://www.tamingthebeast.net)
