FFA stands for "Free For All" and originally referred to web pages (Free For All Links) that allowed a visitor to add a link to their own site, using a title they composed themselves.
The idea was that other surfers would come along, and attracted by your description, click on your link to visit your site. This worked well for a while, but gradually the novelty of browsing FFA links began to wear off, plus lots of "auto-submitters" started to appear. These will post your link to many FFA sites at once, thus removing the need for you to visit each page yourself. This development drastically reduced the number of people visiting FFA pages, and therefore the chance of anyone actually clicking on your link.
FFA link pages are usually split up into several categories like "Business", "Computers", etc., with a preset maximum number of links in each (usually 100). As the use of auto-submitters mushroomed, FFA pages began to be bombarded with submissions, with the result that a posting to a popular page may only be visible for a very short time, possibly less than an hour or so (as each new link is added, yours moves further down the list until it drops off).
By this time the focus of FFA pages as a marketing tool had changed; instead of hosting an FFA page to generate many visits to a site, marketers began to host them simply to collect the email addresses of those posting links (you have to provide a valid address in order to post), so that they could send them their own sales messages.
Many of these consist of a fairly innocuous single mailing, but there are others that add you to their mailing list, forcing you to unsubscribe (I use the term loosely!). Some make it very hard to get off their lists (or near impossible), whilst the worst kind make a profit from selling your address (together with those of thousands of others) to spammers, or to the unsuspecting as 'safe lists'.
You may of course choose to reply to these emails with your own sales message, but be warned, this can be dangerous. Doing just that resulted in well known e-marketer, Rick Beneteau, being shut down by his host, upon their receipt of a spam complaint from an individual whose message Rick had replied to!
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If you do wish to reply to any of these emails, make sure you quote a substantial portion of the original message in your reply, including their signature. That should serve to make it clear that they contacted you first.
Some people are of the opinion that responding to the messages sent to you as a result of an FFA posting is "bad netiquette", their argument being that the host of the FFA page is providing a service by allowing you to post your link, and that this is their 'payment'.
That particular viewpoint doesn't hold water with me. Whilst it may have been true in the early days of FFA pages, these days the host generally benefits far more than those posting their links, with the majority of webmasters setting them up solely for the opportunity of sending out their sales letters.
However, the time it will take for you to (safely) reply to each message, means that this is not a very effective marketing method. In addition, many of your replies are probably never read, being filtered and deleted or going to an autoresponder that simply sends you another message.
Having said all that, a sustained program of regular postings to FFA pages may bring in some visitors and therefore be worthwhile. Plus, if several of the sites that your link appears on are popular and well listed in the major search engines/directories, it can improve your site's ranking in the search engines that measure link popularity.
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Here are a few links to FFA submitters (not clickable to protect me from association):
- http://www.jimtools.com/submit.html
- http://hotyellowlinks.com/
- http://findme.as/freesubmit/index.html
- http://www.linkplace.com/submit/?s=linkplace&p=fancyu
- http://www.global.gr/mtools/linkstation/
- http://www.icestorm.net/linkchain/
- http://www.wealth-connection.com/freesubmit.html
I strongly advise you to set up a suitable free email account/forwarding address before you post to any FFA pages (you have been warned!).
It was perhaps due to FFA pages focusing more on the email side of the operation that led to the growth in opt-in email based FFA lists
These offer the advantage of safe 2-way communication with many other subscribers at once; you read their sales messages and they hopefully read yours if you carft a good subject line. Unfortunately for you though, most people are only interested in posting, not reading. This is why automatic posting software is everywhere; you have to send thousands of posts to get any response.
Continue to read about my test of FFA links ...
