Novel Free-For-All Idea

By Terence Tan
Posted Saturday, July 24, 2004

Almost anyone who has tried submitting to free-for-all sites will say that they are no longer worth the effort as a traffic generating tool. Automated FFA submissions to "millions" of sites are also not that useful as most of these sites are only ever "visited" by automated submission scripts and not by human eyes. The only thing these auto submission tools achieve is to get your e-mail address bombarded with "confirmation" e-mail from the FFA page owners. Many unsuspecting users who submitted their personal e-mail address to these submission tools have suffered incredible frustrations because of the "spam" they receive. (Technically they are confirmatory e-mail that the submitters agreed to receive.)

However. one previous "victim" of confirmatory "spam" managed to turn the tables around with a very ingenious twist to the process. He basically submitted his web site using the FFA auto submission tools and agreed to get the "millions" of confirmatory email...but submitted an e-mail address that led to an autoresponder that replied back to these emails with a "thank you for your offer which I'm considering...please have a look at my web site in the meantime" type e-mail.

Incidentally, Outlook Express also has message rule function which we can use to achieve a similar effect.This is good because some autoresponder services do not allow their e-mail addresses to be submitted to FFA sites (do so at your own risk!). Simply click on "tools", "message rules", "mail", "mail rules", "new", "where the message is from the specified account"(the e-mail account you intend to receive confirmatory "spam" with), and "reply with message", then specify the message you want to reply with.

Don't forget to also freely distribute your e-mail address to multiple mailing lists, classified ads sites, and anywhere that is likely to get your address "spammed". The best part is when bulk e-mail address harvesters pick up your e-mail address and start selling it to other "spammers", you'll be promoting your site to many people with absolutely no effort on your part at all!

Have fun with this one.

About The Author
Terence is the editor of Hugevoice Bulletins, an ezine dedicated to discovering unusual, alternative ways to generate web traffic. For more surprising web promotion ideas, visit Hugevoice.com or send an email to subscribe@hugevoice.com