The Deception of FFA Advertising

By Dan J. Fry
Posted Monday, December 13, 2004

FFA, or Free For All sites are the next generation of internet marketing. Or at least that's what many want you to believe.

FFA sites are places where anyone can post a short ad with a link, as long as they agree to accept emails from the site owner. Some of the most popular sites are

(1)ffanet.com
(2)myebiz.com
(3)prolinks.com
(4)kiosk.com
(5)ffamailblaster.com

At first thought this seems like a remarkable way to advertise. But, there are major problems here.

First off, the only way for the advertisement to work is for people to visit the FFA site where it is posted. But the only people it seems that visit these sites are those that post an ad. To make matters worse, 99% of posts are done now through autosubmiters. So who actually sees your ad? Absolutely no one.

You may have received emails from FFA site owners of claiming that advertising via an FFA is worthless unless you actually own the site. Their flawed reasoning (which I will explain shortly) is that as the owner, you get to post your own ads on the site, and better yet, collect the email addresses of everyone posting. Moreover, you receive commissions on anyone signing up to purchase an FFA site of their own.

But wait! It gets better. The same people will claim that when submitting your ad, create a separate email account to store the large number of autoresponder messages you will receive and other advertisements. So, if you don't want your primary email account to fill up, create a secondary account and simply delete the emails as they come in.

Now i'm really confused. If people who submit to my now owned and paying monthly FFA site, create a secondary email address to submit when posting, only to delete all of the advertisements they receive, why exactly do I want their email address?

The entire logic of using FFA's for increasing site traffic and advertising is severely flawed. What's even worse is that most search engines rank these sites lowly if at all. So where exactly then do you advertise your FFA site?

I performed a very simple test. I created a simple E-Zine sign up form, separate from my site, and used a well known autosubmit software to "Blast" my add to the entire FFA network, which claimed millions of page views per day. Submission was done once per day, at the same time for a period of 1 week. How many responses? 1! A single response that did not even sign up.

FFA sites for advertising are worthless. You'll hear many argue that they work if your careful. I would like to believe it would. Definitely easy to submit to and the exposure would be phenomenal. The cold hard truth is that they do not.

Below are a few of what I find to be comical ad headlines posted at FFA sites. Enjoy!

(1)"Get your classified ad in 5,000,000 emails and 111,000 websites everyday for free without spamming". (If you follow the link you find that what is being promoted is another FFA site!)

(2)"$1.67=massive income" (I wonder if they know that this is not an equality?!)

(3)"Getting 5,000 opt-in leads daily." (1 year amounts to 150,000 subscribers. Just about the population of a small town!)

(4)"Delivers an endless flood of traffic!" (Perpetual motion?!)

(5)"Retire in months for only $6!" (The state of Florida is about to get an incredible population boost)

(6)"The secret to getting a million visitors to your site!"

About the Author
Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics and is married with two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at mailto:e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at (http://www.e-kinetic.com). He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com .