Using FFAs to your Advantage

By Tony L. Callahan
Posted Thursday, August 5, 2004

In my article "Free Promotions for Your Web Business", we discussed the relative merits of banner exchange programs. We also discussed tips and techniques to make your participation in banner exchange program more profitable. As an astute business person you have, no doubt, started with a banner exchange program. You should be starting to see the additional traffic that a banner exchange program can generate.
So, what's next? An excellent means of web site promotion is the Free For All Links Page (FFA). The major advantage of Free For All Links Pages are a low cost way to get the word out about your site. Low cost in terms of dollars, but not in terms of time. First you have to find the pages. Try searching Web Crawler or Yahoo for Free For All Links pages. You either get nothing or you receive tens of thousands of results (depending on your search terms). One you have found some FFA pages, you must post your link to them. Each submission takes between 3 and 5 minutes. You can see how this can quickly add up to be a large amount of time.

One way to minimize the amount of time you invest in FFA posting is to utilize FFA submission services. There are several good, reputable services that will submit your link to multiple FFA pages for you. These submission services come in both free and for hire flavors. The Link-Promote web site has links to free submission services at: (http://www.link-promote.com/tools). Other submission services can be found through your favorite search engine.

Submissions to FFA pages can help with your search engine placement as well. As we have discussed previously, some search engines utilize "link popularity" in their placement calculations. This means that the more links to your page, the higher your placement in the search engine. The down side here is that your link must be present on the FFA page when the search engine indexes it to gain this advantage. FFA page submissions should, by no means, be a substitute for reciprocal links. Depending on timing, and how often your post to the FFAs, they could augment the "link popularity" effect.

Your message will influence how effective you submissions to the FFAs are. With only a brief look at the FFAs, you will realize the your message is up against a large amount of competition. You MUST get you message noticed! The question is how? I believe that the answer is content. The same rules of content will apply to your FFA postings as apply to your Title and Description META Tags. For a detailed discussion of these tags, see "Improve Your Search Engine Placement - Part 2". Avoid "clever" tricks such as all capital letters or using unnecessary special characters in your message. The potential customer visiting the FFA pages quickly learns to ignore these techniques, rendering your message more invisible than it was before. Stick to solid ad copy techniques and leave the "tricks" to the unsuccessful.

To determine if the FFA Link Page you have found is a good candidate for your message, look at the way the page is set up. Are there categories of links that allow visitors to peruse only the type of ads they wish to view? Are the links refreshed on a relatively short interval? If there are more than 50 links per category, I would not spend the time posting to this site. Your ad will very quickly become buried and invisible in the mass of links.

Once you have submitted your links to several FFA pages, sit back and analyze the results. Watch you web site statistics reports. The FFA sites that generate traffic to your are the ones that you should repost to. Experiment with different messages as well. Just as the best banner ad burns out after a period of time, so will your FFA message. Frequently a change to the message copy will result in a renewed surge of traffic, so keep the message fresh.

If you have the time, I recommend that you try Free For All Links Pages as a part of your web promotion campaign. All you have to lose is the time that you invest in them and you have total control over how much time that is.

About the Author
Tony L. Callahan, is a successful Internet Promotions Consultant with more than twenty years of industry experience and is president of his own Internet marketing company, Link-Promote. He also publishes Web-Links Monthly, a newsletter full of tips, tricks, tools and techniques for successful web site promotions. To subscribe, send e-mail to: Web-Links-subscribe@topica.com. For an online archive of articles by Mr. Callahan available for reprint, visit: (http://www.link-promote.com/articles).