Are You Still Using FFA's?

Here's a direct question to all of you. How many of you are still trying to market your product or service using FFA link sites? I don't need to explain what FFA's links sites are, it's pretty safe to say that if you don't know, you probably aren't using them.

FFA link sites are still very popular. There are literally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of FFA sites set up all over the web, and millions of posts per day on all of these sites. With this type of traffic you would think that it would be a good place to market your product or services right? WRONG.

Let's cover a couple reasons why. First and most important, the traffic is all one way. What I mean is that while these sites are always claiming to be high traffic sites, virtually ALL of their traffic is generated from automated submission programs like FFA Blaster that post thousands of messages at a time to thousands of FFA sites. Sure, the hit counters of these sites might say they are high traffic, but hits do not equal eyeballs. If the only traffic going to a site is from automated submission programs, who is actually reading the posts? The answer is easy. No one is reading the posts.

Recently I ran a test by posting an ad for a product that we sell that gets a legitimate 6000 visitors a month to its web site. This site has a sales conversion ratio of about 7.5% which means approximately 7.5% of those 6000 visitors per month purchase the product. We know this product sells, it has a long track record, and we know the site gets traffic.

We posted this particular ad to approximately 1 million FFA sites over a period of a week or so.

Are you curious how many actual hits we received? Are you ready? We received 1 hit. That's ONE, not one hundred or one thousand but ONE.

I've talked to some people who say they do get traffic from FFA link sites, but the one big mistake they make is they do not track their ads. We actually received 37 hits from the FFA sites, but 36 of them were from link verification systems in place on the link sites.

Many people see these hits and think they are real visitors, they are not. It is just the FFA site verifying your link.

There is another major problem with posting to FFA's, and let's for the sake of argument say that you really did get some real traffic from these posts. Traffic from FFA sites will likely be very low yield. In other words these people are far less likely to buy anything and are usually freebie seekers. As the price point of your product or service increases, they are even less likely to buy. The product I mentioned that we tested above is a very low priced item. If I was selling something costing $100 or more, there just isn't going to be any sales made.

Ask yourself this. How often do you actually buy something from a link on an FFA site?

The bottom line, if you are using FFA's to market your product or service and are wondering why you aren't making any sales, now you know why.

If you are one of the few who actually makes sales from FFA's, and gets real traffic and can prove it, I'd love to hear from you.

For most of you, it's time to consider other options for your marketing and advertising needs.