Month: May 2007

If you’re new to Internet Marketing, you may not have heard the term “FFA page” before. It stands for Free For All page, and is a way to advertise a link of your absolutely free.

The basic idea is that you go to an FFA page and you’ll see some number of advertising links (often up to one hundred). In order to add your link to the page, you need to click on one of the existing links and/or enter your email address (different FFA pages use different approaches).

Here’s an example of an FFA page. It’s perfectly safe to leave a link here if you want to see how it all works. You’ll get a single confirmation email in return, and that’s it.

The lure of FFA pages is easy to understand. They’re free advertising, and since in many of them you have to click on a link to leave a link, this means that anyone who leaves a link after you might be clicking on your link.

But they don’t work, at least not for you.

What’s more, they’re not designed to work, at least not for you. The problems with an FFA page boil down to two factors.

First, your link is one of hundreds, so the chance of a person clicking on your link is slim. If they do, there’s no requirement they leave your page up for any length of time, so they won’t even read it. But at least it’s free, which is more than you can say for pop-under traffic.

Second, the people who visit FFA pages are other people like you, who have websites to advertise and online business opportunities to sell. They don’t want to buy your opportunity, they want you to buy theirs!

So, how do you get FFA pages to work for you?

Run one. Every person who posts a link, and there are quite a few of them, receives an email with your message in it. If you tried the example FFA page above, you received an email that included a message from me. While that message just points to this article, it could have just as easily pointed somewhere else.

Where to Get an FFA Page

The best way to get started running your own FFA page is with a free service, Link Scout. By joining Link Scout you get an FFA page of your own that goes into the Link Scout rotation, so you’ll start getting hits to it without any effort on your part.

They also have a number of other tools for advertising web sites, such as a search engine that displays your featured links (this also goes into their rotation).  You can also bid Link Scout points for keyword positioning in their global search results.

There’s far more available at Link Scout than I’m going to go into here, since my focus in on FFA pages.  It’s free to join, so take a look around it and explore the features.

Here are my stats for Link Scout since I signed up on May 18th.

The main bit I want to point out is that I’ve received a fair amount of traffic to my various Link Scout provided sites, all without any advertising on my part at all.  It’s all due to being in the Link Scout rotation.

Also, notice that hits to the FFA pages are low.  Link Scout’s FFA pages don’t seem to get as much traffic as others.  Link Scout is worth a look because it’s free and you do get traffic, but if your focus is running a high traffic FFA page you’d be better off with Traffic Wave. 

Traffic Wave is not free, but they do have a 30-day free trial.  And the way their commission system works, I can afford to upgrade your account to paid status for the first 30 days so you can take a look at all the features provided.

My statistics for Traffic Wave FFA pages are a bit better than Link Scout.  I’ve averaged about 150 people per day leaving links on those pages, again without any advertising on my part. 

Conclusions

I would never recommend advertising on an FFA page, because they’re not designed to be an effective means of advertising.  What they are designed to do is generate leads for the person running the FFA page. 

In my example FFA page above, all I do with those leads is refer them to this blog for helpful information.  You could just as easily try to sell them on your opportunity.

But that’d be a mistake, too.  Tomorrow I’ll share the best way to make contact with these leads.

If you’ve just discovered this  blog, be sure to check out my $100 Review My Blog contest.  Write a review of the blog to have a chance of winning $100!

So you have a website where you hope to make money off visitors. Unless you’re making money with advertising, this usually means that your visitor is going to have to buy something. Your conversion rate is the ratio of people who actually buy versus the number of total visitors you have.

At a minimum, you should know what your conversion rate is. If you don’t, then you’re missing out on a lot of data your website can give you, including priceless information on which keywords your visitors are using to find you. Use some form of web analytics to track this information, which will include the total number of unique visitors. Your sales software should be able to tell you the number who bought.

An average conversion rate is 3%. This means that if you get 100 visitors, on average only 3 will buy something. When you’re paying for advertising to get visitors, a low conversion rate means you’re not getting much return on your advertising investment.

There are three classes of people who will visit your website. Those who are ready to buy, those who have no intention of buying, and those who want to buy but are undecided. You can’t do much to affect the first two classes, but the last class, the fence sitters, can be converted. On a normal website, though, they’ll look at all the available information and then leave, intending to make up their mind later. Maybe they forget, or buy from someone else later. Either way, you’ve lost a sale.

The primary problem online is that you can’t have a conversation with the fence sitters. In a retail store, a salesperson could talk with them and get an idea of what might be keeping them from buying, and provide information to help them decide. Online, where do they get that type of interaction?

From opt in lists. They allow the fence sitters to start a conversation with you. Autoresponders take the role of the salesperson, giving the standard information most customers want to know.

Here’s how it works: you put a form on your site where customers can ask for more information about a product. They fill out just their name and email address. No billing info is sent, and they’re not asked to make a commitment of any kind. A fence sitter is more likely to do this than to jump into buying. Once they click submit, the autoresponder goes to work.

You would have had to have previously written a series of email letters about the product, with common questions and links to answers on your website. Each letter is personalized, so appears to be a conversation with the customer. Well written letters make the customer feel like they’re having a personal contact with you. The autoresponder sends each email in the sequence you specify, at whatever intervals you specify.

A typical series of automated letters will start out with the information the customer requested, and then a day later check back with them to see if they have more questions, and then a day or so after that offer them a special price if they haven’t bought yet.

At any point, the customer can reply to the email and contact you directly, breaking out of the automated sequence of emails.

Stay on Topic

With today’s spam regulations, it’s easy to get into trouble with an opt-in list. The key is that users have signed up for more information about a specific product or service, so you’re allowed to send them a nearly unlimited series of emails, about that product or service. You don’t have a license to send them emails about different products or services (that comes once they’re a customer and they agree to receive your “special deals newsletter”).

Getting blacklisted by spam lists is a Bad Thing for your business, so stay on topic.

See It Work

To see an autoresponder in action, put your name and email into this form and click Submit. You’ll get a three day series of emails I setup just for this post. Note that this series will not try to sell you anything, it’s just an example so you can see how the autoresponders work, in case you’re one of the few on the Internet who have never signed up for these before.

Request Your FREE Report: More Information From Online Opportunity
Your First Name:
Your Email:

These days, any website that doesn’t use opt in lists is missing out on converting fence sitters into customers. Getting visitors is only half the battle. Converting them into customers is the other half.

The undisputed king of autoresponders is Aweber Communications. The chances are good that you’ve signed up for at least one series of mailings from someone using Aweber’s autoresponders.

I also quite like Traffic Wave, which is the company I use for autoresponders. Both companies offer much the same services at much the same price. Both also use their own autoresponders to provide you with more information on their own services.

You can sign up for Traffic Wave’s demo emails using the following form (note that while the letters are personalized to appear to be from me, they’re the standard Traffic Wave demo letters):

Request Your FREE Report: How Autoresponders Can Make You More Money
Your Name:
Your Email:

And this one for the Aweber demo series:

AWeber Demo