Running a FFA links page

If you have read the "FFA pages" article, you know that it isn't a very good idea to go around posting your link to them. But what about running your own FFA links page and allowing others to post there?

At first it sounds like a pretty weird idea. What could you gain by creating a page that allows other people to post their links into it for free? The answer is easy enough: You would get their E-mail addresses. Just about every FFA links page out there requires anyone who wants to submit a link to give out his E-mail address as well. The owner of the FFA page then uses these addresses to send out a "thank you for posting" message, which of course just happens to also include an advertisement for some of the his products.

When the user's link has rolled off the page, some webmasters send out another E-mail to him. In this message, they tell the receiver that his link has disappeared from the page and that he is welcome to come back and submit it again. As you probably were able to guess, the guy who runs the FFA page does not forget to include another advertisement in this message as well..

So, as you can see from the above, there is a good reason why some webmasters maintain FFA pages. It enables them to get their hands on valuable E-mail addresses for marketing purposes and also offers them a valid excuse to send at least one advertisement to each of those addresses. If you would go around and send people information about your latest product without them having first asked to receive it, your E-mail account would be closed down faster than you can say "spam".

However, if they were to send their E-mail address to you by submitting to your FFA page, it's a completely different matter just as long as your FFA links page has a note that tells visitors that they will receive one confirmation mail from you if they post a link and another one when their link expires. As long as you send only those two messages, it would be very difficult to accuse you of spamming.

Does this kind of advertising work? It used to work in the past, but it isn't very effective anymore. At the present time many users use autosubmitters such as FFA net to submit to hundreds or thousands of FFA pages at the same time. This creates a problem for those who maintain these pages, since many of the submitters understand to get a throwaway account and direct the flood of E-mail caused by the submission to that address. Of course, they never go and read these messages, so all those carefully composed E-mail advertisements will be wasted.

Another problem is that even if they were to use their primary E-mail address and see all the messages they receive, they would get so many of them that they couldn't possibly read every single one. The chances of your message being among those that get read would again be close to non-existent.

Tackling problems associated with running a FFA links page

Even while the above facts might sound a bit depressing, here are some tips you can use to avoid or at least minimize the difficulties associated with FFA's. Notice that implementing most of them will require a decent knowledge of CGI, since you're going to have to modify the FFA script yourself.

• As many people submit fake E-mail addresses, make sure that your FFA page checks that the submitter's E-mail address follows some basic rules:
  1. If the E-mail address contains more than one @-sign or doesn't contain the sign at all, it is bogus.

  2. All working E-mail addresses have at least one character in front of the @-sign.

  3. No valid E-mail address can contain certain special characters such as spaces, commas or quotation marks.

  4. The @ must be followed by a valid domain name, for example apromotionguide.com. If the domain name is a real one, it cannot start or end with a dash ( - ). It also must end in a valid top level domain, ie. com, org, net and so on. For a fairly comprehensive list of valid top level domains, check this page.

• You might want to consider to have the FFA page send all submitters a request via E-mail to confirm their submissions by replying to the message. Program the script so that it won't post the link until it gets a confirmation. The problem with such arrangements is that they will drastically drop the amount of people who bother to submit to your FFA.

  This most definitely is a two-edged sword, but might be something to consider. If the submitter isn't willing to take the time to read the confirmation message and reply to it, what makes you think that he would read your messages even if you didn't require him to reply to confirm?

• Delay your confirmation mailings. If the the submission comes via an automatic submission tool, the user will get a ton of mail. If you reply immediately, your mail will get buried under hundreds of others. Program the script to send the confirmation mail two or three days after the submission. In that time, the flood of E-mail to the user has died down a bit and your mail will have a better chance of being read.

• Remember to notify the user why you're mailing him in each and every one of your E-mails and only send the one or two E-mails you promised to send when the person submitted. Do not sell the E-mail addresses you are able to gather with your FFA page to others.

• Make sure that the subject lines of your E-mails catch the attention of the receiver. There are many ways to achieve that, but one pretty good way of doing it is using something like "IMPORTANT message about your site, <the address of the site that was submitted to your FFA page>!" as the subject of the message. When the receiver sees the word important followed by the URL of his site, it is hard for him to leave the message unopened.

We have now covered why people run FFA pages and how to improve the benefits they can bring. But is that hard work worth it in the end? I'd wish I could say otherwise, but I believe that the answer is no. It takes quite a lot of effort to get a FFA page run flawlessly and even when you manage to achieve that, the negative sides of running an FFA page will always be with you.

Some people will use the E-mail addresses of their enemies when they submit to your page and when you send an advertisement to the E-mail address you received, the receiver will think that you're simply spamming him and complain to your ISP. Massive autosubmitters may hammer at your host, using up bandwidth that could be better spent for other purposes. People will post obscene links on your page even if you tell them not to do so.

When you sum it all up, the negative sides are in most cases just too big to justify setting up your own FFA links page. However, if you still want to do it, here are some CGI-based scripts you could perhaps use.