- If you look at my awards pages at http://www.internet-tips.net/awards.htm you will see that I've also included text of emails from award programs. These are good testimonials as they provide a reason why award was won. This can serve to add credibility to your site and information that you present (and product you may be trying to sell).

It's pretty simple to submit to awards sites. Simply locate them (and there are some good resources listed at end of this article), read instructions and enter data. If you win you'll hear back from them in a few days or weeks. Generally at that time you will receive an email with instructions on how to add award to your site. Usually there is also some advertising included (it's part of price that you pay).

Unless you find an award that you really want, I would suggest limiting submissions to those awards that will give you a link back to your site. A major part of reason to go through all of this trouble is to get more traffic. The only way to achieve this is to get that back link.

My advice is simple. Spend a few hours each week scanning through award listings such as those at bottom of this article. Submit your site to perhaps thirty or forty awards. You will win some of them. This should become part of your standard weekly promotional activity.

The gain will be that you will feel better about your site (assuming, of course, that you win any awards), your popularity will rise, and perhaps you will gain some small amount of additional traffic. At very least, people who are judging awards will have to visit your site at least once to check it out.

Additional Resources -------------------- Our awards code of ethics http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/awardsethics.htm

Website Awards Worksheet http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/awardsworksheet.htm

Revisions to Worksheet http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/awardsworksheetrevisions.htm

Daily editorial - January 10, 2001 (Make A Web Site That Wins Awards) http://www.internet-tips.net/Daily/20010110.htm

Join Web's Best Awards webring! http://www.internet-tips.net/Bestwebawards/Joinring.htm

So you want to run an awards program? http://www.internet-tips.net/Awardmaster/awards000.htm

Win An Award for your site http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/Winanaward.htm

It's a good idea to be very careful when writing this email to not reference your primary email account. You may also want to use caution about referencing any important web sites or other things of importance. Why? Well, even though technically these emails are not spam (since they are a "feature" of submitting to an FFA list) they are often mistaken as such. This is especially true on more advanced FFA lists which allow several autoresponder messages to be sent days or weeks after initial posting.

Another important caution about these lists: do not ever pay a penny for one. They simply do not have a large enough pay off to justify a single cent of your hard earned promotional dollars. If you are going to pay for advertising, take advantage of higher return programs such as ezine ads.

When you create your FFA list, be sure and take advantage of all of customization features that are available FOR FREE. If they have option to include your own banner, then do so. Be sure to write your own autoresponder email. This is primary way to get a return from these lists. Remember, virtually no one ever visits these pages - they just use an automated program to submit to them.

One other feature to avoid is unrestricted ability to set up a list on your own host or server. I found out hard way: if you do install one of these scripts, be sure not to allow automated postings. Why not? Those FFA lists which allow for automated postings have extremely high traffic requirements. After installing one of these lists you may find your bandwidth costs will skyrocket with virtually no return.

Again, I spent some effort and time determining if there is any value in actually creating my own lists. I again created custom welcome pages, and embedded links to those pages within email messages from my FFA pages. The result? Virtually no hits from any of dozen or so pages that I created over a period of months.

This is not to say that FFA lists are totally useless. I've found their primary value is very indirect - by including one on my site (configured to disallow any type of automated, off-site posting) I have added stickiness. Basically, by including list I've given my visitors one more activity that they can do while they visit my site. This gives them yet another reason to visit, to look around, and to come back.

Additionally, since FFA list pages are submitted to search engines, they tend to attract visitors based upon keywords within submitted links. Occasionally, these people land on one of my FFA pages looking for something completely different, become interested and look around rest of my site.

Simply enough, my advice is to completely avoid posting to FFA lists altogether. This is, in my humble opinion, a completely worthless endeavor which eats up time with no return. I would also avoid creating pages on any of FFA services, as this has, in my experience, no real payoff either. In fact, there is actually a risk of being accused of spamming by sending emails from these services. The only thing you may want to do is include a script on your site to improve stickiness. You can do this either with a custom script on your own server, or you can use a service such as Bravenet.com, which has an excellent (and simple) FFA posting feature.