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.

FREE-CD-ROM

Produce a CD-ROM about your business. Put some of your web pages on that CD. You can also insert actual Shareware/Freeware software, tools, older ezine articles and other material. You will give opportunity to select things offline and buy online if you sell a product or service. That makes buying much faster and more comfortable. Give this CD-ROM away for free on your website. Your customers will give their Address and receive CD some days later. If there is not much data you can also provide an archive file to be downloaded. People will buy again and again! The CD will also have effect that your customers won't forget you! If you have a bit of luck you will even have chance to receive a bit of money with that CD. You can sell places for advertising. An ad for another company is displayed 10sec. before you can use CD-ROM, for example.

ADVERTISING

Sell places for advertising on your webpages. Give these places away at an online auction every month for one month. If you start at a very low price several people will probably be interested. This is a nice new opportunity to attract possible sponsors and keep people interested.

AFFILIATE OPPORTUNITIES

If you have a lot of traffic you can also sell advertising places with an affiliate program. That page that generates most traffic for your site will receive advertising place. Ask visitors to install a banner to your page on their site. If they do you will insert these sites in a list. You can chose one site from list at random every week. This site gets an attractive advertising place on your page. This will cause many links pointing to your site.