Whether you are an experienced online marketer or just starting out in your own home based business, you've probably heard someone tell you to FFA.

No, they were not being rude!

Actually FFA stands for Free For All, and Free For All sites are advertising sites. Whether you should use them or not is your choice.

In order to help you make an informed decision, I offer you this article.

There are literally millions of FFA sites on the internet. All one has to do is to go to any search engine and type FFA into the search box. With most of them you have to register before you can submit an ad and there is good reason for this, as you will see below.

Normally all you get to put on FFA sites is a one line ad linking to one URL. You usually get the opportunity to choose a category for your ad, so that may help a bit. Unfortunately, you can't say much in one line so you better make your ad stand out.

Another thing you should know is that most of the people visiting FFA sites are other advertisers placing their ads. That could actually be a plus if you are advertising something that online marketers may be looking for.

Of course, there is always a downfall to that. Today many marketers have access to programs that will submit their ads to the FFA sites automatically, therefore there may actually be very few visitors to the site.

Something else you should be aware of is that every time you place an ad on a FFA site you will receive an email back confirming your submission. If you place hundreds of these daily, you are going to get hundreds of emails. A good idea is to get yourself a free email account (such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Lycos, etc) and use that email address instead of your normal home email address. It won't take long before it is overloaded with spam.

Now you may ask yourself, why use FFA sites if I can't say much about my product, nobody is going to read it anyway and I'm going to get tons of spam?

Good question.

Remember I mentioned about registering? Well, the owner of the FFA site gets to send a confirmation email out to every advertiser who posts an ad. If you think about it for a minute you will see that could mean sending hundreds of emails a day. And hundreds of ads!

That's right, every confirmation email will have the owners ad in it. And that, my friends, is the upside of FFAs. Free advertising for you!

You simply sign up for a free FFA site of your own, set up your email using the site's autoresponder and let it do it's thing. Every time someone places an ad, they automatically receive your email with your ad in it. And, if you have your own web site, simply put a small ad on it somewhere giving people the opportunity to place free ads and send them to your FFA site.

Most FFA sites will also let you upgrade, for a fee, and be able to collect the email addresses of every person who posts an ad. This could help you build your own email list, however, unless you have something of value to keep them interested, most of them will unsubscribe.

There is another small plus for using FFA sites. If you are advertising your own web site all of the ads you place using your web site's URL gives you another link back to your site. Although most search engines place little value on this type of link for ranking purposes, I believe any link back to your site is of value, especially since many search engines use spiders to find sites by following links.

So there you have it, FFA sites, should you use them or not? It's up to you.

Randy Justason