Hi Ethel,
I read your message, re: - spam.
The short answer, as Candy said is - when the FFA service you use makes it clear upon the person submitting her link for posting she will be receiving confirmation emails containing offers and specials from members then its not 'spam.'
(But, spam is 'unwanted' or value less email in the eyes of the beholder, which means you want to put together a quality message.)
A couple of rules of thumb:
1. You can only send one confirmation mail per post and when you are sending time delayed confirmations, it is better to send only one - even when the person posted 10 times. What I mean is, let's say you collected emails from a period of 10 days. The best course is to 'clean' the list, removing all duplicates and only send out one mailing.
(I have seen some people send out 20 separate emails for each post, on the same day, which strikes me as rather excessive.)
2. When mailing to FFA leads, remember you are mailing to people who usually have posted their link for one purpose, to bring visitors to their web site. In many cases, the desired objective is to get a temporary improvement in search engine ranking.
This means, you are marketing to sellers and in a large number of cases, people use dump mail boxes to receive their confirmation e-mails.
3. When marketing to sellers or advertisers, think through what is these people want and then provide it to them, but also remember:
a. You are an unknown face, so applying the age old principle - give and you shall receive - you want to send people to a web site were your visitor receives an offer of a gift (s) in exchange for contact information - or you can give away a gift and let the gift with your links do the selling and follow up.
This is why you will want to see some marketers give away an information product which contains their own affiliate links. The e-book does the 'selling'.
b. Once the person accepts your gift and agrees to receive further information, outside of the FFA arena, you can then develop a relationship.
As to the form of your message. Some services don't seem to mind you sending out HTML messages with flashing neon lights. (Of course, in today's market place, 9 times out of 10 these are ignored, presuming this form of message makes it through the 'spam' filters.
Some services will not allow you to set up a 'verification' process in your message. USA FFANet is one which comes to mind.
The preferred course is a two step process - like a classified advert (just longer) with your web page then describing what the person actually gets - a free download of value, in exchange for your visitor's contact information.
Trusting these comments are of some value. (Of course, I could be all wet and then I am sure someone will tell me what for!
Kind regards,
John
jbg/
John Glube
Glube's - Business Services
Toronto, Canada
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