I made an impulse buy and bought a pro membership of Free Traffic System and I'm starting to question my decision quite a bit. It's not a lack of results that's bothering me (I'm still in my testing phase to see how well it works.) It's the really clunky choosing of the blogs and especially the "rechoosing" thing that's driving me crazy. It takes me many attempts at choosing and rechoosing before I finally get my articles up on 40 sites. It just seems like a really poor way to do it. Why can't they do it where you just select some categories and it randomly chooses for you (and it should continue to try blogs automatically until it reaches 40.) It's just a real hassle the way it's set up now. Sort of venting on this and I'm wondering what other FTS veterans think about the system and how well it works. It's too late for me to save my money - but my time is even more valuable to me.
There's a free version that essentially works the same as the paid version except that you only get your article out on 30 sites (instead of 40) and you can only include 2 links (instead of 3.) At least, I think those are the differences. Since I started off as a paid member, I never tried the free version.
Although we own our own service we use other services too simply because they are extra networks. That being said we left FTS along time ago simply because the system is flawed. The bigger the network gets the more tags you are going to have to sift through, this being said it only allows publishing to 40 blogs max and half of them have errors so do not get published. I really do not know what the hype is about FTS there are so many more better programs out there.
I agree, there's all of this pain in the ass involved with choosing (and then re-choosing over and over again..) the blogs and you are limited to just 40 sites anyway. The other services I use have no such limit and usually my articles with them end up on more than 40 sites. I really hope they change this aspect of the system.
I just tried the free version, there aren't many blogs that are related to my niche and I gave up long ago. Btw, I was so annoyed with the choosing also, not because I have to go through the choosing process, but because whatever keywords I entered, only a handful sites came up. Not worth all my effort in inserting spinning code into the articles.
Glad to see I'm not the only one annoyed by the choosing and re-choosing thing. It's just not a very effective way to do it. I don't understand why they do it that way. I'd love to hear that they are working on fixing this part of the system to make it user friendly because I don't think I can recommend it to people the way it is now (unless you're really broke and you want to go with the free membership --- maybe.)
I do not think they will be able to fix the system as they have already given all the control to the article submitter and not the webmaster
It's so frustrating when you contact the people that run a service like this about their service's problems and all they do is give you a bunch of nonsensical excuses. I'm becoming more and more frustrated by this service. I almost feel like I'm going to have to write off the $397 I spent on my lifetime pro membership because now I'm wasting something more important than money: Time. I just had this scenario play out: 1.) I submit an article (going through the annoying "choosing" scheme where I have to pick 40 blogs based on their title - which is essentially just choosing blogs at random - why couldn't they have software that does this for you?) 2.) Only published 8 times (each article is supposed to be published 40 times with a pro membership.) 3.) I go through the even more annoying process of "re-choosing" (as far as I can tell they list all of the blogs the same way as the first time, even if you've already been approved / declined by blogs...) 4.) My entire article has been declined after this re-choosing submission. And there's no way of "re-choosing" again and no information about why the article was declined. WTF!?!?!!
I haven't paid for a membership, but the free membership works well if your niche is fairly common. I don't know if Google treats food blogs as within niche with wine....but since I am only sending articles that are already published elsewhere to FTS, I don't worry about it much. No, I'm not worried about duplicate content on different IP's.
I wouldn't be worried about that either. Press releases and AP stories are on hundreds/thousands of sites and that doesn't negatively effect anything. Plus with FTS you can spin your content so duplicate content doesn't need to be an issue. My problem with FTS is how the blogs are chosen for an article submission - the system is not well designed.
I agree with the op on the procedures, but I could live with their cumbersome procedures, if the results were good, but they are not. After months, I gave up. I felt I was wasting my time. I would: 1. Write my article 2. Submit it to all the blogs I could 3. Never see any backlinks for my efforts. If you are a user of FTS, than you know that FTS hides the blogs URL that your links are put on. I forget their reasoning for this, but I remember when I asked, they gave me some hog wash answer. Ok, I accepted their excuse and kept writing, kept submitting and after 8 months no results I gave up. I can't even remember the details, but you were suppose to get like 30 or 40 backlinks for each article. IF you wrote 100 articles that would be 3000 or 4000 backlinks. Heck I would of been happy with 300 or 400 for all my effort. FTS tiring matra that google does not show you all your backlinks got old. They acted as if there was no other way to check for backlinks except google. They were full of excuses and spent more time trying to sale on why you don't see all your backlinks than providing quality service to their members. Bottom line is you are better off submitting to article sites than to waste your precious time on FTS.
That's the conclusion I seem to be coming to, although I'm still testing it... It sucks to write off the $400 I spent on my lifetime pro membership - but I think wasting time is even worse than wasting money. And similarly I got BS responses when I complained as well. They just make excuses like a bad politician.
Personally, I gave up on ArticleRanks some time ago because the articles they provide are way too few and targeting is way too broad for my niche sites. I got tired of rejecting 90% of the articles because they had nothing to do with my niche. One or two usable articles a week won't cut it.
For a free service, I find FTS to be working extremely well for me... I don't see what the problem is with chossing Blogs... you just scroll down the list and select blogs untill the system tells you that you have selected your maximum allowable blogs... pretty simple if you ask me
I'm glad to see this topic has popped back up... because I've changed my opinion on FTS. I still think the "choosing" and "rechoosing" system is a pain in the ass (much more cumbersome than the systems UAW, AMA, & AR use.) But I've been pretty pleased with the results I've seen with it after doing some testing. I'll take a bit of a pain in the ass if I get some good results, and I'm impressed with the results I get with FTS.
Hi, I just tried the free version, there aren't many blogs that are related to my niche and I gave up long ago. Btw, I was so annoyed with the choosing also, not because I have to go through the choosing process, but because whatever keywords I entered, only a handful sites came up. Not worth all my effort in inserting spinning code into the articles. Reply With Quote