Memo to my fellow bloggers – don’t be scammed!

Funny how things work out. I’ve recently been helping out a friend with something that should make us both some extra money. It’s taught me a whole bunch of new stuff about web marketing and search engine optimization and back linking and Google rules etc etc. Stuff I knew NOTHING about just 3 months ago. Now, as part of this process my friend has nudged me a bit about optimizing this blog – you know – optimizing potential revenue – and I reject that since this is basically my diary or just the random spewing of my mind, not something I want to feel pressured into updating.

(and….speaking of spewing – my cat just barfed so hang on…..SIGH…..)

So about two weeks ago I received an email from someone who had used the contact portion of the site asking me if I wouldn’t mind allowing a guest post. With a link to a site which they PROMISED was totally legal and not X rated and that I would have full editorial rights to the post if I wanted to change it and..oh hey…the would pay me!

Hmmmm….out of the blue? When I have been rarely if ever posting anything in here other than boring tales from my life and my kids in order to keep my mom happy? 🙂

Turns out that due to this site being around for so long and having previously been featured by WordPress and also having enough popular images and it maintains some sort of decent overall page ranking. I was intrigued and wondered how much it would pay and could I get more info…. here was the reply:

Here is how it normally works:
1) We first agree on a fair compensation/post. Normally $100/post on a site like yours. 
2) I create and submit a guest post to you (or just send a link and anchor text if you prefer to write the articles).
3) After you review the post you let me know if there are any edits that need to be made and if you plan to publish the post.
4) You send me the URL of the published article and I submit payment to your PayPal in 1-2 business days. 

Remember, you will always have full publishing power over any post I send you and can always just send it on back if you don’t like it. After all, it is your site and you can do whatever you want!

Emphasis mine – sounds awesome right? Easy peasy! I host an article for them with a link to their vendor’s site – upon my pre-approval of the post and heck I could even write the article if I wanted as long as I embedded their key words and that all important link. Then – 1 or 2 days AFTER they see that the post is live – they send payment to my Paypal. $100/post! Sounds fantastic right?!

So..I then ask if they can send me a sample article, if there is a minimum amount of time the post needs to be up and is that perhaps why it takes 1-2 days to receive payment, and do they mind that I sometimes post barely once a week but then sometimes I get a flurry of inspiration and post daily pushing any recent posts (perhaps theirs) down a notch, but that I can control the posts and keep theirs as a Sticky of Featured one for a couple of days….

SILENCE.

What had been a next day response turnaround became….SILENCE.

Because she could tell I was onto their scam – get me to post something – ride the traffic for those 1-2 days – let’s say at least 2 since it would take a lot for folks to remember to check their paypal daily right? After two days you email them and receive dead air….but you might politely wait a day to hear back…so even if you then remove their post they have had 48-72 hours of riding your site’s traffic and you have received – SILENCE.

So my fellow bloggers who ALL get way more traffic than I do –  if you receive an email from someone at 43a.com – just delete it.

I mean – if you really WANT to pay me $100 to feature your site on mine – hey now, I’m all for it! Of course, considering that I just embedded a sentence in here about a cat barfing, maybe you want to reconsider. And if you don’t, well…then I gotta admit it kinda feels like I might be the one pulling off the scam!