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We have been working with online advertisers for quite a few years, benefiting from putting this site online back in the mid 1990’s. We have worked with many excellent advertisers over the years and have created custom solutions for a number of them. When you have an above board advertiser who knows what they want, it is an absolute pleasure to work with them.However, there are so many requests that pollute the waters so to speak – we try to respond to all advertising requests – giving people the benefit of the doubt – and perhaps we need to draw the line at a higher standard than the lowest standard that approaches us.
Here is what we often go through when dealing with a number of new advertising requests.
Pre Advertising
1. They want us to write the content first and try to pay later – and then never pay2. Want us to post the piece first then never pay
After getting burned on exceptions we now no longer make ANY exceptions to this rule.
3. The advertiser who keeps giving us miscellaneous contracts to sign – pro-longing things, coming up with multiple agreements. We’ve seen a few of these come from India based advertisers for whatever reason. This is a fun one.
4. Odd ball requests – I will work with custom requests – but often we get requests to remove other paying ads and then post theirs. Often their offered price is incredibly low.
5. We get a number of requests like this: “here is our offer to give you free content to help build traffic to your site – the content is often poor English and there is *always* an agenda of placing 1 or more links within the piece to for profit websites.
6. We get a fair amount of small change requests – usually with budgets that really stretch it to reach $50 one time. These particular advertisers are intent on bargaining down to the $1 range.
7. The page ranker. They are only interested in Google Page rank and no other analytics. They work off of a formula they’ve been given – so they can only offer you one price based on what ever your page’s particular page rank is. There is no room to work with their set pricing.
It is always amazing to me how $10 to $20 difference in one time offers make all the difference in the world to these particular advertisers. As in offering $10 or $20 less one time (one off) is a make or break to them for their budget.
8. The no follow linkers. These requests (and we’ve had a few but not too many yet) are only interested in their link being the “follow” link on a page and won’t spend a dime until all links on a particular page are set to “no follow”. They are dead set on that and don’t seem to have interests in other analytics.
9. The advertiser that doesn’t get it the first time. We give prices and then they circle around and ask for free advertising after we have provided a list of our rates. Often times after asking again, they will then ask multiple times even after we’ve mentioned we don’t have free advertising or can’t give them whatever low ball price they are trying to reach!
10. We are starting to get “bulk pricing” requests now for guest posts and other advertising – which means we agree on a lower price for say 3 posts a month or more. One post is then submitted and paid for at the much reduced lower price. We never hear from these individuals again and we’ve just given a much reduced price for one guest post. We need to figure out how we will deal with this – but we are now aware of this latest “scheme”.
11. Domain Authority – we’ve started to get a few of these requests. They only offer a certain price based on MOZ domain authority and aren’t interested in anything else as it relates to the site and advertising.
12. The “violation of Google webmaster guidelines” – they want to submit one or more commercial links in their post but do not want to pay for it. They reference Google as being the entity that controls a free market economy.
13. The “no traffic folks”. From time to time we get requests after we have emailed them our pricing that say something like “but your site has no traffic” and they reference a flat line graph in their email showing close to zero visitors per month – usually from some obscure SEO software – and then because of this reference, they then ask for free or extremely cheap advertising.
14. The “sneaky guest post requests” – we are inundated with those who try to pretend to be non commercial entities – offering to make our site so much richer for a quality post they have spent hours writing – we are “so lucky” to be the recipient of their good work. There are different degrees of how sneaky they can be – we send them our very specific guidelines on guest posting vs advertising posts – and then they ignore them all, setup an account and add their post. Thats the quickest ticket to the “delete” button. Some write personal emails but then they forgot to send from a personal email – rather its being sent from some seo site.
15. The celebrity name request. We receive inquires from celebrity names, George Lucas, Angelina Jolie to name just a few that we have received recently. These senders focus on their name in the email, often mentioning “their” full name several times just in case we don’t catch on that a famous person is writing us asking for advertising.
16. We get a fair amount of requests from either uneducated people, English is not a first language – or those with really unethical intentions who try to pretend to ask for something and then try to sneak in other requests.
A number of these requests end up in my spam folder – I guess there is a reason for that!
Post Advertising
1. Had to mention this one as this has never happened before. A long time advertiser got pissed off because after nearly a month of them being overdue, we removed their links from the site -this was after billing them via PayPal (like we normally do) and emailing our contact. Nearly a month grace period and you get pissed off because you have not responded to our invoices, or email and you had even extra time given. Wow! Enough said.
