I received this email earlier today:
My site is just a personal one. Could this be legit, or the start of some kind of scam? If legit, how much income does this sort of thing bring in?
Sounds like a scam to me. Generic, non-personal outreach? Check. The promise of big sacks of dough for doing nothing? Check. If the contact information is somewhat thin (such as, no phone number) and the name given can’t be found on Google as an agent of internet advertisers, I would look no further.
I do know a fellow whose blog drew attention from advertisers, to the tune of a fewthousand dollars a year. But his site was about marketing and he was diligent about keeping content fresh and linking to other sites in the field. He had developed a pretty good following before the bux started rolling in.
Actually, I remember a thread about a month ago where someone received this exact email…let me see if I can find it for you.
Here it is. Not exactly the same, but similar.
How much traffic does your site generate? Considering you’ve described your site as “just a personal one”, I’m going to assume it’s not that much, certainly not at the level of thousands of unique visitors each day. Even if this is a legitimate offer to sell advertisements on your website, you won’t be making very much money.
I wouldn’t bother with this guy. If you’re interested in putting ads on your site, consider a proven commodity like Google or similar.
Also, xxx looks like a phony name to me.
I have a personal site that doesn’t get a ton of traffic, and frankly isn’t updated much. A gaming company offered me $50 a month to put a text link at the bottom of the page and I agreed. Google ads wouldn’t draw flies.
These companies are trying to boost their google page rank. Not sure if it works, and I haven’t given too much deep though to how ethical it is, but I get $600 a year.
From my experience of these things (that was me in the thread linked by EmAnJ, and that thread wasn’t the first time I’d received an email like this, just a slightly different case from the usual)…
It’s not a scam, as far as I can tell, but they will want you to insert their ad link into your own text in the article, to make it look like you’re personally endorsing it, and to obfuscate its true nature as a paid link.
I refuse to do that on my site for two main reasons:
[ul]
[li]I feel it breaches trust for my readers - if I link to something, I want them to be able to know it’s relevant, and that I personally recommend it.[/li][li]Concealing paid links is a violation of Google’s Webmaster policy - If you have Google ads on your site, this is especially pertinent.[/li][/ul]
One other thing… if you do decide to run with their scheme, try this:
Ask them how much they would pay, and what they want
Tell them you don’t really think it would be right for your website
Wait for them to make a higher offer
In at least a couple of the occasions I’ve been approached about this, they doubled their offer after my first refusal. (I still refused, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well squeeze some cash out of it)
My bet is that the ad is or contains links to a scam, they would just be using you as a carrier. Check out this article in New Scientist from just this week, starting from “Devious twist”:
The ones that have approached me haven’t been - they’re just trying to piggyback on the search engine ranking of a popular page, either trying to get direct footfall to their site (though the links), or just trying to game the Google PageRank thing by creating inbound links from popular pages.
That’s not to say there aren’t scammers out there - and if the follow-through for something like this was a request to implement the ad in any way that could embed (or dynamically call) external code/content, it should be treated with extreme suspicion.
Yes it is a scam - I got the same email.
In addition to it having no real detail it also appeared to be sent from a Hotmail address but it was actually sent from a different completely google account.
Give it a wide berth.
I did send then a tentative reply, and this was their next email:
So it looks to me like it might be an attempt to improve someones google ranking, but I don’t really see how I could end up being the loser here.
Both of these facts mark it as spam, but not necessarily as a scam - and as I and others have found and noted above - it’s probably a legitimate offer - it just happens to be one that could be detrimental to your website if you are using Google ads or webmaster stuff.
It depends on the nature of your site. You will be asked to place the text right in the middle of your own writing, so it looks like you’re personally recommending the link - which in my own case, I felt would be a complete betrayal of trust to my visitors - but whether the same is true for you may depend on the nature of your own site (online gambling links just don’t fit in mine at all), and how strongly you feel about inserting stuff like this.
And if you use Google products in your site, then being a party to this could cause you a problem.
Otherwise, there’s little to lose - if you go for it, insist on an ordinary HTML link (no embedded stuff, no Javascript), insist on immediate payment, don’t be duped into paying anything, or giving out any sensitive account or personal information, and see what happens.