When not to accept advertising

September 24th, 2007 by Ross McKillop |  Print This Post

I was recently approached by someone who wanted to buy $550 worth of advertising on Simplehelp, and ended out turning them down. After seeking the advice of a number of other bloggers, here’s why I said no.

This post could also be called “Why I still don’t have an iPhone”.

The entire email transcript between “James” and I can be found as a screenshot at the end of this post. The only info that I Photoshopped (Gimp’ed really) out of the email is James’s last name and email address.

So - on Sept 12th I received an email from James, asking if I was interested in selling him advertising on Simplehelp. My response was sure I’m interested, what did you have in mind? He responded with a request to insert a paragraph on 8 different pages on Simplehelp, with his “links adjusted in them”. His next line was what made me actually consider his offer - he citied a “Technorati Top 100″ blog (SmashingMagazine) as an example of who has taken him up on this kind of offer, and a direct link to an example of this “style” of ad. I subscribe to SM’s RSS feed, and I actually read it. So if they’re doing this kind of advertising, it sure seems legit, right?

The very smartest thing that I did in making my decision was to ask other bloggers what they thought. So I sent an email to Jason, engtech, and The How-To Geek. Eng brought Daniel into the discussion, as he had recently wrote about a similar’ish scheme. Here’s what I learned from those guys:

Quite a few bloggers have been recently approached with a similar offer. In fact, two of the guys that were a part of my email thread had been approached by the same company - with offers higher than what I was being given. They both turned it down, for the same reason I was skeptical - it’s not worth the possibility of being punished by Google. And a lifetime contract was out of the question.

I also emailed the folks @ SM asking if they were willing to talk about their experience with this ‘advertiser’. They actually answered my email very quickly, and said they were pleased with the agreement.

But as The Geek pointed out, SM can get away with it - I can’t. They get so much traffic from other blogs, social sites like digg and del.icio.us, that they don’t “need” Google as badly as I do. And since Google sends me almost half of my traffic, I really can’t risk “ruining my reputation” with them if I want to think long-term.

Side note: if you’re bored enough to read through the transcript below, you’ll notice that I actually kind of ‘played along’ with James, trying to get more details from him. Asking him if he was sure if this kind of thing was OK with Google (of course he said it was). When I mentioned I was skeptical of a lifetime commitment, he dropped it to 3 years (and increased the offer from $520 to $550). When I finally flat out said I’d need to review the sites he wanted me to link to before I’d say yes, he stopped responding. I haven’t heard from him since.

click to enlarge