Reaching Out
So, over the past few weeks I've gotten emails from a person named Francis Morales questioning about advertising some third party content over on Techman's World. That all in itself seems fine; I've gotten offers for advertising before. Generally I reject them, but I decided to communicate with this guy to see what he's all about.
Dishonesty
Well, discussions between he and I continued on for weeks. However, when I started talking about payments and what the terms of agreement were, that's when the material cropped up that made this post worthy of a Name & Shame.
You see, he wanted me to post a sponsored article AS myself, without any markings that it was sponsored. I believe that this highly dishonest both to myself and you folks, and I started to develop more of an assertive tone that I wasn't going to tolerate that. He also specified links to be rel=nofollow, which is fine, but since he appeared to be more and more fishy, I told him that links had to be approved by me. I didn't want him linking users here to a bunch of junk.
How long would it take to pay me, after the post was submitted to Techman's World? 7-14 days. To me, that also sounded ridiculous. Plenty of time to be scammed, after Google has indexed all of their links. None of what this guy started to add up, and the more I continued on, the more you could see that he doesn't speak proper English.
I think some lessons can be learned here. First off, if any of you folks run a website and gets some kind of advertising offer like this, always take it with a grain of salt. Most of the cruft I've gotten over the years came from startup PR firms that died in a year. In fact, I tried emailing back some of the folks that reached out to me last year, and all of the emails were rejected. Most were because the domain is no longer registered, and some were because the mail account at that domain no longer exists.
As for PowerYourDesign.com, I would recommend that everyone avoid them. This could have just been a bad employee, but based on the website, this looks like a small shop. I mean, just look at that immaturity. As a business, this is not how you need to communicate with clients, because you just might get exposed for this on the internet (like now).
Anything that I get paid for to have submitted to this website will be marked as such, no matter what. I am not about misleading the audience here.
Anything that I get paid for to have submitted to this website will be marked as such, no matter what. I am not about misleading the audience here.
