Text link offers from Linkstar in the UK

Linkstar UK – their advertising offer

Posted August 9th, 2009 by peter

We receive quite a bit of enquiry from our clients about various offers they receive relating to their website. In recent times an organisation called Linkstar in the UK, have been contacting some clients offering to pay for a text advert on their website back to one of their client sites.

All sounds very nice to receive something for little work. But is it worth it?

Here is a a typical email from Linkstar

From: Jaynelyn Davenport [mailto:jayne@linkstar.co.uk]
Sent: date removed
To: xxxxx
Subject: Advertising on domain name xxxxxx

Hi xxxxxx,

I work for Linkstar, a leading broker of on-line advertising, dealing with many thousands of independent webmasters worldwide.

I’ve had a look at www.xxxxxx.co.nz and I think that it would be a good match for our client, whose target and demographic are similar with yours. We’re working on their behalf to acquire advertising from quality websites such as your own.

We would be interested in purchasing advertising in the form of a text-based advert on your site. To reduce unnecessary admin and hassle, we prefer to pay a fixed annual fee for such advertisements. Once the ad has been placed, payment can be made quickly by PayPal or or moneybookers.

If you are interested, please get back to me with your rates etc.

Thank you for your time in reading our proposals and hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards,
Jaynelyn Davenport

—–

One of our clients followed up, and received this reply back

—–

From: Gellene Reynolds [mailto:gellene@link-star.co.uk]
Sent: xxxxx
To: xxxxxx
Subject: RE: Advertising on xxxxxxx

Thanks for the reply xxxxxxx!

We were actually hoping to get a single text advert inside the body of one
of your pages’ content, not an actual running site-wide advert for our
client in the xxxxxxxx industry. Our current rate for this is 100 USD
per year, however I’m willing to bump this up to 130 USD if we could have
the ad posted in 2-3 days. I’d be happy to give you more info about our
client if you would read our terms and conditions here:
linkstar.co.uk/terms.pdf.

I’ve gone over your site and have picked this page:
www.xxxx.co.nz/pagename as the best place to put our
advert on. With your approval, we’ll send you an email specifying where the
text advert would appear in the article’s body. We have in-house writers
doing this for us so worry not about the flow of your article being affected
or altered in any way.

Also, please ensure that you’ve read our Terms And Conditions (TAC) document
which you can view here: linkstar.co.uk/terms.pdf

Once you agree to our TAC, as well as the text advert placement and price
above, I can then forward to you the text link and the content our writers
came up with. We also prefer to make payments via PayPal, are you ok with
this?

Please let me know if you wish to see the advertising copy for your website.
This will give you a good idea of how we want the advertisement to look, as
well as provide you more info about our client. Don’t worry, the ad copy is
subject to your approval and you can always ask us for changes/revisions.
Feel free to email me any concerns. Many thanks!

Warmest regards,
Gellene

So, what is our response to our clients asking the question if it is a good idea to go ahead?

—

Hi xxxxx

Have had a couple of clients ask my advice and I have researched it a bit

It appears that they do pay up, (if in fact they contact you back after your reply) but the whole situation is quite questionable and it appears to be a little dodgy

Here is a report about them from a journalist who investigated them – http://blogs.computerworld.com/web_advertising_linkstar

However, after reading that article, I would read the sequel at http://blogs.computerworld.com/seo_text_link_scams

Personally, I would do it for $500k, but a couple of hundred bucks even US would not entice me – the possible repercussions are too high a price to pay for a small business who offers a creditable product or service.

We think it is worse than having Google ads on your website (true – ads on your site can have a place to play depending on what your website is about and who the target market is) – for a couple of hundred $ a month (if you are getting thousands of visitors to your site a month) why on earth would you entice people away from your own site to a competitors site ?

Cheers
Peter

—

So, if you do receive enquiry from Linkstar in the UK, it is up to you. But think about the consequences for your business online presence

Filed under:@ web one stuff