I received an email over the weekend from a sponsored post network called Post Genius informing me that I had removed a link in a post I had written and they had deducted the money they had paid me and would be returning it to the advertiser. In fact by the time they had sent me the email the money was already given back to the advertiser.
I looked into this a little further, because I’m sure I did not delete any links, and low and behold there was the link exactly as the advertiser had requested.
When I received the offer the advertiser asked me not to insert a normal text link, they wanted me to insert an image into the post and link that instead. I did this, but Post Genius would not let me complete the task because I had not placed a text link in the post, the text link they wanted me to insert had NA as the anchor text. I inserted the text link as they asked and the article was approved.
I received an email a few days later from the advertiser asking me to remove the text link as they did not want the text link there, they wanted the image to be linked. I contacted Posts Genius about this and received NO REPLY so after an entire week had gone past I removed the text link.
When Posts Genius emailed me and told me they was going to take the money back I emailed them THREE TIMES to argue my case and not once have they acknowledged any of my emails. I then found out that they do not reply to emails that are sent via the email address they use to contact publishers. It isn’t a NO-REPLY email address either, it is bloggers@postsgenius.com.
What is quite worrying is that searching their web site doesn’t seem to produce an email address, contact form, or a phone number, to find an email address I had to visit a domain whois web site, type in their web sites to find out who owns it, and then visit the parent site and search for a contact form. What kind of company works like that and expects to succeed?