Internet Marketing

I think it's important that you learn from my own mistakes and hence this story...

My electricscotland.com site had been using in text advertising for some time with Kontera. This is where when you sign up with them you are given a bit of code to place in the footer of your site. When the page loads Kontera will then search for any key words that it uses to advertise their clients and if found they put a double green underline under the word or words.

When the visitor rests their cursor over the word a wee advertising box comes up and if you then click on that you are taken to the advertisers web site.

Well... we hadn't been making much money with Kontera and I was thinking of dropping out of this type of advertising when I was told of a company called InfoLinks that did a similar offering but was reported to be paying out some 5 times what Kontera were doing.

In short I decided to give them a try and was pleasantly surprised when I found out they were correct and indeed I did earn 5 times more with them than I had with Kontera.

While I was still happy with InfoLinks I had another look at Kontera who by all accounts were now offering a much better payment plan and they had also established a UK office. As some 20% of my traffic was from the UK I thought this might give me more relevant adverts and so I thought I'd give them a trial again.

They offered me a 75% share which was shortly raised to 85% and so it was off to do the trial.

The earnings in the first week were a total joke and I was so concerned about this that I wrote to them pointing this out. I then received an email...

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Hi Alastair,

I understand that in the end it all comes down to the earnings, but two weeks is not enough for the optimization process, considering that you have not been approved yet to our partners like Yahoo.

BUT I understand you and want you on board!

Send me the stats of your earnings with Infolinks and we will match them and pay you 10% more than you earned with Infolinks.

So you will for sure earn more and not less!

Deal?

Cheers-Sarah

Sarah Moshel
Business Development Manager
24 Greville Street, London EC1N 8SS
P +44(0)2030084399

Well with an offer like that and no strings attached who could refuse and so I agreed to the deal.

After a very poor September I enquired about about the deal as in previous correspondence I was told the agreed sum would be reflected in my reports.

Well I got my reply...

Monday, October 11, 2010

HI Alastair,

I am very sorry for the delayed reply.

We have reviewed your site and the performance and compared it to the earnings but unfortunately they did not agree to the payment offer. I have tried and negotiated but we couldn't come to a solution that would satisfy both sides.

We have a campaign running now that would greatly fit your site, I have attached it, which would boost your revenue, but I totally understand if you don't want to wait any longer and move back.

I have tried my best and very sorry to give you a negative answer.

Cheers-Sarah

Sarah Moshel
Business Development Manager
1 Shenkar Street, Herzlyiah 46725
P +44(0)2030084399 (UK)

So as you can see a deal with Kontera is certainly not a deal.

Let's compare earnings...

InfoLinks for my last full month with them which was July 2010...

And so that month I earned $597.54 with InfoLinks.

Kontera for my last full month with them which was September 2010...

And so that month I earned $80.04 with Kontera.

So you can see that my earning with Kontera were only some 13% of what I had earned with InfoLinks and which was probably in my slowest month at that.

Quite apart from Kontera being so much worse than InfoLinks they also cheat their customers as the above emails show. I have kept all the correspondence that I had with Kontera along with actual copies of the earnings reports. I think this is a very clear case of a company cheating a customer. When the Business Development Manager makes a clear offer with no strings attached you just assume they can be trusted but as you can see they can't.

While I have learned a lesson from this I hope it will also serve as a cautionary notice to anyone else looking to deal with Kontera and obviously if any of their Business Development Managers makes you an offer beware!

As a final note I have indeed switched back to InfoLinks and in the first part day I moved back my earnings for that day were already $11.85.and that wasn't even a full day.