Starting up a new business can be a great buzz, however once the initial excitement wears off, it’s down to the nitty gritty of sorting out operational procedures and making sure that your business can scale in the way you want it to. And sometimes you’ll come across challenges, some with you’ve expected and some with you haven’t.
One of the new internet companies I’ve been keeping an eye on is a company called SponsoredReviews.com, which is a website providing a marketplace for advertisers and bloggers to get in touch to provide revenue for bloggers and buzz for advertisers. Anyway, SponsoredReviews.com have an interesting model which allows bothe parties to negotiate a price for a blog post about whatever subject the advertiser wishes. It’s pretty unique in the market place and quite a compelling one as it helps both parties learn more about each other and establish a much closer relationship tha just blind advertising techniques like Google Adwords for example.
Anyway, I thought something fishy was going on when last Friday I received notification that I had $300 worth of work pending on SponsoredReviews.com.? They allow 7 days for the reviews to be written up, so I thought I’d wait before embarking on the assignments. The next day, I received an email of apology from SponsoredReviews.com informing me that the assignments I had received the previous day had been paid for using a stolen creditcard and they had no option but to cancel the assignments.
It was good that thie was caught relatively quickly, but I’m sure there must have been people out there who had tried to fulfil the assignments. This outlines a flaw in their operational procedures in that they probably don’t try to process the advertiser’s credit card up front. Most payment providers have sophisticated fraud detection mechanisms and a stolen card would have been picked up relatively quickly. Without knowing details about how their organisation works I’m not going to try and guess how they work, however it’s good to see that they contained the damage quite quickly and without too much fuss.
I wish them the best of luck. And if you want to learn more about them, check out this great review of SponsoredReviews.com
This comment about your comment on Boiled Peanuts. Yes! they are good. Need to have them just a tad salty, hot and of course must have your favorite soda chilled until it has little shivers of ice in it. Good! Good! Good!
I haven’t had any luck with Sponsored Reviews, everybody turns me down and most reviews I go no lower than $5 in my pocket. Ah well, guess they aren’t for me 🙂