Startup founders: avoid getting scammed in your quest for coverage

Talk about timely, I seriously just found exactly the same email while reviewing my spam folder just 2 minutes ago. They used my contact form and, even though the mail was essential from myself to myself, Gmail recognized it as spam. Awesome.

yeah I got a bunch of those from trying to contact all the different blogs.

it's also important to note that many of these pay to play sites have no actual traffic. Someone wanted me to pay $300 to get featured on a site with supposedly 5K hits a day. Ignoring the fact that, it's crazy high CPM...even that number was bullshit, since the Alexa rank for that site was 1.9 million.

1.9 million Alexa number, usually translates into 10-20 hits a day, not 5000

It's simple, if your site is newsworthy the sites with the traffic will be falling over each other to cover you, if not then too bad.

Paying for coverage is just another way to say 'advertising'.

So concentrate on what it would take to get a story that's compelling enough for real coverage out there, human interest works well, so does hot technology and 'firsts' of any kind, and raising money (successfully).

Don't bother with these small fry sites, it's not worth your time.

I got this one too, back at the beginning of Sept. $45 then. I guess he must be doing good enough to raise the rate.

I received the same email two weeks ago when my app was featured on Killer Startups. My first thought was that it was rather entrepreneurial of the guy. Perhaps the site does not have much of a following but the reviews don't seem badly written.

Also, the rate seems to have gone up from $45 two weeks ago.

I was thinking about an idea to cover the startup apps, though not on a CPM basis but on CPC basis. And I was thinking to have it as Sponsored Post kind off item, one app at a time similar to AppSumo. Does anybody here still feels the value in that ?

Scam is way too strong a word. Many small sites charge that same $65 per month for a link and get it. This seems like a deal by comparison.