After been approached by serveral advertising networks for one of my personal sites, I’ve decided to trial the advertising network buysellads.com on the recommendation from a colleague.

First impressions

Nicely organised website, the first thing I was interested in is checking their credibility. Clicking on “Meet our publishers” gave me a pretty good list of their publishers, which had some pretty big well known names such as :

• Dynamicdrive.com
• Nexusradio.com
• Tutorial9.net

The sign-up process was pretty painless. Email, name, password… standard stuff. Verification email was sent instantly and I was able to login straight away.

Setting up the publishers account

Again the process was simple and painless. You are prompted to enter your Paypal account for payments as you first login.

Hit the Publishers Dashboard link and you are prompted to submit a “Property”, since this is the first site Im guess the dashboard would look different if I had a published site.

So, what details do you have to submit? I had nightmares of forms with 100 questions. but no there were only 4 required fields, great!

buysellads.com dashboard

Questions.

1. Site Address:
2. Title
3. Description
   
4. Keywords

There were also plenty of helpful hints to help you along the way and a very clear selection criteria for sites they will approve.

My only beef so far…

I was a little disappointed to find after sign up the selection criteria was limited to;

1. We are currently focused on the tech / web design / development / freelancer niche. While we do occasionally accept sites outside of thie niche, you may be denied if you are not in this niche.
2. Greater than 100K impressions per month (for new sites, if you (or your team) have a history of creating really nice websites we will accept you).
3. Your website must be live, finished, and have fresh content.
4. No porn or anything illegal or containing even remotely “questionable” content.
5. Site must be in English (sorry, we’re just not able to provide support in other languages right now).
6. If you have a ton of untargeted ads on your site already, we’re not going to approve you (you know who you are).
7. If you do not have your own domain (i.e. you have a *.blogspot.com url) we will not approve you.
   Getting denied does not mean that we will not approve you at a future date.
8. Last, but not least: we’re not trying to be snobby, but we aim to keep the quality of the network high, and if we feel that your site impeedes on the perception of the network we will not approve you.

Rather than having to sign up first and than find out later the site is not within their niche, buysellads should make it quiet clear from the outset.

Details filled out, I hit submit and await the admins at buysellads to approve my property.

(Update) My website was rejected!

its a fail!

Well no surprise, this afternoon I received an automated email from buysellads admins rejecting my offer to become a publisher. There was not specific reason attached, basically it just repeated the criteria again in the email and said this was an automated message.

Looking through their network of sites available to advertise on, I can only conclude that the niche of my site ( An Internet Radio / Dance Music Community ) did not fit into their criteria and cant be the quality of the website, which received over 800,000 impressions and has a pagerank of 5.

Conclusion

From what I was able to access on buysellads, the website seems well laid out and information were easy to access.

The big but, is the lack of information presented to interested publishers in detail. Browsing through the main pages of the site, there are plenty of shiny testimonials and praises, BUT zero information on the selection criteria, until you sign up and try to add a website.

I don’t enjoy this type of tactic where companies make you sign up first before presenting all the necessary information and feel a little deceived by buysellads and the problem lies in that they have all my personal details such as my full name, email, DOB and Paypal address.

Hopefully my rather cynical response to their automated reply draws attention to this downfall.

My apologies to the readers that were hoping to see a little bit more insight… maybe you have a similar experience? Let me know.