Tips for safe blog advertising

Have you received an advertising offer from a company called Polimedia.US? If so, you are not alone. The email text offer reads like this:

"Subject: Advertising Inquiry
From: advertising@polimedia.us

We have reviewed your blogger.com blog on behalf of one of our
clients that would be interested in placing advertising with you.

Client profile :
DoingFine (http://doingf#$%)
New project (<1 month old) Theme A forum dedicated to those things that came out right and worked out fine.

We'd like either a 150x150 button, 160x600 skyscraper or 468x60 full banner (or footer). Alternatively, we may be interested in text-only advertising.

This would be a weekly, monthly or yearly arrangement. In either case we will require a one time, one day (24 hours) free placement in order to test the quality and quantity of traffic your website can actually provide*. Within this interval, we will make a final determination, based on the traffic volume, quality, and your asking price. Should we find your terms acceptable, this trial day will count towards the agreed interval.

Kindly let us know if you would be interested, which arrangement best suits your editorial needs, and what rates you would like to charge. We prefer using PayPal but may be able to accomodate alternative payment methods.

Thank you.

*Please note that we employ software that reliably detects autoclick and autosurf bots, pay per click and paid to surf type traffic, and other such non-human traffic. This may be a concern for you, especially if you are buying "bulk traffic", or employing the services of dubious "SEO experts"

After researching this last night, I decided to blog about the need for advertising safety and what to do to check references and perform "Due Diligence".

Here are my tips:
1. Check the company out in Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) to make sure they are a legitimate company
2. Check the website and the URL using whois.org. This will provide you with both the technical and the business contact.
3. Next, check those contacts out on Google. Usually you will find some CV or bio of them if they are a legitimate representative.
4. Google search the offer to make sure others haven't already checked it out (maybe this should be the first step :).

The Polimedia.us offer may be legitimate (at this time the data is not in) but I personally will pass and stick to traditional forms of paid placement through the established channels (aka Google, Yahoo SEM, ect). And...if Polimedia.US really wants to be on your blog, simply tell them to us Google AdWords for placement :)

Be safe out there......