What Is Inside The Pay-For-Post ICO Industry? - Part 1

You're Doing It Wrong

ICO and crypto teams are further muddying the waters by trying as often failing to pay for posts in the world where nothing can be trusted and fake news abound. It is observed that the current crop of ICO creators and those crypto projects are therefore interested in scaling fast and many ICO CEOs are far happier along with scammy multi-level marketing tricks than real media relations whereas bribes for blogs is nothing new. 

The service providers are the worst part of the spammy, scammy ecosystem as the new group of media organisations are appearing where the pay-to-post comes to be the norm rather than the rare exception being looked at these groups for a while now and recently has found a few egregious examples. 

Then for some background.

Oh yeah, is it Mr. Smart Guy? How do I then get press?

Therefore, in case you’re trying to publicise a start-up, it is emailed all the big names in the industry as the emails go unanswered whereas the product is all about to flounder on the market without users as you can’t get funding without users as also you can’t get users without funding. Then in the case, isn’t it a good idea to pay the few dollars for the little press.

The answer is therefore no.

Then is it not PR just pay-for-post anyway?

Here also the answer is No.

What Are The PR Doing For The ICOs? 

Paid to reach out to media on their behalf and also their particular set of skills honed over long careers, PR people are consummate networkers paid to reach out to media dedicated to breaking down the forcefield between the journalist and the outside world. As your surrogate hustlers, they are dedicated to getting more exposure whereas a good PR person comes worth their weight in gold. In this case, it is possible to call up a popular journalist to make a simple pitch as the cool new thing has happened putting you in touch. 

In case a journalist’s mission is to afflict the comfortable as well as comfort the afflicted, the good PR person is making the comfortable look slightly afflicted to give the journalist a better story like those velociraptors that are tenacious following up multiple times on your behalf. 

On the other hand, it is observed that a bad PR person cold calls hundreds of journalists as they read a script half the length of Moby Dick producing little more than spam with efforts beginning and ending with pressing the Send button. It is also interesting that to note many bad PR people have of late found new life as ICO specialists.  

Further on meet the pay-for-post hucksters as there is now the subset of the PR world offering to get the press release or story on the top of various websites for the low, with a low price of between $500 and $13,000. One set of hucksters for example created a small business selling posts on Harvard.edu creating garbage WordPress blogs while posting press releases increasing SEO coverage. 

The PR Persons and Entrepreneurs

Here the question is what’s the difference coming to be between the price list as also the job a PR person will do for you? Here comes the difference which is trust whereas the pay-for-post huckster is dependent on thereby convincingly poor paid freelance writers adding links and other dross to their posts thereby to get a placement while getting requests like it almost every day with almost all journalists reporting the same. 

While some entrepreneurs are coming to be savvy enough to avoid these scams, there are even more who aren’t. 

As explained by Rick Ramos of HealthyJoy.com, they never paid as they almost always thought it to be a waste of money while they have been offered this type of coverage many times. Many of the organisations have since unfortunately requested payment until the last minute whereas how is it that you know when someone sells pay-for-play vs. a real editor? 

While it is getting worse, it is usually pretty easy to sniff out based on their email blast where it is pretty untargeted with no reference as to what the company does as how it related to the story as there are some people upfront about the payment while others want a 15 min call to discuss. It is hereby a quick LinkedIn search always showing them as a salesperson versus a reporter or editor according to Ramos. 

The Discussion Is To Be Continued

Thereafter it is now getting worse.

Finally when discussed receiving a document from the company attempting an ICO as the sort of menu was quite uncommon until fairly recently as the on-demand economy melded with PR scammers as the completeness of the document comes to be unique as feasibly plan the PR efforts just reaching out to journalists working at all of the places.