Smorty is a get-paid-for-publishing service used by many bloggers to earn extra income. I joined their community last year and wrote only one for review for them before deciding to leave them. This was before Darn Good Reviews was a blog.
I’m leaving them now because of their inability to deal with commas and periods next to the anchor text required in their assignments. Yes, I said commas and periods. I find this astonishing that they can’t (won’t?) accept a review when a comma is placed write after (not part of) the anchor text you need to include in your review. It makes no difference if no one has complained about it before. This is an easy fix and would save a lot of bloggers grief. That translates into more bloggers doing more reviews and advertisers getting the exposure they’ve paid for.
I recently spent my time writing for an opportunity that I was pleased to see because their opportunities are few and far between (I’ll get to that later). Additionally, it was for a higher price, so I thought, “Finally!”. But after writing it and submitting it to show I had completed the task, their system never would accept the review.
Puzzled, I emailed customer service. Now, before I get into this part of the story, let me explain that I had emailed them a couple of times weeks beforehand asking for assistance for something else. Never got a response. Never. But this time, someone did respond. So whether or not this is a case of them choosing to respond on things they want to respond to, it still doesn’t make for good customer service.
Back to the story.
The customer service rep told me their system didn’t like the commas and periods next to the links I was supposed to include in my review. Are you serious? It’s not enough that I focus on making a write-up interesting with my own style, I have to make sure I include my links in places determined by them — places inside of a sentence?
The customer service rep was indeed helpful, and got back to me within the short time frame we had the email exchange. As I mentioned previously, historically they had a bad track record on that front, so I was pleasantly surprised I was actually conversing with someone. But since we couldn’t see eye-to-eye, I informed that rep that I would be taking down the review I had already written and replacing it with a negative review of their service.
What’s sad is that no one wins in this scenario. They’re missing out on my ability to help them write reviews for their advertisers, their advertisers are losing one less point of exposure, and Smorty gets a negative review that is now being seen publicly.
Another thing about their service that you should be aware of is that they’re supposed to send you an email when new opportunities arrive. I have never received one such notification. Not one. Each time I logged in to see their opportunities, I saw a blank slate. This went on for weeks, until this past week when I saw the one opportunity I thought would be something I could take.
They have a list of bloggers and the income they’ve made so far. I always wondered how that can be when there were no opportunities to take. It looks like either those bloggers got their notifications or had plenty of time to refresh the opps list and grab them right then and there.
So if you are using Smorty or are deciding to, just be forewarned that you may be in for a difficult time.
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