I answered a solicitation and received ALMOST a guarantee of making big internet money by joining Summer Ventures and American Website Solutions, which seemed to be either 2 divisions of a company or one in the same. Whenever I would call the numbers for American Website the phone was answered with a greeting as Summer Ventures, though the employees had no answer as to this occurrence.
The initial sign-up procedure was through sales pitches and affirmations of great sincerity and testimonials of how successful our relationship was going to be, and how great their keywords campaign would be, bringing tons of traffic converting website visits to at least $10,000 a month once the campaign was underway. The website would consist of 4 different health related sites on one page with the domain name being emedicineworld.com. (i found that the site existed under at least 10 to 15 other domains, and of course individually under each independent company website. XL Pharmacy, Vitacost (selling high quality dietary supplements), Native Remedies (herbals) and 1-800petmeds (pet supplies).
The fees for website set-up, search engine submission. Optimization, meta tags and keywords amounted to $5,355. The fee for Targeted Visitor Advertising Campaign and Banner ads was $4,500. To be included (which were never apparent) were business card templates, post card templates, flyer templates sample ads and newspaper directory.
The sin-up took a fair a, ount of time as they shifted me fro Delina in reception, to Barry Schuster in sales, Greg Cramer explaining the website, Michael Nunley (liaison) Greg Neff supposedly my direct contact and finally Ryan the HTML programmer for the website. I don't believe I ever spoke to any of these people again except for Ryan.
My campaign consisted of 30,000 pay per clicks, none of which ever resulted in a sale. When I would call with questions about failure to make any sales (except when I would buy supplements from my own site and receive a small commision), or to ask for changes and updates of my keywords, I would get a Summer Ventures recording and had to leave my name so that they could determine who should return my call.
They calls were mostly a waste of time as nothing changed, and I never made any sales from this very expensive venture, In August or September my "advertising campaign" was halted as it had exhausted the $4,500 I had paid them. No one ever contacted me during this last year; there was no support. Finally, they shut down the website 12/22 without ever contacting me. I was ripped off!!
0 comments