In early March I received a call from a person named Joel ([email protected]) from Future Ranking and I would have normally just hung up but he was very polite. He told me I had a professional looking website and that his company could market my website and get me to the first page for my chosen keywords within 8 months. I told him thank you but I don't have any money and unless he was willing to do that for free he was wasting his time with me but he avoided the money issue and continued talking about their services and had me go to google and type in some keywords,
Then when the list came up he had me click on a website and proceeded to tell me that they were a client of his company (stupid me I didn't ask for any proof) but didn't really care I wasn't buying anything. Then after a while of telling me about the success I would have he had me go to their Future Ranking website and type in some promotion code, then showed me their promotions and their 100% money back Guarantee if I am not on the first page results for all of my keywords within 8 months. I told him as I am finding out now, that their 100% money back Guarantee is worthless unless they honor it and that I cant afford to pay the prices that were shown. At this time I was thinking that I needed to start making some money from my website and that having a professional company market it may be what I needed at the time.
Even though I was getting the information to teach me how to market the website correctly and achieve the rankings from the search engines that I want from Storesonline, I was quite overwelmed by it all and a bit desperate. I needed to start making money from my website, so maybe if I could swing it having them market my website (www.GpsFrontier.com) would be the fastest way to get the ball rolling and making some money.
I told Joel that I couldn't pay the amount that was on the website and he said that if I was willing to give some telephone testimonies to some of their potential customers he could bring the price down. We went back and forth like that for a while untell he got the price to $1050.00. I told Joel that I maby could pay that but I couldn't pay what was listed as a monthly fee also and that I could do maybe one or the other but not both. He assured me that the monthly fee was only to be paid once my website had achived the top rankings that were promised within the 8 month perioed.
I then told Joel that the $1050.00 was still a big chunk of money so he said that they don't usualy do this but he could split it into 2 payments one now and the other in 30 days so I stupidly agreed. He said he needed to get the ok from his boss and because it was so late in the day that he would get back with me. I beleve it was a Friday so he got back to me on Monday and sent me an E-mail with instructions to make a payment using Google and I did.
A month or two I receved a call from someone from Future Ranking asking me to set up the monthly fee payments and I told her that I didn't owe any yet because my website hasn't even started to show any rankings yet but she didn't know anything about that and said if I don't pay it that they will suspend my account and I woulldn't get any refund. I then called Joel and left a message on his voice mail and complained that I told him that I couldn't pay both and that he promised that I didn't need to until my site was ranking. He later called me back the next day and said I was mistaken and that I did owe the money but he would fix it for me.
A month went by and I got the call wanting me to set up the monthly payments again, I got mad and left another message on Joel's voicemail and told him that I was not able to pay that and that I told him in the begining that I was not able to pay it. I also told him that all the money that I already paid them was wasted if they suspend the account so I expect you to fix it. Joel then called me back a couple of days later and left a message that he talked to the owner and I don't need to pay any monthly fees until my site was ranking.
Then he sent me an E-mail with some form's to fill out including the 15 keywords I wanted. I filled them out and faxed it back and for some reason they changed some of the keywords saying that there information was that there were better, I didn't complain and just went with it. At this point I asked what I needed to do and Joel told me there was nothing much to do but wait and in 3 months I would get the first ranking report. Well in 3 months I received the ranking report and it was a report showing that I wasn't showing anywhere yet.
So I called Joel and he told me that that was normal on the first report especially because I sell GPS products and there is a lot of competition and that by the next one there should be progress. He also had me talk to Brian in coustomer service and Brian had said that he would send me another ranking report in a month and a half. Well nothing was sent so I called Brian again and he sent me a new ranking report. I was excited to see that my website was showing listings for a few keywords. I was told that once it starts to get going it will start to snowball and I will be getting a lot of good traffic to my website.
Then I got the 6 month ranking report and it was back to nothing again, it didn't show that I was listed anywere with Google Yahoo or MSN. I called Brian again and asked what happened, he took a look at the report and said he didn't know that he wasn't a technition and he would ask them and call me back. The next day I got a E-mail from him saying that he was sorry that the last ranking report was not more impressive and that they will continue to market my website till the end of the 8 months but I would not get a refund because they have done their job.
I waited to see if there was going to be any inprovement in my website rankings and by Halloween I had given up on Future Ranking doing anything. I don't have money to get a lawyer to sue Future Ranking and I knew that was the only way I would get a penny back so I just gave up and chocked it an expensive lesson learned. Then I got an E-mail in November from someone in custpmer service saying that they wanted to do something to my website to continue marketing it.
After two months go by and I hear nothing from them I have to wonder why would they want to do something to help now. They wanted my website user ID and password, they said to check code and keywords. I sent back an E-mail asking them to explain to me what they needed the ID and password for and what they plan to do to market my website. She sent me back an E-mail saying they need the ID and password to check code and keywords but nothing as to what they planned to do to market the site. So I sent back an E-mail asking that question again as well as stating that some of the keywords that they were using were obsolete now. She sent me back an E-mail asking what keywords I wanted and for the ID and password.
At this point I am still wondering why after 8 months of not doing anything they would want to do their job now. On the off chance they were trying to help I sent back an E-mail with the revised keywords and asking for instructions on anything that was needed to be done to my site. I certainly was not going to trust them anymore with that sensitive information because there is no telling what they were going to do to my website, they could order products get PayPal account information or even change the password and lock me out of my own site. I received an E-mail a couple of days later that simply said account canclled. I was left with no money, no search engine rankings and almost a year of time wasted that could have been used to properly market my website.
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