Buyer Beware: Online Website Marketing Tools

If you have a website that you intend to market on the Internet via search engines (such as Google) and directories (such as Yahoo!), I have a little advice for you.

If you prefer to submit your site the hard way, you can try to find the hundreds of site-submittal pages yourself, or you can hire someone to “hand submit” for you. If you choose the former, you’ll spend needless hours researching, then keying in different data into countless gateway scripts. If you choose the latter, like I originally did with ineedhits.com, you may be repeatedly charged for a subscription that is not mentioned anywhere on their “Buy Now” page.

In the case of ineedhits.com, after I saw the subsequent charge and complained, they refused to reverse the charges, claiming (of course) that I agreed to a monthly subscription. I returned to the site I bought their service from and found no mention whatsover about any subscription, nor any mention about repeated monthly charges. I feel that sort of business tactic is inherently, if not incredibly, dishonest. Unfortunately it is all too common on the World Wide Web.

So, I suggest you make it easy on your time and your pocketbook. But most of all (emphasis strongly implied), do not do business with ineedhits.com, ever. Period.

Now for the good news. I’ve come to learn about a very cost-effective site that helped me. With selfpromotion.com, I was able to submit my website, California Wine Hikes, to a number of search engines and directories without a lot of work, and with very little cost. For a one-time fee of $10, I not only could submit to all the major engines and directories, but I can also track the status of my submittals, optimize for the search engines’ spiders, and much more. There is also a lot of great content on the site to learn from. Using this nearly-free and valuable service, I’ve been able to elevate my page ranking in Google from 1 to 5 almost instantly.

If selfpromotion.com interests you, I suggest you check it out.

~winehiker

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under technical stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.