Dear all
First a personal comment. I usually decline to comment on this forum as it seems to be often frequented by people who clearly have an agenda but tonight I felt compelled to say something. If you are inclined to make personal comments and suggestions about people you don't know then you must really have questionable character yourself! I think I am an honourable person who fights hard to give our customers a great service. I am sure we don't always get it right but I can assure you that myself and everyone employed by my company feel the same. If they don't, we don't want them to work with us.
Local Link Up has over 30,000 customers on various services and over 3000 regular subscribers to our PLINK product. The founders have been involved in the UK Internet sector for 14 years and sold a business three years ago to BT for £20 million pounds after substantial due diligence by one of the UK's largest telecoms companies. How many of you experts who criticise us on these boards have managed that? In addition we are not in competition with BT. They offer completely different services.
That said we have learned much over the years from our previous business and spent a lot of time building new products that are great value for our customers and frankly we get better all the time. I am not saying we have not made mistakes in the past but we try very hard to put them right. The market we work in has changed considerably during the last few years and has become very much more competitive. You only have to look at Yellow Pages magical shrinking book to see how many businesses have struggled to make products that appeal. We have always tried to appeal to a mass market. We have looked at the products out there and have come up with a suite of internet advertising products that we think are second to none. People on here that criticise us are very often competitors who don't like what we do because it offends their ideas of what the market is but we see it differently!
Our main product, a PLINK is a free website that comes with a domain name, hosting and email. It is fully editable by the customer (including the description) in a sophisticated content management system that is also free. We don't control what is on the page, the customer does. We do offer a content writing service, again free, but the customer can change and update what we write. We don't write spammy unprofessional pages and I have to agree that the example description that is on the page shown is pretty poor. I wouldn't write something like that and neither would my team I am fairly certain. We write over 75 customer descriptions a day and we pretty good at it. Again not perfect I am sure.
We are called Local Link Up because we focus on local SEO. We only charge our customers very small monthly fees based around local phrases that they choose to be ranked on and only if we manage first page on Google. Our customers pay nothing else. We are the only company out there that has the courage to offer a free product based only on results. Some people suggest that those phrases are not competitive but they are I can assure you, we compete very hard to make sure our customers get found for what they choose. All customers choose a range of phrases from popular to less popular and they are priced accordingly. Some are easier than others for us to get found but we get people found for phrases they are not currently found for so for a tiny monthly fee they are getting ranked on the first page of Google.
We have over 250,000 phrases ranked on the first page of Google currently and the service has only been available since September 2010 and we are growing weekly. Despite the unpleasant comments we get lots of businesses who choose our service and see it as great value and are getting lots of enquiries through Google.
Google doesn't work for everyone but you can't do better than being ranked on the first page for your phrases so if people don't want your service that's not a fault of our service. That means being on Google won't work for you. There is no cheaper service than Local Link Up to find out if it will work for you either!
But that's not all. Our service is totally free until you get first page results. Our customers can upgrade to a fully functioning website, again with a sophisticated CMS. We recommend they do but many don't preferring to stick with the PLINK as it works for them. If our customers choose to upgrade they get access to one of the highest quality web design services at very low prices and again with no monthly hosting fees or domain renewal charges unlike almost all other companies.
On either of our products no customer is charged anything monthly until they get rankings on Google. We measure those rankings four times a month. We have an unlimited refund policy and we prefer our customers to pay by direct debit which again by the very nature of the scheme has an unlimited refund policy. If someone wasn't happy with any part of our service they can cancel at any time with NO NOTICE and claim a refund at any time if they don't think we did our job.
As well as charging extremely low prices we cap our customer's bill at 25% of the total value of their campaign so that they don't get any bill shocks when we start to get lots of phrases found.
Mr Preston I usually am not prepared to discuss our client's cases in public but I believe we have only ever had one Steve Preston cancel his service and it is simply false that we debit someone's cards after they cancel their direct debit. We usually only hold one payment method at any time on our system and we have taken payments since November via your credit card on your most recent account. You had two packages with us and cancelled one in February and the other in April. You chose in February to keep the second one and then cancelled that one in April. It is disingenuous to claim that you didn't know your card was debited and indeed you were corresponding with people making enquiries via our service as late as the third of April 2011. WE have the emails from you to the enquirers.
If any of our customers ever has any questions they can call us directly. Our telephone lines are open during normal business hours and are staffed by friendly UK based people who are always willing to help our customers. We don't have a queuing system on the phone but then you would know that as you have called us many times in the past. We of course, have the calls recorded! We dealt with an email from you to us to cancel your package on the 15th of April but you were notified on the 1st of April to your yahoo email address that your payment for a whole £9.08 plus vat would be taken on the 15th. Due to the banking system we would submit that request on the 12th. We have not taken any payment since you notified us you wished to cancel your package!
Mr Preston I am really sorry you felt the service didn't work for you but please note that you were on the first page of Google for the most competitive phrase in your sector and that part of the service was costing you £1.85 per month. Indeed now after you cancel the service you can be sure that one of your competitors will be there instead. We would love to attract you back and I am happy to offer you six months totally free service to prove to you that the service will work for you which I am sure it will. If you wish to take up this offer please call our telephone number and ask for me.
I hope that this thread does not continue to attract negative comments from other providers but I am willing to put our service and value proposition up against any other internet business. If you are ready to criticise our service please be prepared to compare our service to what you offer and I will happily show you in public why what we offer is better value. If you really want to judge the quality of the service we offer why not become one of our resellers and then you would really find out just how hard we work to make our customers happy.
Stuart Forrest
Local Link Up
