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mag
21st Sep 2006, 06:43 PM
Hello,
My name is Anne and I have a question/concern for which I would welcome any helpful suggestions or bits of wisdom. I bought into the SOL scheme last summer (2005) at a seminar in Dallas. Unfortunately, I bought into the "six licenses" scenario and trotted home with the expectation that I would get some reasonable help regarding the building of these websites. After a few weeks of complete confusion trying to read and understand where to start, I got the infamous call from the "PMI" group. Of course, their offer seemed to be the best step for me since I felt I had not a chance at that point to get any websites going without the personal coaching sessions. I spent another large amount of money for the offer and then began with the coaching sessions. I will say that had I not received that help, I would most likely never have gotten started at all. Since that time, I now have a partner helping me and together we have developed three websites with many grueling hours of pain, tears, and frustration. I have been very disillusioned by the level of "user unfriendliness" of the software and, in hindsight, I would never use this again for developing anything. The programming that was part of the purchase was almost worse than doing it myself as I had to go back and correct most of what was done. (We did about 95% of the work on the second and third websites ourselves!). Anyway, overall, my experience has been at best dismal.

Here is my question. I just recently learned of this forum and also of the lawsuit filed in my state of Texas. I have a link to the Attorney General's Office to file complaint, but I need to know more about how the outcome of the settlement affects me--or if it does have any affect. Does anyone know where I can get more specific information? I cannot say that my purchases from SOL have been useless, but certainly many of the claims have not been realized nor has the help been what I expected. The software is worse than driving a "model T" and we get constant evidence from customer emails, calls, and copious abandoned orders that make me suspect that the ordering proceedure of the software is not functioning correctly; perhaps even discouraging customers. My greatest concern is with the purchase from PMI. Proportionally, a large amount of the purchase was for marketing through a company called EMS, which I found out is no longer doing this. It is now being handled through MyEBiz. Another portion of the PMI package that I bought was for some "E-Mail Promotional campaign where they send out scores of email (which sounds like spam to me) to people to advertise your sight. I do not like the sound of this and want to get a refund for at least this portion of my purchase. They also promised to put a deposit in three Pay-Per-Click Search Engines. As I tried to use this, I learned that MyEBiz only puts the deposit in one SE. I also had to move heaven and earth to get that taken care of, something that should have been taken care easily considering the large expense for this portion of the package. I called and talked to someone with PMI about this and he was rather "quick" to offer a $650.00 refund to me for the fact that the three PPC search engines were not going to be funded. I felt very much as though this was an attempt to make a quick "payoff" to get me off their back. While I would be happy to have any sort of refund, this is only a very small portion of what I spent and feel that I should get more money back from this over-rated, over-charged "service". I would like to get advice from any of you that might have some knowledge of this sort of issue. Would you take this and run or should I pursue a better settlement?

Anne
www.thelsgs.com
www.luminescents.net
www.wildfeatheredfriends.com

KarenMac
21st Sep 2006, 07:10 PM
Anne

My best advice would be to contact the Attorney Generals office and find out the details there. Only they would have the complete information you are looking for.

Karen

Bethers
21st Sep 2006, 07:17 PM
Anne,

You are asking multiple questions - some of which only you can really answer. However, I'll take a stab at a few of them.

Re: the TX settlement - did you buy before or after Aug 2005 - as that's when the agreement was reached - and I'm not sure if you would have any claim if it was after that - unless you put a complaint with the state of TX and they allow it. I think they believe that SOL stopped the practices after that (which I doubt). If before that date, you'll need to read all of the agreement - because the details can be very important. Some of the people who were involved in the Australia lawsuit found their stores all of a sudden not available.

As to the possibility of getting anything back from SOL or PMI - if you believe you can go for more, that's up to you - or if you believe that what they have offered is the best you'll get, then you could take it - but do NOT do so if you have to sign anything saying that you have no other recourse. I don't mean they will give you more for the same thing - but there are so many facets.

The only thing that SOL was good for with me - is that I got stores online when I might not have had I not purchased when I did. Hindsight is always 100% - and I could kick myself - but I do believe you should do whatever you feel you need to do or can do - and continue moving forward - in whatever direction is best for you.

Good luck to you.

Shoshana
21st Sep 2006, 07:20 PM
Anne, your story is a familiar one. Many of us on the forum have been down that same path.

Karen has given you good advice about one of your questions. As far as PMI, if you've documented everything as you went along, what was promised, as opposed to what you actually received, you can probably pursue that.

One other point, you have managed to get three websites up and they are all very nice. However, they aren't optimized for the search engines.

When you get ready to do a little tweaking, go to the Site Review room and ask for a site review and we can help you to send you in the right direction.

Don't give up. You can turn this around and make something very good out of it.

mag
22nd Sep 2006, 02:57 AM
Thanks to both of you for your comments. Beth, I too am concerned about "burning my bridges" with SOL and I am taking stock right now of just what I think my justifiable complaints are. I did purchase these licenses in June of 2005 so I will try to get additional information from the Att. Gen. Office. Shoshona, thanks for your comments also. I have been told this same thing about needing some optimization. I received a message with many links to the site optimizations that I should do from Christine, I believe, and Beth. I have tried to follow these along with the many links they lead to and get so confused. I feel too stupid to even know how or where to post the question as to how to get started with this. Could you please tell me the first thing to read? I looked at the info on H1 tags and footer links but honestly, I don't understand HTML and I am not sure where to even find these entries to make the changes, or "tweaks". The only thing that I know to do is to go to the "meta" information area of the storebuilder and add keywords there, which I and my partner have done on many, many pages. I have also paid Internet Advancement to do optimization on Lone Star General Store and Luminescents. Whether good or bad, these stores are getting search engine traffic and I do not really want to go in and undo what I have paid someone else to do. WildFeatheredFriends is presently being optimized by MyEBiz. Can you, or someone, please tell me where the "beginning" point is for the tweaking that you suggest I do? When I read the many entries under site optimization I feel like I am coming in at the middle of the conversation and missed the first part. I don't know how to find, or even get to the items that are suggested for me to do.

Sorry to be so iliterate on these issues, but I am determined to make use of the information on this forum. I would like to know if there is anyone who would be willing to allow me to call to ask some questions concerning the optimization processes needed if I cannot get the understanding needed from reading?? (I don't mean ongoing--just to get in the right place to start????)

Eternally grateful for help......

Shoshana
22nd Sep 2006, 04:10 AM
This is concerning your western decor store. Your first line is NOT a keyword phrase in H1 tags and it should be. Here is an example. It should be put in a text element on your home page and the element should be numbered "1" Then you need to Edit this element and click "Don't convert carriage returns and unclick "Add extra space"

<center><H1><font size=4>Western Decor</font></H1></center>

The reason I chose these keywords was because of this reverse search:


Searches done in August 2006
Count Search Term
5748 western decor

You should do the same thing above for each of your product-category pages but the keywords would be specifically what you are selling on that page.

These search engines optimization companies you've hired don't really seem to understand SOL templates and what we're up against to optimize them.

One final note: When you have something underlined, people think it's a link and try to click on it. If you want to emphasize a term that's not a link, it would be better to find another way to do it like italics or bold.

Hope this helps you to get started.