People say “you get what you pay for”, but does it actually apply to digital products and to web development in particular? maybe these cheaper companies are able to produce the same level of results for much cheaper rates because of their lower salaries and costs? We decided to test it out.

We went to “Elance” one of the most popular arenas where these companies compete for business. And we commissioned search engine optimization for an inactive site of ours whose position on search engines and traffic didn’t make much difference to us. They asked for only $100 a month for their services and so we decided to give it a try for 3 months, which is a long enough time to evaluate their services. If this site’s rankings go up even a little bit; that would be worth every penny. We set the wheels in motion and completely forgot about this experiment. 3 months later, “Vaibhaw” our charming account manager calls me; in the middle of the night on Sunday might I add, to remind me that we need to pay for the next 3 months of their services. Monday morning we looked at the results and we were surprised. Not the good kind of surprised. We lost our rankings on all the keywords they were working on and for some of them we completely disappeared from Google’s top 200. Maybe they scammed us, we thought. Digging deeper into it we found that they were in fact working hard and putting many man-hours into the process but actually damaging this site’s reputation with search engines and the public, if there was a public for this dummy site. When performing external search engine optimization via link building an SEO professional will write favourable reviews and articles about the site he or she is promoting and link them back to the website. So not only all the reviews we’re in broken English with severe grammar and spelling errors, they also linked to this site from various questionable sites like Viagra, Russian brides, Casino and any kind of shady area you could think of. If it was a real company whose internet reputation and rankings were important, the damage would be almost irreversible. After all there’s a reason that these companies so cheap. Otherwise everybody would use them or all the North American web companies would outsource to them, but that isn’t the case.

The idea came while overhearing a conversation of a few friends of ours who are all in top positions in their fields, executives, doctors, lawyers and university professors and they were sharing horror stories of single life and especially online dating. Some of them were complaining about a lack of accomplished singles and that the generic dating websites were just a pool of unemployed people especially during the recession. Others were uncomfortable with the idea that their picture and personal information was going to be used as advertisements and be available to the public. The remainder though couldn’t bear the idea of encountering their secretary, clients or students on these websites.

Owning a web development company and solving our client’s problems using web application all day long I thought about it a little and asked them. What if there was a special kind of a dating website?

A website that would screen people based on education, income and management, and at this website, user profiles were protected from the public.

What if somebody just signs in to this website under a fake name and look at our profiles, or lie about who they are just to get in? They asked.

“Then we’ll verify the identity of each person registering to the website” I said. Realizing how excited they were at the idea that there would actually be a website like that me and Alex started doing our research discovering how great of a need these very successful people who neglected their love life in favour of their career have for a dating service and also discovering how inadequate and risky the available options are we decided to go for it and create a better kind of an online dating site. Owning a web design company we had the knowledge and the tools to turn into reality, we’ve done it before for our clients so it was time to do it for ourselves.

It wasn’t easy, the dating industry has been labelled as shady and morally grey, and we have to overcome that perception everyday but it is a very rewarding challenge. The dating industry is almost as bad as VIAGRA. Knowing we can compete in such a saturated market gives me great confidence to offer our clients the same marketing solutions that work for us.

I believe that it’s possible to market real value through the internet without over promising and manipulation. Search engines are a wonderful thing they actually change the whole advertising dynamic by allowing advertisers to advertise to people who are actually actively searching for their services instead of imposing on unsuspected viewers or pedestrians. It also allows for advertisers to pay exactly for only traffic they actually get by Pay Per Click. There are many other technological advantages to internet marketing to be able to become less sleazy. Unfortunately due to the fact that internet marketing is about 30 times cheaper than TV and the fact that there are no start-up costs to start advertising on the internet there’s mayhem. A flock of affiliate marketers, who are basically people who are selling other peoples products online for commission, are breaking all the rules. Most commonly they are using sales letters, the infomercial’s twin from a parallel internet universe. These sales letters are typically 5-10 pages long all crammed in one page, filled with fake quotes from fake clients. Pictures of mansions, jets and houses that these alleged money-making-gurus have and an overdose of “CLICK HERE”, “LIMITED TIME OFFER” “FREE” and “BUY NOW” graphics. The biggest problem that I have with these methods other than the cheesiness is that they sell virtual products with no real value. The internet has the potential reverse the whole dynamic of advertising with search engines and social media. But I think we’re only going to start seeing a major shift in a few years when Google takes over the planet; meanwhile we’ll all have to continue to “CLICK HERE NOW”.

Boris Giller
- Marketing Manager