Leapfish.com advertisers beware
When I think about Leapfish and my experiences with the salesmen and the articles I read, the only thing that comes to mind is Boiler Room. Remember that movie where the salesmen were selling nothing at a high price to people that wanted to make money quickly?
Leapfish.com is the Boiler Room of 2009 and hopefully not beyond. My first experience with them was through a phone call I received a few months ago. The salesmen asked me if I’ve heard of leapfish.com and of course i haven’t. He went on to explain that Leapfish is a new search engine that combines Google, Yahoo, and MSN into one tool. It has a bunch of other bells and whistles that, admittedly are pretty neat.
And shortly thereafter, the real pitch began. Similar to sponsored ppc listings on Google or Yahoo, I can own a permanant sponsored listing for life on Leapfish, for a one time fee. I was realitively intrigued, why not. I asked how much, he delayed and went on to show me some more flashy features. Again I asked how much…
Finally he asked me for a keyword I would want to be permanantly placed number one with. I gave him the term Trolling Motors. Now get this, they want over $1,000 for one keyword!!! Wow. I told him that is alot of money for 1 keyword on a search site I have never heard of before. He gave me some bs about how popular leapfish is and how highly ranked they are with alexa. So I asked how many people searched trolling motors on Leapfish. He sidesteped that question.
I continued to back off of doing anything with them. Then the real pushy side of the salesmen came out and said that Napster and Facebook weren’t popular at first either, but now look at the people who were on board at the beginning. Then I really saw through the BS. Napster and Facebook were original and inventive, Leapfish has done nothing new. Search aggregators have been around for years.
His last effort was to say that he would sell the keyword to someone else and I would lose forever. I said I’m fine with that. He then started to get real pissy and tried to make me feel stupid for not getting on board. I told him that I was finished talking to him and hung up.
Then I did some research on the company and found that countless others have had similar experiences. I also found some people that were convinced to buy a keyword and now regret it.
They continue to spam twitter with testimonials from people that are obviously affiliated with the company. Their “press releases” are primarily picked up by their own blogs.
Here are some articles that should convince you to stay away from this scam company.
http://www.justanswer.com/questions/2cyo5-hi-purchased-ad-leapfish-com
Click fraud
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/03/the-leapfish-chronicles-admitting-to-click-fraud-is-an-interesting-business-model/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/20/leapfish-launches-another-meta-search-engine-no-one-will-ever-use/
http://www.thebransonpro.com/leapfish-sucks/
A leapfish salesperson left a message on my answering machine stating something to the effect that they were looking for “coaches such as myself for a project.” This inferred, to me, that they were looking to hire for coaching services. I called them back, and the salesperson staged his talk so as to keep me on the phone for a long time for nothing. For example, he started out with “Are you familiar with Leapfish?” I was not, and that gave him license to drone on and on about the company. I slowly realized he was just trying to sell me something. I think Leapfish uses deception in its business practices.
Boiler Room . You got that right with the ringing of the bell and all the high pressure and fraudulant sale tactics . Well this is Brent and whatever we can do to get this fraud of a company shut down the better off the internet will be . Leapfish has take my 87 year old mother and me for over $ 30,000 for a bunch of worthless keywords .
Run from this company as fast as you can. Boiler Room, amen. In May bought a 3 word very targeted keyword phrase. 50 days later: 12 impressions, and 10 clicks, all of them from me checking on my purchase.
I asked them for their cooperation to change to a broader term that could be expected to get some clicks based on stats from Google comparing what I bought and what I wanted to switch to. They wanted more $ for the switch to the broader 2 word keyword phrase. I said no way was I going to give them any more money. So no deal. Interesting that on Google, the more targeted keywords cost more than the broader ones, but not on Leapfish. I don’t think their search engine gets anything in the way of traffic for any keywords.