Is BT tricking your clients or simply luring them away with an offer of a much better service? You can’t attack the platform because a world leading authority in web marketing tools (the AeA) has declared it is the number one way in which Americans now find a businesses from which they wish to buy. If you were the concerned and decent consultant you perceive yourself to be you would be recommending BTwebclicks and BTwebclicks Plus to your clients as a cost effective way of generating contacts to their businesses. If you really have a serious problem with the way that BT has marketed Webclicks simply raise a complaint with Ofcom, better still, why don’t you speak to one of many many many many many many many many many BTwebclicks subscribers out there and see if they think they have been tricked or if they are more than happy with the results they’re getting, where else after all, can you buy a customer for your business from just £1?

As a SEO consultant you should have no problem identifying a Btwebclicks subscriber… they’re the ones that appear in a prominent position on the results page!!!!!

Now… who’s trying to trick who here? And no… I’m not missing the point!

I’m just not happy in which they try are trying to trick my clients.

Guaranteed Service. Any service or product can be guaranteed. BT guarantee to deliver a set level of referral. Failure to deliver results in a pro-rata refund. I believe this meets the current popular definition of guarantee.

Expensive. Define expensive. I am typing this on a G4 PowerBook from Apple. It cost 1200 quid, three times what an of it’s time PC based laptop wold have cost. The machine is now approaching it’s sixth year of use. The bulk of businesses qualify for the £1/click with the higher cost packages reserved for higher margin generating companies.

Waste. Small businesses are vulnerable, I agree. What makes better sense, a drop of 500 leaflets that might reach 1% of your customer base, of a marketing plan where you only reach customers that are looking for you.

Not Always best: You answer this by saying 99% of the population is on the web. Erg, you reach 99% of the population. I fail to see the objection.

Painkiller: I fail to see how this is different from the service you offer. Your solution is ongoing as is the BT solution.

How Long: Most Plasterers and Horse Riding Equipment suppliers are, in my admittedly limited experience, tend not to be skilled in the fine art of creating source code. You might be able to knock up keywords inside an episode of Doctor Who, but the average plumber isn’t as skilled in HTML as you or I.

Free: yes, it does only cost time, assuming you have the requisite skills. BT offer the service if you don’t.

Free again:”You only have to pay for them to appear on search engines for the keywords you choose.” So, not free then.

Marketing: Webclicks can be used as a standalone product, or in conjunction with any other plan. It depends entirely on the product or service that is on offer.

What: Perhaps you should join BT as part of the market research team. I spite of being a lone ranger web designer, you seem to know more about UK buyer research than a major conglomerate telco of many decades does, in spite of them having scores of staff who do only this.

GUARANTEED PIECE OF CRAP: in lieu of any sensible debate, you resort to playground stile abuse. Ofcom will tell you that the warranty is of legitimate value. BT are regulated by something called compliance that prevents them from saying a great many things. Perhaps you could draw upon it’s wisdom.

THE REAL EXPERT Customer can produce websites on their own, but that won’t suit you either as they will be at best amateurish and at worst, well, I guess you get the picture.

It is my belief that you see WebClicks as a clear and present danger to your business. I also believe that you will have been charging exorbitant prices for your service and are now feeling threatened by a simpler and more cost effective customer solution. Correct me if I am wrong.

The text you see is the text I received by email, if i’ve missed it out its because it wasn’t sent to me correctly. The more text the better really.

It doesn’t matter what platform they use, it’s the way in which they try and sell it that is the issue, thus why I provide their marketing blurb, and not details of the product.

The fundamental flaw in your attack… You don’t tell us how you would go about delivering the exact same results for your clients and what you would charge for the service, and what would you offer them as a guarantee. Alright, so you managed to get on page one, but what does this mean to me… not a lot unless you can tell me how many clicks have successfully generated on this page as a result, and how long it took to generate them.

You have also retyped the marketing blurb rather than cut and paste, so you have, and I assume, by error, missed out some of the original text.

Incidently, the Geneva software platform that BT webclicks uses to generate the clicks to customers websites has just been voted the No1 internet product of 2008 in the USA by the AeA, and is now also the number one way in America in which customers search for the details of businesses from which they intent to buy. Now… the worlds biggest internet users can’t be all that wrong!