£2486 "broker fee"?!?

instaunt · 14 November 2012 at 11:38PM

dealer_wins wrote: »

I know we tend to blame the government for a lot of things, but getting yourself into debt is really not their fault!!

Is this is another story of someone who overspent during "the good times" and has nothing to cover a bad patch.

That is something I have yelled for the past 12 years myself!

I do accept responsibility for the position I'm in. My rants at the government are because the VAT/tax/regulation changes that meant I could no longer be cost competitive. I am unable to simply register myself in Ireland or Switzerland like large companies did after the tax changes here. I also blame Google for positioning themselves as a monopoly and then creating a hostile environment for small businesses. (They don't pay any tax here either by the way.)

I'm not a big spender. I only managed to get on the housing ladder in 2007 ... at it's peak. For the past decade my cars have all been second hand and under ten grand. I even made a profit on a couple! My wife yells at me constantly for being tight-fisted (I'm from Aberdeen).

I tried to do everything right. I had saved for a rainy day and got hit by a tornado. I accept responsibility for trying to revive my business. I should have fired everyone two years ago like most companies did, then taken my money and gone elsewhere. Instead, I continued employing good people who did their best. They even went without pay for the last two months because they believed it could be turned around.

Google put the final nail in our coffin last month. No explanation and legally we can seem to do nothing about it.

Jeff_Bridges_hair · 15 November 2012 at 12:05AM

Im sorry to ask but exactly how did Google put the final nail in your coffin? I know and work with lots fo companies that find using goole and its advertising ways very profitable for them in reaching new consumers of their product so im interested to know how they are the ones who have got you into this mess.

instaunt · 15 November 2012 at 1:02AM

Jeff_Bridges_hair wrote: »

Im sorry to ask but exactly how did Google put the final nail in your coffin? I know and work with lots fo companies that find using goole and its advertising ways very profitable for them in reaching new consumers of their product so im interested to know how they are the ones who have got you into this mess.

no, I got myself in this mess by relying on Google to remain fair and professional. we were attacked on all sides by Google.

1) over the past couple of years we've seen the CPC rise from £0.15 per click to £2+ per click. there are no other advertisers for many of our advertising keywords. google just raises the minimum bid every couple of months. when you sell many £5-£10 products that have 20% VAT and even more % taxes on it ... £2+ per click is pointless.

2) In other areas of our business where CPC pricing is even worse (such as legal services) we can not get any organic traffic either, because paid ads take up the whole top section of the search results.

3) 13 of our websites were dropped from Google in the Penguin updated. We were told we had "un-natural links". I filled in a re-inclusion request, created a disavow file ... everything. People who link to us have done so of their own accord. Google won't tell us which links are un-natural and we have tens of thousands of links.

4) Then (the final nail I referred to), Google cancelled our Adsense account without explanation. The reason they gave was "fraud". That was it. We asked them to point out where they thought the fraud was, they refused to answer. They said they didn't have to answer either. They failed to pay their last commission payment to us as well.

All 4 of these things are happening to honest businesses across the country. Google has a monopoly. They should not be allowed to practice like this. We still rank highly on Bing, but that is practically pointless in the UK.

I did my best to diversify traffic. I have 10,000+ followers on Twitter ... but Twitter people don't result in sales very easily. I have 2,500+ fans plus advertisements on Facebook ... again, tough to actually engage and get ROI. Sadly, Google is the monopoly when it comes to driving customers.