Here is my fundamental issue – the Leapfish business plan smells FISHY. They told me I could own for $500 the keyword “earrings” and be in the top-3 for a sponsored search. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that that is not a sustainable biz plan (even with the 10% per year maintenance fee).

I was also told that I owned that spot for life and could resell or lease it if I wanted to.

Anyways, total waste of time. Glad my decision to hang up on them is substantiated by others.

Thanks for stopping by. I will be interested to see what is your ROI or how many visitors LeapFish actually sends you?

For time being I am suspecting you may have been asked to by some one to leave this comment and praise LeapFish. Am I wrong?

I believe very little change in that regard. However if you are able to prove me wrong, please stop by and tell us if the money making opportunity with LeapFish is worth considering.

Thanks for stopping by!

cheers

My name is Chris and I am the “Rogue” sales person who committed “click fraud”.

First off, I am fairly certain nobody at Leapfish or anywhere else has even checked to see if fraud was actually committed. If I am not mistaken, after you click on a company’s PPC link once they will get charged. If I clicked on it again from the same IP address (which I did) there are no further charges.

Secondly, you need to address your Director of Sales. He was the one who gave me the idea in my seven days of training prior to hitting the sales floor. He told all the new hires that when he was making cold calls in the beginning, he would tell prospects that he was going to click on their PPC link unless they buy a keyword. Being the Director of Sales for the company, he probably shouldn’t say that to a fresh college graduate with no sales experience or they may follow suit.

Thirdly, when I was hired, there was no interview whatsoever. All they did was sit me down at a table and tell me to pick up a phone and act like I was selling something. After that, he said I was hired and gave me all my HR paperwork to fill out. Then I started the following Monday.

Lastly, Have you all ever considered putting a CRM system in place? Or do you just get an inexperienced group of salespeople and send them off on their own?

There were no boundaries put in place whatsoever. Just find a website online and try to sell the service. That’s what I did, and luckily I spoke with the right guy to expose your shady business practices.

I do have to thank Leapfish though, for teaching me what not to be in the sales world.

The only reason I needed to respond to this is because I am continually getting bashed for a rookie mistake. Leapfish astrosurfs like no ones business, just look at the alexa reviews. So get a life Mark, better yet, get a new job with a company that has a future.

I don’t give a squat what you think, nor will I allow astroturfing on my blog on behalf of the LeapFish. Feel free to spam on their behalf somewhere else.

I would hope that Leapfish is using google and yahoo as a crutch to draw in loyal clients of the aforementioned companies only to one day implement their own contextual search system one it’s client base is self sustaining. I am sure this topic has been brought up before Leapfish must know that it can build an air tight business model if it is subject to googles TOS – I’m sure they are working it our.

Because I am sure it is inevitable. Google will pull out.

I always suspected that though.

It’s always about traffic.

We also know they now have the capital to move forward with development.

Leapfish is in this for the 5% renewal fee they are not going anywhere.

Just my opinion.
impact561

It’s true that with some of the negative implications surrounding leapfish, some of us feel a little silly for buying in. That being said I see key words in much the same way I see domain names. there is value to be had in keywords providing Leapfish plies a concentrated effort on producing better numbers.

Now.. I don’t thing I’m a dumb ass – I sell 3000 dollars a month in pure profit not to mention the 2500 dollars worth of key words I have are paying off for me.

I own “pay per click advertising” “Pay Per Click” and “PPC” all of which go for over $10 per click on google for first position. Since I bought my keywords I have received 487 hits from leapfish resulting in a multitude of sales.

So who is the Dumb Shit?

Clearly it’s not me

I just saved $4500.00 in google adwords payouts more then paying for my leapfish investment.

by the way I still supplement my advertising with adwords but I can tell you I honestly pay more to google for fewer hits then I paid for my three keywords with leapfish.

in addition to that most of the leapfish traffic is North American.

Perhaps Chris Pirillo did write about LeapFish because he realized it’s potential.

If you think you are doing yourself or your former employer a favor, think again. Internet has a very long memory.

If the incident to which I refer as click fraud is so insignificant, why then LeapFish fired that employee???

LeapFish is useless without Google and Yahoo, what do you think would happened if Google or Yahoo pulled the plug on LeapFish? But to answer your question, my beef is with every sleazy company out there, not just LeapFish.

To be honest I did not realize Mr. Behrouzi purchased the domain you just mentioned. So, no that is not an issue.

Hope it clears up few things for you. Feel free to stop by again if you have any other questions.

leapfish is garbage run by retarded monkeys who’d rip off anybody including their own retarded mothers for an extra buck.

leapfish is worthless. why’d you invest in keywords that have no real value whatsofuckingever in the real world? you’re as dumb as the other dipshits that get suckered by these fucktards. nothing better to invest in then fucking internet keywords? seriously? that’s the worst fucking investment i’ve ever heard of.

nice burger king crown luis, it’s nice to know the ass holes peddling this trash who sound dumb as shit over the phone actually look the part too.

As for the comments… I wish whoever wrote them stayed clear of stating that since AdSense account was not involved it was not really a "click fraud". I am writing a post about it and how many AdSense publishers were kicked out of the system (rightly or not) and yet LeapFish continues without a "wag of the finger" from Google, especially since LeapFish uses Google's API to aggregate the results.

I am sure no one important will ever notice it, but as some one who uses AdWords and encourages friends and colleagues and readers of this blog to do the same, I can not be silent.

On the subject of paid reviews – Chris doing a review and heartily recommending something are two different things. AI fully agree paid reviews do have a seedy side. That's the risk – just one or two reviews of "bad product" and your own reputation is dead (like leapfish's seems to be).

Thanks for stopping by "Digger" !

As always thanks for stopping by.

Sadly, Chris Pirillo did write about LeapFish. A paid review to make a quick cash for a charity if I am not mistaken- yet another ugly side of paid reviews. I believe the review was through IZEA.

As I read over the first comment, I begin to suspect they might have been written by their legal council. It took him 8 hours to comment, strange for a guy that Twitters non-stop.

We'll see where it goes.

I should point out that no one outside of leapfish knows how the advert service works. This is the same of the more famous and trusted Google AdWords system. However Google has a lot more people trying to guestimate what goes on and they rarely (if ever) conclude fraud or misdeed. If LeapFish have a fraction of that number of people and a fraction of the detractors looking and some of those numbers are concluding fraud then your transparency level is wrong.

As a technologist there are things I look for with any "investment" based market and these things appear to be missing in the case of LeapFish. While not necessary they are a good bench mark of the usefulness and quality of an offering. Had Yahoo, Google or Mr Nobody come up with this system of LeapFish's and been viable I would, for example, expect the likes of John Chow to tell his readers how to get the most value and mileage from it. I'd expect it to become a popular ebook topic and I would expect to see Google adword, Yahoo ads and "home ads" (ads on the topic's own system) telling you how to get rich using this system.

I would look for 45n5 to make a video about it, for Caymon host to have a product, for Andy Beard to send me a stumble. I would expect Vlad to have an affiliate product from (say) click bank and I would expect to see it in the business and financial places I go.

I would expect to find podcasts talking about it with questions like "is x the next big thing?"

I would expect advice from CopyBlogger on getting the most from you x ad.

I would expect ProBlogger to write about it.

…

Need I go on?

For every blogger that says they are thinking something I would expect there to be between 7 and 70 other people thinking the exact same thing and twice that thinking similar things.

So when six blogs I trust say x is good I will conclude that x is likely to be good.

If, say, Chris Parilo said it was cool I would expect it to be cool but if it was not Chris would loose my trust. Chris has never lost my trust which is why his words carry the authority with me and many others that they do.

The same is true of Vlad. He has never led me wrong yet.

In fact because of a review of one of the above I am going to purchase some new equipment as recommended by said person.

Second, this is an opinion piece and never do I claim to be a journalist. My opinion of LeapFish is not favourable, but I am sure you can gather that by now. You make no effort to change it either.

Are you telling me that advertisers sending $7,000+ decided not to link to their own websites but link to LeapFish blog or not to link to any one at all? You are absolutely right then, I do not understand the advertising model. But thanks for clarifying. You should probably do so on the "pre-sell" pages on your website. I expressed my opinion of your advertising model.

Since you brought up AdSense, I am thinking that my next post should reflect on why Google should pull the plug on LeapFish and stop serving any data to your site. No you did not benefited from the clicks, you just made your partner (Google. You use their API, don't you?) look extremely bad. If you think the click fraud is exaggerated, why that slaes person was fired? Or was that a lie as well?

Finally I never mentioned by name your CEO, I understand that running a company of about 100 employees he can't keep track of every "loose canon". I do not understand why you are trying to put words in my mouth. Whenever I have an issue with him, I am not shy expressing it. This article has nothing to do with him, it is all about LeapFish.