FreeSiteSignup Scam?: Stay Away At All Costs

This hub is about Freesitesignup. I write to urge you to avoid this program at all costs. This isn't one of those underhanded "Is Freesitesignup a Scam?" type articles written by a Freesitesignup shill. I hope that if you read my account you will avoid this wrong turn.

Now let me start by saying that I am not going to label Freesitesignup as a scam per se. A scam, at least as I define it, in some sense cheats you out of money. I do not have evidence of fraud. In my opinion, the program is not valuable and a new (or experienced) affiliate marketer should avoid it.

I. What FreesiteSignup Purports To Offer

I am not going to put a link to FreeSiteSignup's website on my hub because I do not in any way want you making the poor decision to do business with them. But I am sure you could find them on Google easily. Moreover, they and their eager associates have so saturated the Internet with their sales pitches that you have likely already encountered them.

Here is what they promise. They tell you that they will give you one website free with no obligation. But if you want to have "money-making" membership status, they will give you an additional 35 money-making websites for only $8.95. They say that they will host your websites, will give you extensive training and will give you one-on-one coaching until you succeed.

They tell you that these sites have been tested and proven to make $20k-40k a year on auto-pilot. Multiply that by 35 and you are talking about serious money for websites that are handed to you! How could they be offering to give you a business that they practically guarantee will make you over $1 million a year for only $8.95?

Here is the truth. Their "free" website is worth nothing. It is the kind of shell template that many affiliate programs give you for free so that you can use it as a landing page to promote more sales in Freesitesignup itself. There is no hosting provided or any means to derive any value from the "free" website. While there is nothing wrong with giving potential affiliates a free template so that they can market your program, labeling it as some kind of special free website can only lead to disappointment. Indeed, I have read users on various forums complaining that Freesitesignup is a scam because they tried their free website and it does not seem to be working or to do anything.

So let's say you get past this and actually give them $8.95 for their "money-making" program. First of all, it is not $8.95. Their website discloses that they will charge you approximately another $100 in 30 days for 1 year of hosting. Also, they strongly advise you to register a separate domain for every one of their websites you choose to use (actually from an SEO perspective that is probably good advice). So you will also be paying annual fees of $10-15 per domain to register your domains with them. You will probably only register 1 at the get go, but it is still an additional cost.

What about the 35 money making websites? In my opinion, they are rather facile affiliate landing pages in a variety of niches. The biggest niche is an affiliate program for marketing Freesitesignup itself! 4-5 of the website templates are also devoted to Freesitesignup. Another handful of the websites are in the debt relief niche, and primarily involve marketing a company called Curadebt. Another niche is in the "green energy" space, another for french learning courses and another for spanish learning courses, one about golf, one about world of warcraft, weight loss, attracting women, etc.

Many of the products, to me, seemed of questionable value. For instance, one of the first four niches they encourage you to get into is "H2O conversions." You would be essentially selling e-books that told people how they could convert their existing cars to run on water rather than gasoline. I'm not an expert, but I am skeptical that this works and would not want to be involved with marketing a scam. During one training webinar a Freesitesignup representative revealed that Google adwords does not permit H20 conversion ads in its program.

Another one of their "money-making" websites is a niche about growing taller. You are supposed to market an e-book in Clickbank that promises to show you how you can grow significantly taller as an adult. According to the author of the e-book, he bumped into an old Vietnamese man that taught him how to use a cocktail made of human growth hormone as well as a number of "secret" exercises to unlock an adult's body to start growing taller again. Again, I would be concerned about marketing a product like that.

As I stated earlier, one of the main niches Freesitesignup encourages you to get begin working in is to promote Freesitesignup itself. With respect to the non-Freesitesignup niches, I have reason to believe that Freesitesignup is taking a cut of affiliate commissions as well. I noticed that with Curadebt, a heavily promoted product in the debt relief nice, Freesitesignup tells you to let Curadebt know that you are a Freesitesignup affiliate. Freesitesignup tells you that you should do this because Curadebt will more quickly approve you into the program if they know that you are with Freesitesignup. But on Curadebt's website you learn that it offers residual commissions to all referrers. I feel that Freesitesignup should have disclosed that they would be collecting residual commissions on my sales. I have not checked every single other niche, but based on their apparent arrangement with Curadebt it is certainly possible that Freesitesignup has made residual commission arrangements with a number of the other ones. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but I believe it should be disclosed.

Their training program consists of a series of webinars and written materials. They give you the information in sequential stages and ask you to send them written confirmation and links to your work product at every stage so that they can check your work. Although I did so, I never received any response other than boilerplate emails thanking me for keeping them posted. When I began with Freesitesignup, the training seemed helpful. Only a few months later, based on so much I have learned just from surfing the Internet, the training does not seem that valuable or special. I would have been better off on my own.

There is another problem with Freesitesignup that would not be obvious to a total newbie but seems obvious now. The 35 websites they are offering you are duplicate content and will not be indexed by Google. Moreover, these websites will likely get slapped by the Google adwords program for being low quality landing sites. As I will further describe below, although they don't disclose this at the outset, a big part of their training program is devoted to attaching a Wordpress blog to each of their sites to try to create additional content. And they tell you that you should make your blog articles (rather than their supposedly market-tested and proven) landing sites for traffic. When you add in the substantial additional labor of making each site unique with a Wordpress blog, you start to wonder how the 35 websites they have given you have any value at all.

II. My FreesiteSignup Experience

I came to FreesiteSignup with no internet marketing experience. I was referred to it by a friend.

I'm not a fool and the profit potential FreeSiteSignup promised sounded unreasonable. But I was willing to accept lower profits so long as what I got out of it was worth the amount of time and money I put in.

I paid my $8.95, and paid the extra $100 at month end for hosting services. I also registered a domain with Freesitesignup.

One of the first things they encourage you to do is market Freesitesignup to your friends and try to get them to join. It seemed me that if this was such a big opportunity, I shouldn't need to sell it to my friends to be successful. I did not do this.

Also at the outset, they strongly encourage you to join a training program by a separate company called the Net Wealth Dr. I suspect that this company and Freesitesignup are affiliated.

Freesitesignup's training program generally seems very plausible to a newcomer. They required me to write down my goals and got me to send them periodic written status updates. As I stated earlier, all that I got in return was boilerplate thank you emails.

One thing that struck me was that getting started was an incredible amount of work. This was at odds with the whole pitch that they were giving you these websites so that you could launch a new business quickly. The majority of the work was related to creating an attaching a Wordpress blog to every website. They advised that each blog have at least 10-12 unique articles and that you add another 2 new articles a week to it. They also advised you to write 5 articles for articles directories to start out and then to write 1 more a week. Keep in mind that you would be doing this only for 1 website until it became profitable and then replicating it niche by niche. So I do not want to make it seem like I was creating 35 blogs.

During this time, they said that the reason that you needed to make this blog before you started making immediate profits with an adwords Pay-Per-Click campaign (where they represented that the real big money was to be made) was because a Search Engine Optimized blog attached to their niche websites would create steady long-term profits. I think the truth is that their duplicate content websites are slapped by a low quality penalty by the Google adwords program.

Another thing that troubled me was that they instructed me to direct any traffic from my PPC campaign to a landing page I created myself on my blog. So what was the value of their free websites?

I dutifully performed the steps of their training program. But I was experiencing increasing frustration and doubt. First of all, I needed technical support on a number of occasions but the vaunted support offered by Freesitesignup was not very good. I had some success getting people on live chat, but it normally took 2 business days to get a response to my emails. On one occasion, I noticed that there had been some interruption in their hosting services and my website was not working. I sent them an email with words like "URGENT" and "EMERGENCY" in the subject line. Two hours later it started working again on its own. Two days later I got a response email where they said they checked and the website seemed to be working fine. I became increasingly concerned with their non-responsiveness and that they would not be able to provide consistent or reliable hosting services. Needless to say, if I built an online business empire with unreliable hosting that would be a disaster.

It was also discouraging that they never made more than boilerplate responses to my status updates. It started seeming like more and more of a game or a way to make me feel that they were providing coaching when they were doing nothing of the sort. I stopped making status updates at the end.

During the middle of the time I was preparing my first website, Freesitesignup launched an entirely new training module. This training appeared to eschew their 35 websites and their Pay Per Click profit strategy altogether. Instead, they gave you 8 templates and training on niche research so that you could drive traffic through Search Engine Optimization. They did not say their first approach was a failure, only that they were offering an alternative approach. I did have to wonder whether, if their PPC program was so great, they were rolling out an entirely different.

In any event, I finally completed by blog and launched my PPC campaign. I set up a Google adwords account, and launched a campaign based on keywords Freesitesignup gave me. They also gave me draft ads but asked me to rewrite them (which I did).

Many of the keywords on their list required ad payments of approximately $1 a click to have first page placement. I set a budget of $100 per day. Over three days I purchased approximately 300 clicks for $300. According to Freesitesignup, none of the traffic I received converted.

I do not know why this happened. Perhaps the landing page I created was not sufficient persuasive to pre-sell visitors on Freesitesignup. Or perhaps Freesitesignup's own website is not persuasive and does not lead to conversions. Or perhaps Freesitesignup does not accurately track commissions. I do not have evidence of the latter theory, but from my experience they do not inspire confidence.

At the end of three days, Google essentially shut me down. It stopped showing my ads because it said my landing page was of poor quality. I could start them again but would need to pay substantially higher advertising rates to receive first page rankings. My understanding is that Google did this to stop affiliate marketers from using Google Adwords to drive traffic to worthless duplicative websites. Perhaps I did not make a sufficiently robust blog to overcome the stigma of using one of their duplicative sites. Or maybe everyone has the same problem with them. I don't know. At the end of the day it was a blessing because it cut my losses.

I have since stopped working with Freesitesignup.

III. Final Thoughts On Freesitesignup

I am not going to call Freesitesignup a scam. My experience with them has been very negative. It has been only a few short months since my time with them and what strikes me is how little of value they truly offer. I know so much more about online marketing from reading free material on the Internet than I learned from Freesitesignup's training program. Moreover, their 35 free websites seem to be of no value. They claim that the websites have been proven or tested to make money. Whatever tests they have run, however, would not seem to be relevant because at the end of the day you are on your own creating a Wordpress blog that will be your main selling piece.

Creating Wordpress blogs is not particularly hard. Getting Freesitesignup "money-making websites" is therefore of little value. I personally use a program called Sandvox for Mac to make websites. I have also used another good design program called XsitePro. There are also many other convention web design programs. With any of these products you can make a better website than anything Freesitesignup offers, and you will not have to go to exhaustive lengths to avoid duplicate content penalties. I pair these programs with a powerful keyword research tool called Market Samurai.

You can also get consistently reliable and cheaper hosting from a number of companies. Domain registration is also something you can easily do on your own.

At the end of the day, I can only relay my own bad experience. I do not mind the money lost so much. But I do resent how much of my time they wasted. Please learn from my mistakes.

On this hub I've included a few Youtube videos just because they may be of interest. In the first one, the main Freesitesignup trainer acts as a shill and poses the question of whether Freesitesignup is a scam and then answers it in a very self-serving way. Also, there is another video where an incredibly amateur new affiliate tries to market Freesitesignup. Freesitesignup encourages its new affiliates to make Youtube videos so I don't blame the guy, but I find him funny nevertheless. Don't be fooled. Thanks.