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HowToLearn teaches to How to Deceit, Defraud and Insult. Scam Warning. Review of victimized customer.
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Trying to run ads with the educational advertiser HowToLearn.com I came to learn how to deceive, defraud and insult clients. In March 2014 we approached the educational and learning site HowToLearn.com with a request for advertisement. At this point it
looked very promising: HowToLearn’s focus on learning agrees with the tutoring purpose of our company. The site looks well designed and some articles were quite informative. Moreover, in October 2013 we had already run a $200 ad for being named HowToLearn’s
Top 101 Best Educational websites. However, I should have been more cautious when HowToLearn’s CEO persuaded me to buy an ad package for $5,000. This package includes expert pages and the CEO highlighted other expert pages which looks indeed promising. These
other customers - so the CEO claimed – receives most of the her traffic from HowToLearn. Moreover, the CEO explained that the participants could expect a doubling in web traffic. What a treat! Double traffic! Or so I thought because if something sounds too
good to be true it probably is. So be warned when a sales person for that matter – makes fantastic promises. In the first week of July 2014 when the expert campaign was running we received the true numbers: less than one percent (that is 0.88%) more traffic
from HowToLearn – and that included the already paid traffic from last year’s Top Educational campaign and a new Best Tutoring sponsorship. One percent is a far cry from the insinuated doubling in traffic. To make matters worse, the quality of the traffic
was poor also. Visitors clicked on average only 3 times on pages and the bounce rate was a whopping 68%. Google Analytics can prove our results. Not only the performance data was a let down but also working with the CEO. She promised to aid client’s content
presentation with advice and work. In reality working with the CEO was for me a real pain the b… due to her ridiculous demands. For example, emails to her (not customer content) must start in upper case followed by a colon and a reference line or else she
would disregard them. The CEO inundated me with lengthy and confusing instructions on how to submit content. When in her estimate my submission was insufficient she denigrated me by showing how links were to be edited and headlines are to be formatted. While
I am certainly no expert in marketing, I am however a web developer who has worked the last 10 years on the web and feel insulted by her condescending teachings. Finally, after painstakingly presenting the information according to the CEO demands the links
on the web site where still not linked but worded: (link to: www.tutorz.com). In exchange for expert page content with links, named a sponsor, one newsletter campaign and one press release we agreed upon a payment of $5,000. I already paid half ($2,500) in
March 2014. We was named a sponsor of a list of Best Tutoring sites and received a back link. This ad worked quite well actually. But no other feature was delivered, no newsletters, no press release not even direct links to us. Outbound links would link first
to HowToLearn and then be redirected to the target site. This practice is bad for SEO and bad for user speed. But when I brought up this topic the CEO did what she can do so well: to inundate me with my-way-or-the-highway prose. Despite all my disappointments
with the CEO and HowToLearn I carried on hoping that the expert campaign would still yield some benefit. After all, $2,500 was already sunk. But when the CEO incidentally mentioned that a year later I was supposed to pay another $5,000 I collapsed. I was under
the impression the expert pages were permanent just like the previous ads. I felt very much deceived. I could no longer go on with HowToLearn. When I asked for at least a partial refund of my $2,500 I heard more of the CEO's now familiar highway talk. Now
here I am, having been defrauded, deceived and insulted by HowToLearn. But at least I’ve learned to better deal with sales people of her kind: One – If promises sound too good to be true, they probably are. Two – Setup and contract describing in detail the
promised services. Negotiate a refund if performance marks are not reached. Three – Collect references from previous customers. Four – Analyse similar ad presentation to spot problems such missing direct links. Five – Pay in installments as work progresses;
never all in one lump sum. HowToLearn In Summary Pros: Nice looking site. $200 for permanent ads is a reasonable investment. Cons: Risk of being defrauded. Bad working relationship. Time waste. Poor SEO value.
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