In January, I wrote a post about how I was fed up with the Better Business’s Bureau’s Online Reliability program in which they force an additional fee on already paying members in order fro them to be able to display the BBB logo on their sites.
A few weeks later, I received a phone call from one of their representatives congratulating me on my post, stating they also wanted to see the program done away with and that my post was helping to speed up that process.
However, little over three months later I get a renewal bill in which the price has now increased from $135 annually to $177.50. I’m not paying. It is not the money… really it is not. It is the principle. Just because your business is online, you should not have to pay an additional fee to announce your BBB membership. It is wrong and I will stand for it no longer.
In fact in anticipation of them kicking my company out of the program, I have already linked the seal to my company’s online report, of which any consumer can access with or without our involvement with the program. I will no longer pay additional fees simply because I choose to demonstrate our BBB membership via our web sites. If they want to revoke my membership, so be it.
Want to help spread the word? You can either blog about it yourself, linking to my original post or even better yet, you can Digg the original post, helping me to push the original story to the front page of Digg which in turn should help the story to gain great placement in the natural results of the search engines.
David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses.
