Four months on from the crowning of Mark Wright as Lord Sugar’s new business partner, their internet marketing company “Climb Online” appears to have yet to get off the ground

Part of the problem was that poor Mark seemed to fall foul to every internet marketing school boy error imaginable, including:

1. Choosing a domain name that was already taken by a climbing blog http://climbonline.co.uk/

2. Not having a personal Twitter account, and also allowing the climb_online (climbonline was already taken) account name to be taken after the final was aired.

3. Having a flawed business model that aims to provide a personal hands-on service to clients, but at the same time outsource all of the technical work to a third-party provider.

4. Not having a website for close to two months – thus failing to capitalise on any potential momentum.

So after an initial rocky start (pun intended), why is it that the website still hasn’t gained any traction?

Spammy Black-Hat Links

Mark Wright claimed that Climb Online would be using white hat SEO techniques:

That was in early Jan – it was not long after that Mark (or whoever he is outsourcing his SEO to) began building thousands of low quality garbage links:

Here is an example of one of Climb Online’s backlinks:

Is that what you call “White Hat” Mark? Thousands of links on spam site full of payday loan, viagra, and porn links?

The Website Is Terrible

With that investment of £250,000 they could have got a decent website up and running within 24 hours if they’d wanted to; and after all that time stalling, this is what they came up with:

A drawing that a five year old could have done in five minutes…

“Do you want to increase leads via paid adverts?…”
“No – I want something else.”
I.E. I want a marketing agency that actually does paid search marketing.

Climb Online don’t even bother to protect their own brand name in the paid search results:

A Focus On PR

Mark Wright’s focus is quite clearly on public relations:

So Climb Online has a PR team, but no:

• Web Developers – the site construction was outsourced to http://madebyshape.co.uk/ (notice the similarity in the theme?)
• SEO’s – if they had a dedicated SEO their link profile wouldn’t be such a toxic mess.
• SEM’s – we’ve already established they don’t do PPC.

The True Business Model: Selling Snake Oil

As Climb Online don’t appear to have the capacity to provide online marketing (since they don’t seem to be marketing their own website), but do appear to be aggressively promoting themselves through other forms of media, and at the same time taking on new account managers:

Mark Wright is a salesman; he sells SEO; but selling SEO is not the same as providing SEO.

Here are a couple of customers Mark picked up in Jan:

Let’s see how their site is doing now:

Wait! Three links in three months – that sounds about right.
But wait, they did get a picture of Mark on their website:

That’s got to be worth the £600 or whatever monthly fee they’re paying.

Nothing New Here

Mark Wright said that his SEO product would “change the way SEO is done in the UK”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are countless SEO agencies that are better at selling SEO than they are at delivering it. There are probably more agencies like this than there are agencies that can provide a quality service.
Their business model is based on their ability to acquire new customers and retain those customers by hiring in slick account managers, who possess little knowledge about how to rank a website, but who have enough gab to get clients tied in to long contracts.
As it turns out, this type of business model may prove to be more profitable than actually providing a good service – ultimately making Climb Online a smart investment choice for Alan Sugar.