December 4, 2007 by admin.

I had pretty much given up writing on this blog because it seems like a waste of time and really, I had nothing much to write about. But I am having an experience with the Citysearch pay-per-click company that I think everyone should know about so that they can avoid this company like the plague. They have tried to charge my credit card for nearly US$200 for fraudulent clicks and they don’t seem willing to listen to my complaints.

First of all, as a very small business owner, I was looking for ways to promote my website (the same reason for first starting this blog), and I had signed up with 1and1.com as our ISP (no complaints about 1and1 though, they have been great!) I received vouchers for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and one for US$25 for Citysearch. I found much better vouchers for Microsoft, Google and Yahoo elsewhere, but I thought that I would at least give Citysearch a try until the $25 credit ran out. The deal was also supposed to be that there would be no monthly charges, but the cost per click was very expensive (in my opinion) at US$.75 per click. Even so, I thought that with my small website, $25 would last a couple of months at the very least.

Once I signed up on October 7 and supposedly put my ad up on Citysearch, I looked for it for several days afterwards but could never find it. It was only supposedly listed in the Oklahoma City area Citysearch (my company is registered in Oklahoma) so how hard could it be to find it, especially since I knew what I was looking for? I never could find it, so I just assumed that they had decided not to post my ad for whatever reason and then forgot about it, until I received an email from Citysearch on November 3, stating that I was about to be invoiced. I couldn’t imagine that I had used up the $25 credit already, so I logged in to my Citysearch account. It showed that my ad supposedly ran from 10/7 to 11/1, with zero clicks everyday except for 4 days: Monday 10/22 showed 51 clicks, Tuesday 10/23 showed 25 clicks, Wednesday 10/24 showed 25 clicks, and Thursday 10/25 showed 21 clicks. All other days there was nothing. They were trying to charge me somewhere around US$97 (they have deleted this information from their website so I’m not sure on the exact amount.) Just from that alone a person would be suspicious, I mean how many people look for tours of Beijing in the Oklahoma City Citysearch website? Furthermore, I have Google Analytics set up on my website, and the TOTAL number of visitors to my website for the two months that I had been using Google Analytics was not even close to the 122 clicks that Citysearch was charging me for, and that was before I even figured out how to exclude my own computers from showing our own visits to the website. I emailed Citysearch to complain and cancel my account (there was no way to do it through their website, and I could not remove my credit card information) but I heard nothing back. I checked my account a few days later, and the $97 charge was gone, so I assumed all was ok. WRONG! I got my credit card bill on November 29, and Citysearch had charged me $66.50 on 11/8/07, then $40.50 11/16/07, this time without telling me that I was about to be invoiced or any notification whatsoever. If I hadn’t checked my credit card bill they would have, at least initially, gotten away with it. Immediately I emailed Citysearch and told them that I knew that these were fraudulent clicks and demanded that they credit my account, or I would dispute the charges through my credit card company. I also saw when I logged in to my Citysearch account that they had canceled my account and conveniently deleted all of the “statistics” that showed the number of clicks, etc. that they were trying to charge me for. Once again I checked Google Analytics, and found nothing from Citysearch or anything that could have come from them. The total number of clicks on my website once again were nowhere near what Citysearch was charging me for.

I finally got a very unprofessional email back from a “Bruce Jones, Senior Account Exec (sic)”, which implicitly made fun of my family name (I have an unusual family name), complete with punctuation mistakes and words that were left out. Bruce informed me that I should call him to talk about my cost per click, but said nothing about my telling him that there was no way that there had been that many clicks, if any at all, from Citysearch, and that I had never been able to even find my ad on their website.

After that last email from Bruce, I followed through with my threat to dispute the charges with my credit card company, especially since the credit card bill has to be paid within a week.

A quick search on Google for “Citysearch fraud” found other stories very similar to mine:

http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/my-adventure-with-city-search-pay-per-click-advertising-and-click-fraud/
http://approachingmidnight.blogspot.com/2006/11/citysearch-sucks.html
http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/28/citysearch-snaps-up-insider-pages-in-local-search-race/ (look at the comment on 11/8/07, before my comment)

and those are just what I found within the first couple of minutes of searching. I’m a licensed attorney in Oklahoma - is anyone interested in possibly starting up a class-action lawsuit against Citysearch? They cannot be allowed to get away with behavior like this, and I am sure that there are many others that don’t use visitor tracking software that have no idea that they are being scammed by Citysearch.

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October 15, 2007 by admin.

I know that this is not exactly an original idea and that it has been analyzed and written about extensively, but it occurred to me while I was trying to sleep last night just how incredible technology really is these days. Certainly I would have never come to China without the internet (I had posted my resume’ on some MBA Network website in early 2000 where it was found by the Chinese company that brought me to China to teach MBA classes in February 2000), but it goes beyond that. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to stay in China so long, so far away from my family - those occasional pictures that I get of any of my 4 nephews can really brighten up my day - and the emails 3 or 4 times a week from my mom help to close the distance from half a world away. And just this past Saturday (early Sunday a.m. here in Beijing) I was talking with both my mother and father at the same time using a certain company’s “computer to landline” phone service for only US$.01 per minute (I won’t mention the company by name since they charge me to advertise my business, they can pay me to advertise theirs!) and giving them almost live updates on the Oklahoma State - Nebraska football score since it wasn’t televised back home. So here I was sitting in Beijing, China giving my parents in Oklahoma updates on the score of an Oklahoma school playing football in Nebraska. These types of things have become so commonplace that we don’t really think much about how nearly miraculous it is until the computer breaks down or the internet goes down; then we realize how much we take it for granted.

Without current technology, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to start Beijing Discovery Tours and offer Beijing tours, hotel rooms and holiday packages to people all over the world through the internet. Guests can safely and securely pay either the 30% deposit or pay in full through the website with current technology and then come to Beijing knowing that they don’t have to worry; we will have everything ready for them so that all they have to do is relax and have a good time while they are here. Technology also helps us coordinate travel plans for our customers to travel to other cities such as Xi’an with the world-famous Terracotta Warriors and Chongqing where they can enjoy the famously spicy food as well as Yangtze River cruises.

Last and certainly least, the internet and current technology allow me to sit here on the computer in Beijing, China, looking out on a beautiful sunny fall day in October and write these words that can now be ignored by the entire world, from Azerbaijan to Zambia and all points in between.

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October 8, 2007 by admin.

Today is Monday, October 8 and I assume that it’s back to work for everyone here in Beijing after the week-long holiday for the equivalent of China’s Independence Day, which is the date that the People’s Republic of China was formally established by Chairman Mao at Tian’anmen Square on October 1, 1949. China actually has three yearly week-long holidays, known as “Golden Weeks”, one for National Day, one on May 1 for Labor Day, and the other for the Chinese New Year (also known as “Spring Festival”), which falls on a different day each year in either January or February by the Western calendar because it is based on the Lunar Calendar. There is some debate within the Chinese government as to whether the 7-day holidays should continue for Labor Day and May Day, with interruption of the normal flow of business cited as the reason to discontinue them. Critics of these holidays say that they should only be 3-days long, with the other days spread to other traditional Chinese holidays such as the Mid-Autumn Festival. From my personal standpoint, when I first came to China teaching in an MBA program, the week-long holidays (which had just been started in 1999, the year before I came to China) came as a pleasant surprise and gave me a chance to do some traveling around the country. These holidays and my subsequent travels in China were so much fun that I decided to start Beijing Discovery Tours to help other people enjoy traveling inside of China as much as I have. (To plan your own Beijing tours and holidays or other China tours,  visit our website at www.beijingdiscoverytours.com.)
The main point of this writing today (other than to plug our website of course) was to suggest that we might be able to learn something from the Chinese government in the U.S.A. It’s not often that you read something positive about China’s government, but in this case I think that they have done something right. The whole idea behind the “Golden Week” holidays was to spur domestic consumption, and judging by the amount of travel and shopping that is done during these holidays, it has been an overwhelming success. I know that this could never happen back home, but what if we put a couple of mandatory week-long holidays into the U.S.A.’s too-busy calendar? A week-long celebration for Independence Day would give more people a chance to travel and see their families (as well as promote a greater sense of unity in the country)  as would a week-long holiday for Christmas/Hanukkah, and they are fairly equally spread out through the year. It might do us good as Americans to take a more relaxed approach to work rather than constantly enduring the stress-filled lives that far too many of us seem to live.

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October 1, 2007 by admin.

It was an interesting week for me as I went with my best friend to his sister’s wedding in a remote part of Henan Province, one of China’s poorest provinces in south-central China. It took a 16-hour train ride from Beijing to the regional capital of Zhumadian, Henan, then a 2-hour rough mini-bus ride followed by a 30-minute private car ride provided by the local government to get to my friend’s hometown. I had been to his hometown 3 times before, but this was the first time in 7 years that my friend, his 2 brothers and their sister (the one who was getting married) had all been together. It was nice to see all of them so happy despite the really rough conditions, and the entire trip made me realize how privileged in life most of us really are. As I was riding on the way back to catch the train to Beijing in a cramped mini-bus packed full of about 16 people (3 of whom were puking on themselves and others) I thought that I had it pretty bad until we overtook an open-backed truck crowded with probably 12 workers sitting in the back in the cold rain, with no rain gear, on their way to some most-likely hard manual labor work at 6:45 in the morning. It is one thing to hear about the struggles of the poor workers and farmers in China’s countryside but to live amongst them for a week and see firsthand what a difficult existence it is really makes you think about the tough job that the Chinese government has in balancing the exponential growth in wealth in the cities with the incredibly poor in the countryside, who are seeing only small increases, if any, in income and negligible improvements in lifestyles. Almost all the homes in this small village have no running water and no toilet, just an outside bricked-in area of about 4 square feet where you go about your business right there on the dirt, which is then left there for the next person to see and someone else to deal with later on at some point. I describe this only to give any potential readers an idea of how a majority of the Chinese people live (some 80% of the population of China lives in the countryside) and what a tremendous gap there is between the “haves” in the big cities and the “have-nots” in the countryside. To be fair, the Chinese government is pouring money into developing these areas - I saw at least 2 major highways being built that will greatly increase access to these remote areas, and a huge, gleaming new “Xincai Bilingual University” nearly completed within about 30 miles of this small village that looked like an amazing school. Whether this type of investment will lead to better lives for these poor but very hard-working people remains to be seen, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Having said all of that, the people, although their clothing and weathered faces (even on the young) clearly showed the difficulty of life in this part of China, could not have been nicer. I have known my friend and his family for around 6 years now, and I have not found better people anywhere in the world; they remind me very much of my own family. I still cannot understand hardly a word that they say (the Henan Province dialect is much different than the Beijing Chinese language, which I can at least understand a little), but the kindness that they have shown to me every time I have gone there has been amazing. They have taken me in as one of their own each and every time. I hope that through my friend’s translation to his family and the local hometown people that they know that I truly appreciated the chance to stay with them for the week and the manner in which they treated me. I know before I write it that it’s going to come across as cliche’ or overly-sentimental but I also hope that at some point in my life I will be able to do something to help this particular small village in China to improve the lives of those who have become such a big part of who I am today.

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September 22, 2007 by admin.

Since becoming a “webmaster” (actually I haven’t mastered it at all or even come close to it) and developing our own website, I’ve had to learn a lot about h1, h2, h3 headings, Meta tags, Page titles, and most importantly about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I was under the impression initially that you just created your website, threw it up (and I intended that hurling reference) onto the Internet and there it was for all to see. True to a certain extent, but I didn’t realize how complicated it was to actually get your website to show up in search engine results, especially in a field as competitive as tourism in Beijing and China. What I have noticed by using Google and Yahoo’s webmaster tools is that some of the other tourism companies in Beijing have posted links to their website on blogs and forums that are completely unrelated to anything that has to do with Beijing, China or tourism. I don’t know if this is a conscious choice that those companies have made or maybe a company that they hired to increase their ranking on the search engine results, but I’ve found myself facing a dilemma on whether to do the same thing or not. I have decided not to do it, because I have ethical problems with posting our link somewhere just to increase our search engine ranking, and I just think that it reflects badly on the integrity of a company to have a link to their website randomly inserted into blogs and forums where it is not appropriate. It usually looks something like “Beijing tours, beijing travel, beijing trip, beijing hotel…” and then something in Chinese. (That, by the way, is a link to our Beijing Discovery Tours website - it’s my blog so why not?)

One of the great things about starting your own business is that you are the one in charge and you can do things the way that you want. By choosing to not post our link randomly on blogs and forums, we may lose out on search engine rankings and potential customers, but at least I’ll know that the hits that we get will come legitimately.

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September 19, 2007 by admin.

Some people have asked me and I’m sure most people that know me wonder why a guy from Oklahoma with a law degree and an MBA degree wants to live in China and run a tourism services company. I often ask myself the same question, but the short answer is that China is such an interesting place to live and I wanted to do something that could help people from other countries experience what a fun place it can be to travel here. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to travel to many different places in China since I came here in 2000, and if you don’t expect 5-star accommodations, immaculate conditions and Western food everywhere you go, traveling inside China is great fun. As in any country, of course you have to be careful about petty thievery and people trying to rip you off on prices because you are a foreigner, but overall China is a very safe country in which to travel and the people are very friendly, for the most part. If you have a friendly attitude, 90% of the time people will treat you with kindness, and that’s a pretty good ratio for any country but especially for a developing country such as China. Some of the smaller villages that I have stayed in in Henan Province had never had a foreigner visit there before, and people actually stopped in the street and stared, but if I smiled at them they would usually smile back. I supposed that I had the same type of feeling as the way a movie or music star feels when they go out in public, except that I had done nothing to deserve the attention other than coming to visit from another country.

I guess the purpose of this particular writing today is to encourage anyone that should ever read this that they should certainly visit the big cities of China such as Beijing and Shanghai, but they should also spend a day or two in smaller cities or villages off of the beaten path. I’m hoping to offer tours through Beijing Discovery Tours that will help people to experience places that most tourists never see, although travelers to these destinations will need to be a little more open-minded and flexible when it comes to sanitary conditions and lodging. Those things can be a bit “dodgy” to borrow a term from my British buddies when traveling outside of the major cities in China, but it just adds to the adventure and provides a source of great stories to tell to your friends when you return back home.

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September 18, 2007 by admin.

I spent probably over 30 hours on Saturday and Sunday working on the Beijing Discovery Tours website, and it look slightly better, but the program that I have been using, NetObjects Fusion 10.0 seems to have so many bugs that I spent most of my time trying to get the software to do what it is supposed to do rather than actually improving the site. It’s hard enough to get things done without malfunctioning software so it was a very frustrating experience.

Outside of that, on a personal level, I’ve been back in Beijing for 1 week now and the refrigerator has been broken the entire time. A repairmen has been here 3 times already, each time asking for more money for a different part, and it still doesn’t work. The landlord is supposedly going to buy a new one for the apartment now, but he is increasing the rent by 20% in addition to the increase that I’ve seen due to the appreciation of the Chinese Yuan against the US dollar. That, along with the website software problems and the usual “acclimatization” process that has to occur after I’ve stayed for an extended period in the U.S. made for a fairly miserable weekend. Plus I don’t think I’ve seen the sun here in the week that I’ve been back, it has been foggy, cloudy or rainy every day. The good thing is that last night (Monday) we got some heavy rain in Beijing, which is something that this desperately dry region of China really needs, and the rain is continuing into today (Tuesday).

I also received my Cbiz.cn China business newsletter this morning via email and it had a very insightful article into the mindset of the Chinese people regarding government, you can see it at http://www.cbiz.cn/news/showarticle.asp?id=2487. I need to look into whether I could add the Cbiz.cn newsfeed to our website somewhere because they have some great articles regarding business in China that are very helpful to understanding what a complex country this is. Even after 7 1/2 years of living in Beijing, I feel that I’m only beginning to understand a little of what it is that is driving China forward at such a rapid pace. One thing is for certain, it is a fascinating but not always an easy place to live.

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September 14, 2007 by admin.

I managed to get registered yesterday with the local police as all foreigners are required to do, which makes you feel somewhat like a criminal even though you’re following the law. Some interesting news out of Beijing yesterday with a first look at the nearly completed Terminal 3 at the Beijing Capital Airport. I had seen it as our plane taxied to the gate Tuesday night but wasn’t sure what it was. Apparently the extra terminal was desperately needed although I had never felt like it was too crowded or noticed any problems during any of my other flights out of China. I’m sure the demand for flights to China is increasing though - there are so many more foreigners here now than when I first came to live in China in February 2000. Hopefully this will also lead to increased business for Beijing Discovery Tours - surely more people will need tourism services that they can trust, and not just during the Beijing Olympics next year. Here’s a link to the story: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2007-09-12-beijing-airport_N.htm I need to figure out how to use that RSS on my website too…..

It says a lot about the incredible growth of China that they are already talking about building a new airport in 2010 before this huge new Terminal 3 has even opened………….

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September 13, 2007 by admin.

I never thought that I would start a blog - I think that they are ridiculous, I mean, who wants to read what someone they don’t even know has to say about anything? But in the interest of promoting Beijing Discovery Tours and using another of the options that comes with our 1and1 web hosting package, I’ve decided to give it a try. Certainly, as an American living in Beijing, China and starting a new tourism business, there is no shortage of ideas or things to write about while living in such a dynamic and interesting part of the world. Whether I will actually consistently write in this blog or not remains to be seen though….regardless, if you have somehow stumbled upon this blog in one way or another, I hope that you find something here that will interest you - it is a work in progress. Thanks for visiting.

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