I was a member of Bring The Fresh’s full disclosure program for 2 years. I have a lot of good and bad things to say about them that I will be sharing in this review. Currently Bring the Fresh is offering a 7 day, $7 membership to check out their “proven system”. And as someone whose already seen it, I’d like to share with you EXACTLY what to expect from them before you take the plunge. I’d like to also add everything written here is based on my personal experience and opinion with BTF.
Update: It appears BTF is NO longer in business. Feel free to read my experiences with it though!
An Inside Look Into Bring The Fresh (Full Disclosure):
Bring the Fresh is a website which was founded by Mike Long & Kelly Felix. Both are successful internet marketers who set up the site to teach their members the same tactics they use to generate a large income online.
The Good:
The most important components of Bring The Fresh are it’s “Fast Start Guide” & Forum.
The Fast Start Guide is a 70+ page step-by- step guide which walks you through the process of making your first website and setting it up “correctly” for search engines to spot. Then it gets into ways to make your site rank very high on Google. Overall great SEO tips. Nothing about PPC or Email marketing though.
Having tried out some of their strategies, I did have success with 3 sites as they hit the #1 position. But in all honesty, this approach to SEO isn’t really anything unique. It is however rare to find a place with good SEO tactics. The fast start guide is one of the few sources that does have good SEO info.
The forum is also a good place to get advice and help. Though half the time I spent asking questions there, it would take up to days to get answers sometimes and in some cases never. I also noticed Kelly Felix, one of the site’s owners doesn’t often communicate with the forum community. Just an observation and that may have changed since I “left”.
The BTF fast start guide and forum make up for about 50% of all the material you’ll get initially. And the remaining 50%? Well…
The Not so Good (Up-sells)…
While the site does have good information on making successful websites and ranking them high on search engines via genuine and even shady SEO tactics in my opinion, most of the website (in my estimate 50%, possibly more) consists of up sells once you join. Up sells are future products they try to sell you once you join their membership area.
I’m not a big fan of up-sells in general since the main BTF page talks a lot about how they’ll teach you all these grand things about SEO and then once you join, you do get good information, but you also get a lot of other offers they try to get you to buy which gives people like me the impression that what I originally purchased isn’t enough. I don’t like this method of marketing. It works, but I find it disingenuous mainly because you’re not told about these up-sells until you join.
Some of Bring The Fresh’s Upsells:
Done for you websites. Kelly Felix claims he’ll make a website for you and make it work while you do nothing. This up sell costs anywhere from $500-$2,495 depending on which package you select. I’ve heard good and bad stories about this from people. I personally am against any kind of done for you approach to building websites for a number of reasons.
The biggest is that it’s never guaranteed. This is the case with Bring the Fresh. If it doesn’t work out, you’ve lost tons of money. Buyer beware.
And any place which says they guarantee SEO results is something I’d be very careful with. In my experience most of these places either don’t know what they’re doing, charge you ridiculous prices for their service, are lying about their guarantee, or they use black hat methods of marketing which can get your website Google slapped. BTF does know what they’re doing, but in my case, it didn’t end well (more on that below).
Bring the Fresh backlinks: This is the service I used. It can cost you several $100 a month. At least 2 out of the 3 sites I used these backlink packages on ended up getting Google slapped. And I never got a refund until I filed a dispute with my CC company. More on that below.
There are a number of other upsells this program provides, but these are the 2 which are most popular and controversial.
This is one of my biggest issues with Bring The Fresh. Imagine for a second buying a very expensive toy in a box, opening it up and seeing that only 50% of the toy was in it, with the other 50% located elsewhere and worse costing even more money. That in essence is what I saw in Bring The Fresh.
Note: If anyone reading now this has tried any of their up-sells, please share your experiences with this below.
Why I “Left” Bring The Fresh…
I never actually left this place. I was kicked out because I disputed their services on one of my websites they were supposed to help improve. Allow me to elaborate…
Bring the Fresh offers backlink packages as one of their upsell services. For a small price of $100-$300, they will send backlinks to your site and help boost it’s rank. Now I’m not sure exactly what it is they do. Some speculate it is sending high PR backlinks to your website, while others say it involves getting people to comment on your blog to artificially boost your site. It could be none of the above, but either way, it didn’t work for me personally.
I first tried 2 backlink packages to see how it would work and the price of that was close to $400. After applying those backlink packages to each site, I saw incredible results. My pages did in fact rise in the SERPS and I did receive tons more traffic.
I was boasting about it to people at my #1 recommended place and though SEO would be effortless from now on. However, the people from this place warned me against using them and said it would eventually ruin my website. I didn’t believe them and as it would later turn out, they were right.
But before everything came crashing down and things were still good, I went back and decided to purchase more backlink packages. But at the time, the prices/packages changed. I purchased the most expensive one at the time which was $300/month. I would then end up using that package for 2 months which would cost $600.
Now where the problem came in: The $600 I spent was on 1 site, and after 2 months of patiently waiting, my site did NOT move up in the search engines. How did I know? Because prior to these backlink packages, my site was already ranked on the second page for it’s keyword and after the packages, it remained there.
Furthermore one of the original sites I used a backlink package on which had great results initially got Google slapped. For those of you who don’t know, it means your site loses it’s position and thus it’s traffic which is a complete catastrophe for profits. One more reason I do not recommend EVER using backlink packages. As I said before, the people at the other place turned out to be right.
I went to BTF demanding an answer, received none, so I disputed the $600. I decided not to go through with the previous ones, because the purchases on the 2 original packages were made 6 months prior. After disputing the $600, they immediately disputed back saying they don’t guarantee their services. Mind you this was NOT directly to me, but to Paypal which handled it.
Not once did these guys ever try to figure things out with me. I found that downright rude and insulting. Then they manually kicked me out of their website. How’s that for customer service? And there is how my 2 year relationship with BTF ended.
I realize that some of it was my fault in trusting them and in hindsight should have been smarter, but I did write this review to let anyone interested in joining this place know my story.
Overall Rating For Bring The Fresh:
Green Flag (Barely)
5 out of 10 stars: Good SEO training, but WAY too many upsells I personally recommend staying far away from. Also as time goes on, I feel BTF has been losing momentum. See #1 recommendation.
Final conclusion & recommendations:
I’m going to be honest. I had good experiences with BTF in the beginning but it didn’t end well. And frankly how I was treated angered me greatly. In spite of all that, I have to be objective when I do reviews.
With that said, in spite of my “beef” with Bring the Fresh, I still believe what they teach in their fast start guide and help you get in the forum to be very useful stuff for SEO, although there are much better options in my opinion. Compared to the dozens and even 100’s of crappy programs that teach you online marketing, Bring the Fresh does possess good information that does get updated every few months, but I would strongly advise massive caution with their up-sells.
Having said that, I ranked them #5 out of the best places to learn. I would advise checking out my #1 recommendation, Wealthy Affiliate as an alternative to BTF because I personally believe it to be much better in terms of training, support, and pricing, and there are no sneaky up sells. And they did call it right, before my downfall with BTF’s services occurred. Plus, here’s a VS chart:
If you’re still convinced BTF is the place to be…
I’m going to show you a discounted way to join BTF that will help you save a ton of money in the short & long run. The original price of joining BTF is $7 for the first 7 days and then $87 every month after that. However, if you follow my steps below, you’ll only be charged $37 a month. Here’s how to do this:
Step 1: Visit Bring The Fresh’s website here.
Step 2: Click the back button. This will take you to a new BTF page where you will be offered a discount for 60%. Now instead of $7 for the first 7 days and $87 every month after that, you’ll only get charged $7 and then $37 every month after that.
Note: I am not sure if it’s really $37 a month (even though they claim it) or if it’s really $37 the first month then $87 after that. Make sure you keep a close eye out for this.
Step 3: Once you sign up and start looking through the website, the first thing to check out is the “Fast Start Guide”.
Step 4: In the Fast Start Guide, you will have to buy a domain name and hosting (your own website). That’s going to run you about $20 up front and $7 every month after that. But I have a method I personally use to build websites in less than a minute, that cost $0 and includes hosting. Here is that method.
Through these steps, you are going to save a ton of money with BTF. Thank me later 🙂
My personal advice:
Again, I do NOT recommend you try out ANY of the up-sells BTF offers. This is my opinion. I could very well be wrong on this, but my experiences have taught me differently. Their up-sells are expensive and they are not guaranteed as you found out in my story. At the very least, try out the strategies in the fast start guide, see if it works for you. If it does, keep going and enjoy. If not, come back here and try my #1 recommendation.
If you have any questions and/or experiences with BTF you’d like to share, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your feedback on this subject.
Thanks for your excellent review on Bring The Fresh.
I had never heard of this website system, but it looks indeed like one of the many scammy type of sites. Although the first 50% offers quality enough content, the upsell bit scares me straight away.
Even though it sounds nice to have a forum, my general feeling about forums is that they are either active or completely dead in the water. The latter is what happens most often to them. Posting questions also takes usually a long time to be answered.
I just noticed that the link to Bring The Fresh is shutdown as is the entire website of them.
Just wondered, were they also telling the visitor that they would guarantee any money earned through their program?
(not that it really matters anymore as they have shut down business). Well it’s great there are better affiliate marketing learning sites available nowadays without the upselling bit.
Woah, I didn’t know they shut down Steven, this review was written SO long ago that back then they were still up and rather successful and you COULD have promoted it back then.
But now I’ll recheck this myself (so far I can’t find their main site so you may be right) and update my links. Either way, this only makes it easier to advise people to join a much better program, Wealthy Affiliate so it’s a great outcome for the people who see this article.
Thanks for the review, I will never join this company due to the upsells you mention. I feel that when you purchase a membership or service why should you keep trying to sell me more stuff instead of including these extra items in the original purchase price. I‘m a huge fan of supporting people when they purchase a good or service from you. After reading your review I can tell customer service is not one of their number one priorities.
Well Wealthy Affiliate is where the support is, even more so than one needs!
I agree with you the S.O.B, charged me 200$ with a done for you blog that was a crap. I started to wake-up just right after that problem, DO NOT buy them course they are horrible and unuseful.
Well I disagree about their course being useless. They do offer good tips to work with, but their up-sells is where the red flag is.
I too was kicked out of BTF as i purchased one of the DFY sites. After waiting for almost a year to get the site i started complaining and asking questions. Kelly quickly kicked me off no refund no response nothing. That was almost 2 yrs ago. I was foolish with my money. don’t be with yours. People might have made money with them but lots of us have been scammed.
Thank you for sharing this Dee. It’s very unfortunate you also had to experience the backlash that happens when you start questioning BTF’s policies. I’m going to perfectly honest, if I keep getting complaints like these about BTF, I will lower their rating and put them in the Avoid places section.
I hope you were able to retrieve your money!
I have heard exactly the same concerns and complaints about wealthy affiliate not responding to their paid members. Many have said their questions go completely unanswered for long periods of time or forever. I need training and mentor ship, and if BTF and WA have issues responding to members, I guess my question is where would you recommend a total internet marketing newbie look for comprehensive training?
Hi Erik, I don’t know who may have said that about WA, but it’s just not true, the support is above any other place I’ve seen. Let me show you here and I’ll also personally make sure you’re fine if you sign up there. You’re going to see that whoever said that about WA wasn’t right.
Hello there this is the first time I’m read this. So after all that horror you still recommend BTF but not those upsells right? Also what are you referring to “shady tactics” of SEO from BTF?
Yes the only thing that’s decent is the training (fast start guide + forum), but the up-sells, I would not recommend. It’s a waste of money in my opinion/experience. But above all I recommend this place as an alternative to BTF.
As for shady tactics, I basically define that phrase as a method of trying to reach high rankings on Google using black hat marketing approaches: Backlinks, artificial methods, ect… Basically anything that isn’t up-front and honest.
I want to know how to leave bring the fresh and get the amount i.paid back since it was said in their site 100% money back guarantee. Thank.you
I believe you have to pay them through Paypal. If there was an issue you have/had with them and want to dispute it, you can try to contact BTF directly. I doubt they’ll do anything about it based on my prior experience/s, but you should at least try and the reason is this:
If they don’t return your money, you can then open up a dispute via whichever method you used to pay them.
If you used paypal, dispute it there.
If you used a cc, contact your company directly and let them know. Be prepared to explain thoroughly why you it is you want a refund. When I disputed, I sent them a 7 page report detailing everything. You can quote their money back guarantee (take a screen shot) as a reason too.
Hi bro
Your precious advice. I wish to join BTF for only 1 week for $7 to obtain the guide with the SEO tactics, then I’ll stop the subscription. Do you think that it’s worth?
Raj
Hey Raj, you can certainly try. The only thing you’re risking is the $7. I’m personally not a fan of people purposely buying then refunding products. I find it bad practice. I would first try it out and see how you like it.
Check out Bring the Fresh, the forum, the fast start guide and try to fit it all into the 7 day period. If you like it, stick around. If you don’t like it, you only risk $7. And if that happens, try out my #1 recommendation instead. I personally feel it’s better than BTF. Cheers!
I enjoyed this review and I would never join Bring The Fresh. Customer service is such an important part of a business as well as delivering what is promised.
It’s experiences such as these that folks need to know about to avoid losing money and wasting time when building their businesses online.
Thank-you for tis review!
Thanks for the comment Devan. The truth is BTF does have customer service, but it’s something that takes a long time to hear from. Speaking from my personal experience, some of my issues would only be answered days if not over a week after my request was put in. Some of the responses I would get would be very rude and basically saying “Nothing we can do, no guarantees”. Not 1 hint of effort on their part.
As I said before and still believe, BTF puts it’s monetary interests above their customers and that I think is something most BTF members would attest to. I understand the need to make money, but they really do it in a way that’s just slimy in my opinion.
Wow all that money you spent! Backlinks are dead now and even if they weren`t, that`s just way too much! Live and learn I guess.
At the time I used them, I had great faith in BTF. Never the less, I should have listened to Kyle’s warnings (member of Wealthy Affiliate). I guess a part of me wanted to believe it was still possible to do SEO the easy way. And I did learn my lesson. Hopefully people reading this won’t fall for the same mistakes! Backlinks truly are dead and good riddance I say.