Keyword Elite: Don't Buy It, It's Broken

As you know, one of the most integral parts of niche marketing, or for that matter, any sort of internet marketing is keyword research. My tool of choice in the past has been Brad Callen's Keyword Elite. For those not familiar with this keyword research tool, Keyword Elite allows you to find high paying keywords that you can center your niche blogs, Hubpages, and Squidoo pages around.

It was an invaluable tool that honestly has paid for itself many times over. However, within the past couple of months Keyword Elite has not maintained its full functionality. What am I bitching about? Specifically the AdWords Traffic Estimator, the login fails every time. This means to get any information about estimated CTR or CPC, I have to point my web browser over to the AdWords Traffic estimator and keyword tool pages. It's not that I'm too lazy to do these things but rather I'm a bit pissed that I paid for a tool that promised to integrate both within an interface that would save me time. Time=dollars.

Now I understand that this 'bug' is because of something Goog has done to thwart our efforts at keyword goodness but the customer support response to this, not to mention the very infrequent updates to KW Elite and SEO Elite, have made the last couple of months very frustrating.

The only place to get information on the AdWords TE problem is over at Brad Callen's official forum, a forum that edits posts that are critical of Keyword Elite. From the forum, all I got after going through the threads is that the programmer is on vacation and that it cannot be fixed at this time. Pleasure before business? Take notes guys, this is not how you want to run your business.

On top of that, Bing support won't be implemented in Keyword Elite 1.0 until Keyword Elite 2.0 comes out. Yea that's right, the same KW Elite 2 that users of the current edition will have to pay for. What happened to free updates Mr. Callen? I suppose promises are your secondary concern, right behind leeching your customers for every penny.

The reality is that all of us Keyword Elite and SEO Elite users are getting the shaft right now. I guess this is how Brad Callen likes to treat his paying customers. He gives us infrequent updates, no fixes for broken features, and horrible tyrannical tech support. Callen acts as if giving a substantial discount on Keyword Elite 2.0 will solve all of this ill will. Guess what though, Brad? It won't. Why would I pay for the privilege to be be treated like this all over again?

With the emergence of Market Samurai (which I will buy once my free trial is over--and no that's not an aff link!) you're no longer the only kid on the block. From what I've seen Market Samurai does the job much better and the developers know how to interact with their customers. So with this I goodbye Brad Callen and wish others who decide to stay with KW Elite good luck with your niche marketing efforts.

Is anybody else as frustrated as me with the Keyword Elite situation?