Wow. Just wow.
That was my first reaction to Perpetual Traffic Formula, or rather the free report, which you can get here and which is the first part of a launch sequence for Ryan Deiss’ next product.
The landing page is really slick and awesome looking and the report itself has great production quality as well. As for the content? Marketing at it’s best.
Read on to see the genius way in which this system is positioned as something new and different in what may well be the most saturated market ever… (video after the break)
The premise is this: “SEO is actually really easy”.
Think about that for a second. How many products are there, that have this basic premise? How many products promise to teach you some super-simple SEO secret? Tons of products have this premise because so many people are after “free” traffic (still need to pay for all the SEO ebooks, so it ain’t exactly free…).
What does Mr. Deiss do to make his product stand out from the crowd? Well, check out the report and be amazed. He brakes down SEO to three factors, one of which is “new” in that no one has talked about it before. Not in a big product, anyway. That element is “activity”. In other words, he says that Google checks for human activity on sites and uses that data to adjust rankings. More human activity equals better rankings.
Is this true? I don’t know. It’s certainly not true that human activity is necessary for good rankings. But whether it helps or not, I honestly don’t know. I’ll be testing it, for sure.
There are a few things that struck me as particularly interesting about the sales-process that’s going on with this product. More on this in the following video:
To get the free report, go here.
How did you like the report? And what about the marketing style? Is it appealing to you?
Finally, do you have any experience with whether on-site activity makes a difference to rankings? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers,
Hi Shane,
I was saying for quite sometime that 2010 is the year of SEO and it looks like I was right… (too bad I am not really making money from that).
I think that the click through rates that Ryan is showing in his report could very well be accurate but who really knows that aside from Google? How did he get those numbers?
On the issue of activity I really don’t know and to my opinion, it is not really the case. I managed to rank a few sites at the top for the rankings within days of creating the site and with no activity. By being at the top you are getting the activity so I don’t see how getting the activity first will get your better rankings as better rankings automatically bring in more activity.
I think I managed to confuse myself here, but I hope you got my point. Also, the cherry picker tool that he released and created so much buzz is not really different from what Traffic Travis has to offer and the SEO Competition module of Market Samurai that only gives you top 10 but provides with much more information regarding the links for each page on the top 10.
Right?
Hi,
I’d say the CTR numbers are accurate. Ryan and his company certainly own enough websites and run enough PPC campaigns to make a good estimate like that based on their own data.
I also have several sites sitting happily on page one without any human activity (comments etc.), so that factor can’t be crucial. It would be interesting if you can get rankings more quickly with some activity, though. And I agree: The more traffic you get, the more likely it is to get comments and such, so having a high ranking kind of takes care of that.
It remains to be seen what the Perpetual Traffic Formula is actually about. It just struck me as a very good piece of pre-launch content. Not because of the theory inside the report, but because of how well it was presented.
As for the Cherry Picker software: I agree that both Market Samurai and Traffic Travis have similar but better keyword analysis options. Same goes for Keyword Elite 2.
Thanks for commenting! :)
The report is certainly very visually appealing and very easy to read.
A lot of what he says makes sense, although I don’t know if I agree with him completely on the importance of “activity”.
From an end user, factoring in human activity on a website would certainly be beneficial for better quality searches, although at this stage I haven’t really seen any evidence for it.
Hi Peter,
Yeah, the “activity” thing is what it all rests on, but it seems that many people aren’t really sold on the idea (myself included). I wonder if he’ll have some proof to back up the theory. Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s going to be part of the final pitch.
I agree that it makes some sense, in theory, to take human activity into account. Then again, how can G determine whether activity is “real” or not? I could deactivate my spam-filter and get severeal hundred comments a day, for example. :P
I will eat my hat if that cherry picker software cost $10,000 to make… Claiming something like that really snapped me out of the fantasy world created by the short PTF report.
As for the future things coming from this launch… I guess Deiss is going reveal some “secret authority codes”, as he calls them. In his launch blog I think he mentioned that these codes will be some search queries to find edu and gov sites, and things like that… Really really basic stuff, at least for many people. Well, I guess Deiss just thinks his prospects are idiots, or something like that.
Yeah, the $10,000 in development cost doesn’t seem realistic to me, either. You’d have to hire the most expensive programmers ever, for that price…
As for the authority codes, I think you’re right. It is pretty basic stuff, unless he offers a new twist, somehow. Apart from anything else, I think that .gov and .edu are vastly overrated.
I don’t think it has anything to do with assuming the prospects are stupid, though. You need to realize that in Internet marketing, about 90% or more of the market consists of “beginners”, because so many people come into the market every day, so many people take forever to make any money and so many people give up, before they get anywhere.
I think that’s one of the main reasons why almost every product is targeted towards beginners.
Matt Cutts himself said in an interview that there is no difference between .gov and .edu to .com .net and .org.
It probably did have some effect a few years back, but today, I doubt it makes any difference.
To sum this entire launch until now, I really didn’t see any valuable information being shared. The first report was good but the activity thing was the only “new” stuff that was revealed and I don’t buy that.
The cherry picker probably cost $100 to make and Traffic Travis gives you more information for free.
The last part about this codes is even worse than the first two. This is truly as basic as it gets.
But, Shane is right, after all this is said and done, Ryan is probably still going to make a killing with this product thanks to the “beginners” in the market.
To be fair, Ryan himself said that the “authority codes” are very simple.
Still, just using Comment Kahuna (free) will get you those types of comment links much more easily.
I’m a bit disappointed with most of the launch, but I reckon the product itself will be pretty good. I’ve seen some of Ryan’s stuff and that guy is smart. Like, very smart.
He definitely knows what he’s doing, marketing wise.
Of course, with the price tags of these products it’s always a question of whether they’re really worth it.
I could go on about pricing, but I reckon I’d better do a separate blog post on that topic. :)
Hi Shane,
I thought Ryan’s report was one of the best on SEO that I’ve come across this year. His theory does make sense and I wouldn’t be surprised that it was true. It is speculative but like you said he does have a lot of test data that he bases his theory on. I did try out his authority codes on one of my sites which suddenly got a boost from page 2 to page 1 on Google but it remains to be seen how long it’ll stay there.
Like everyone else here, I thought his software was a tremendous let down. It’s funny how this is 2nd software I’ve come across that is supposed to be over 10k and it’s built on Adobe AIR. I didn’t know AIR programmers cost so much. ;) It’s definitely not a tool I’d use in my market research because it’s too limited in it’s function. There are plenty of good alternatives as mentioned by others.
Does activity help? Sure, I think that’s a mark of any healthy website anyway. The takeaway for me is, like Ryan says, with any site make sure you cover all 3 aspects: content, links and activity. Simple but effective I think.
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for your comment.
Awesome that you got some results with the authority codes! Way to go! I bet that 90% of people only read the report and then do nothing about it…
The software is definitely a “made for freebie” kind of thing and judgeing by the comments on the launch blog, it worked to impress a lot of newbies. Marketing tool rather than market research tool, I guess.
This is an excellent review site. I am glad to have hear such fair reviews by Shane. Thanks.
PS I am tired of products that are so hyped up and I then I purchase it and end up being dissatisfied.
Thanks!
Yes, there’s definitely more than enough hype in this industry. The way I see it: It works in the short term, but in the long run, the hype-masters are shooting themselves in the foot, because people don’t trust their messages anymore, once they’ve been disappointed a few times.