I watched the Perpetual Traffic Formula just as it became available. I’ll start by saying I approached this as an intrigued skeptic, not a hopeful buyer. That being said, as Ryan Deiss’ marketing went on, I became more and more curious. Well it’s here now, and believe it or not, his $2000 program enrollment fee isn’t the biggest turn off.

I took a couple of notes on his hour long video, and I’m going to share them with you:

Notes

Without Traffic, nothing else matters.

 

1. Paid Traffic is EXPENSIVE

1. Paid traffic is HARD
2. Paid traffic is declining RAPIDLY – google is getting rid of people.
   1. 2006 20-30% of all google searchers clicked on a sponsored result.
   2. Now in 2010: 2-5%
   3. It’s dropping 12-15% every year. People will be advertising and spending more money for less clicks because of the cost and competition.

 

He talks about a triad of search engine ranking. Content-on page content Links -off page content and ACTIVITY. He talks about ACTIVITY like it’s a new thing.

*thought* Google has for a LONG time used fresh content as relevant. Hence why there are parameters in sitemaps for crawl frequencies.

 

His steps: the playground. Your area or market.

The Bait – content, website structure,

The Pump – Linking. Google wants quality and authority, but not more than 10-30 links.

The shake – 300-400 links and MORE activity.

The stir – Massive Activity, visitor engagement, “activity Loops”-lol

The Hammer – Massive Linking, Competition Intimidation, Content Syndication

The Factory – Market Selection, Competetive Analysis, Commercial Intent.

Those are creative names, but there’s nothing new there contextually.

 

He spends a while after talking these points why he’s “the real deal”

At this point I’m 23 minutes into the video, and wanting a break.

What absolutely turns me off by his idea is the optimization TRIAD he talks about. He says that this is a new thing, but people have talked about how Google prefers ACTIVITY for a long time now. And it should be obvious from the sites that rank on top for google. Stagnant websites never go anywhere but down in rankings, sites with communities get more traffic, more content, more “activity” and hence are seen as a more relevant source. Google is nothing but a RELEVANCE engine. It’s goal is to always provide you the most relevant, authoritative sources FIRST.

Another thing that bothered me is the way he talked about statistics on which pages get the most clicks on Googles first page of results. Obviously the world has figured out that Paid advertisements aren’t as relevant as organic results, and those statistics are posted everywhere and they make sense. But he never took into account that USUALLY the first result for something on Google is Wikipedia. If people are more likely to click on the last page than the first, it’s because something like an online encyclopedia is the first result and is not what people are looking for when they are product hunting. This is ONLY a problem from large or international businesses. Most of these online marketing guru’s NEVER go into the fact that MOST businesses online are small-medium sized local businesses. If someone types in San Jose Web Design in a search, whichever business comes up first that isn’t a directory like the Yellowpages or citysearch will likely be clicked on first.

It’s obvious that The Perpetual Traffic System does have content to it, and Ryan Deiss does have some good ideas about things, but the things he’s talking about are not NEW, GROUNDBREAKING LOOPHOLES in the way that Google operates. It’s all hype and speculation, and he’s done a great job of drawing in visitors to his marketing campaign. I won’t be buying it and I assure you that hard work on your site and working over your niche market will help you more than some $2000 crash course. SEO/SEM is a time consuming, market specific venture and there isn’t any unbelievable secret to success that you have to spend $2000 to hear.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong…

-Johnux