Watch the Free Traffic Secrets Videos
Somehow I found the time over the last few days to watch the three free traffic videos by John Reese. These videos were released to promote his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course, which is launching this week.
The videos are high-quality but very simple, mostly John talking to the camera… you can listen to them while doing something else. The first video discusses a traffic strategy called “results detection”, which is essentially figuring out what other people are doing to get traffic and then doing something similar using that research. He gives several examples of how to do this for search engine rankings, getting to the first page on Digg, etc.
The second video is all about “owning a larger piece of the Internet”, i.e. creating and distributing content. The “trick” here is to write lots of content in batches and let it trickle out slowly, using syndication to get it distributed far and wide. By doing it in batches you free up time to do other things, instead of being a slave to your daily blog posts…
The third video is about generating traffic by creating software: toolbars, WordPress plugins, online calculators, etc. Reese considers this to be an underused traffic generation method.
None of this is earth-shattering information, but it’s well presented and it might be a useful refresher. AdSense publishers will find the second video the most interesting, of course, since AdSense is all about content monetization.
Note that everything he talks about requires work. There are no magic bullets, which is a nice change from other books and courses I’ve seen. I can’t comment on how good the Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is, since I haven’t seen it, but if the videos reflect the quality of the information in the package then it’s probably decent value. The price tag’s high, but it’s delivered as a physical product (12 DVDs and various workbooks) and not just a series of downloads. (It’s much cheaper than the original course, BTW.)
Aside: Anyone know of any good WordPress plugins for easily editing old posts? I have to make some changes to this blog as part of my depenalization effort, but the thought of editing all those posts through the standard WordPress admin console is not a happy thought…
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5 Responses to “Watch the Free Traffic Secrets Videos”
Ugh…I made it 2/3 of the way thru the first video and that’s about all I can take. I like John Reese OK…but those videos are really hard to watch. Amateurish, purposeless editing. As someone who has actually worked around video in the real world:
- why is he inadequately lit? Light just isn’t that expensive.
- why is he on camera so much? I can only watch him put his hands and fingers together so many times. Beyond a first impression, he adds nothing to the content.
- why did they build the videos with gradient background, if they were going to bust it down to a reduced color palette to save bandwidth for streaming video? Stairstepping gradients are incredibly tacky.
- the editing is meandering and inaccurate…referring, for example, to high-demand keywords on Ebay, while the highlight just shows the first portion of an alphabetical listing…not high-demand keywords. The point of video formatting is to serve as a template to make real information palatable…not a style-over-substance demonstration like this.
- the info he presents is just generalities…no useful specifics. In other words, this is purely a commercial. If he was actually offering some real helpful tips (instead of just hinting at them), it might be worth my time.
John is a bright guy, and if the final product is affordable, I’d expect it to provide some real value. Because he does things on a large scale and pays people to do research for him (or has systems built to test his techniques), I’m sure he’s capable of offering good info. People didn’t drop a grand the last time around for a complete piece of crap. But, I’m not gonna commit 45 minutes of my day to watching commercials designed to impress me with how much John knows or how much I need to spend my $300 (or whatever he ends up charging) for this product.
Instead, I’ll wait for the Eric Giguere review.
Well, I did say that the videos were “very simple” and that you can “you can listen to them while doing something else”… I agree that the videos aren’t anything special. They could have been released as audios or even as text content, but I guess that doesn’t seem as splashy to people, does it?
Many of the videos that people put on on YouTube and similar sites have the same problem, i.e. they don’t take advantage of the medium.
I’m going to be embarking on a project to put some of my music up for free. In theory all I need to do is create MP3s to go along with the sheet music PDFs, but I suspect I’d be smarter to video myself playing & singing on the piano instead of just doing an audio recording. The video would be boring, but it would get me more distribution than an audio by itself. Do you think I’m wrong with that one?
Eric
BTW, I think the price for the new course is $397. Which is cheaper than the $997 he charged version version 1, but still pretty steep. I dunno if I’ll fork out the cash to do a review of it or not. That’s still a lot of moola to me!
In terms of MP3s vs. videos…what’s the goal for you? To get people to hear the music, and…what? Love the songs and listen on their iPods? Learn to play the songs?
To me, the video only makes sense if you think people will benefit from seeing you play them.
I make a bunch of my music available as MP3s on my piano site (http://HealingPiano.com). I offer them there primarily for listening. There are a lot of people who play piano who are interested in learning the songs themselves, and my record company in Taiwan has released a songbook of my stuff (http://tinyurl.com/chuxpiano), but I’ve never seen any reason to make videos of my hands on the keyboard playing the stuff.
If there’s a reason behind it, then it’s probably worth doing. Personally, I’ve never found those videos interesting…either as a viewer or a music creator.
I think traffic is the primary motivation for doing videos. Direct traffic from the videos themselves (which I think wouldn’t be that much) and indirect traffic from the links back to your music site from the various video sites.
Video just seems to have a lot more traction that audio when it comes to traffic generation. I agree that a video of someone singing and playing isn’t generally exciting, so from a purist viewpoint the videos are a bad thing to do. But maybe not if you’re looking for traffic….