"Cheating" to get tons of traffic (part 1)

The first part of the series I promised when you signed up to the list. This first piece of the puzzle starts the process. Click Here to get the first report.

Traffic Generation - Get a lot of visitors to your site FAST

Just posted how to do this over on the facebook page. Check it out by clicking here now. One thing, I will be giving some REALLY cool stuff ONLY to people that "like" the facebook page. Go ahead and do that and get all kinds of cool extra information.

The Triangle Of Trust: Secrets To Better Rankings, More Traffic, And Killer Sales

The Triangle of Trust can bring you
better rankings, more traffic and ...
more sales!

Frank Kern was the first person to use the phrase "Triangle of Trust."  However, what I want to talk to you about now is much more than the way he uses the phrase.

I want to show you how to use a better, more improved "triangle of trust" in a way that improves search rankings, gets you a ton more traffic, but more importantly gets you a TON more sales.

If you want more traffic, better rankings, and more sales then ... read more by clicking here now.

How A 7 Day Old Blog Attracted 500 Visitors And Over $1,000,000 In New Customers

Apply These Tips To Make More
From Your Site As Soon As Next Week

A week ago today I started a blog over at wordpress.  It's at http://mattgoffrey.wordpress.com

In that single week I've gotten 500 visitors to the blog, 50 people signed up to the mailing list, but more importantly 12 new consulting clients.  Because of how I'm paid, each of these should be worth $200,000 to me pretty easily if they follow my advice (and most do because of how I work with people).

So how did I do this?  How did such new blog ... and a free blog hosted on wordpress no less ... get traffic, email subscribers, and new business?

Gaining Attention In An ADD World

In this day and age everyone is screaming for attention.

In fact that's the problem, more and more people are screaming for attention.  Advertisements are showing up in more and more places.

Do you realize that right now there's actually some idiot out there selling urinal cakes with ads on them.  That's how bad the situation is   with everyone trying to gain attention anywhere and everywhere you look.

The problem is that in order for anyone to buy anything from you they first have to give you their attention.  Yet attention is becoming harder and harder to get.  The reason for this is simple:

Advertising Pollution:
This is what I just referenced above.  Advertising is everywhere and in so many places anymore that it's rapidly getting difficult to cast your eyes almost anywhere outside your house without seeing an advertisement for something.  This is creating "noise" and people are literally beginning to simply block it out.

Paradox of Choice
Want that in red or green, the larger screen or the smaller form factor, this brand or the other.  There is so much choice that more and more people are beginning to simply choose not to choose at all.  It's the great paradox.  So much choice means that people are choosing not to choose.  In fact, the "choice overload" is leading to ...

Lack of Focus
The huge amount of advertising pollution, combined with far too much choice means that it's more difficult than ever for someone to actually focus on anything.  Add into that the always connected society that we live in with smart phones and texting, and focus really is hard to come by.  People are spending most of their time multi-tasking instead of focusing on any one thing or person.

Information Overload
The average person is subjected to more new information in a single day than the average person back in the early 1900s might receive in their entire lifetime.  Now throw in everything talked about above with lack of focus, too much choice and too much advertising.

The bottom line is that attention is the single most scarce resource of the modern economic times.

That last sentence is so important to understand that I can comfortably say this, "the entrepreneur that understands how to obtain and hold attention is the entrepreneur that will win in the marketplace ... every time and every day."

In fact, let me give you some relevant statistics to prove the points I've been making.

45,000 = the average number of products in a supermarket
75,000 = the average number of products in a walmart
500,000,000 = the number of websites
Billions = the number of web pages online right now

All of that is why:

• Only 14% of people trust any advertisement at all
• 69% of people want technologies to block advertisements
• 65% of people feel that they are bombarded with too many advertisements
• 56% of people will avoid buying from advertisers that they feel advertise too much

So lets recap:

• Attention is extremely valuable
• While at the same time there's less attention to obtain
• As time goes on, attention will get still yet more difficult to obtain

In fact, numerous online studies have shown that people absolutely do not trust marketers or advertisers at all.  Trust comes only from friends or authorities and that's it.

The problem is, you don't want to become a "friend" to your market exactly.  There's an old saying, "You're never a celebrity at home."  Basically that means to your friends, you're just you.  People ask for favors from friends.  People do not pay a premium just for the privilege of doing business with a friend.

Flip that around however, and someone that is a trusted market expert and authority; that person is a celebrity and people will pay a premium to do business with that person.

This is why it's so incredibly important for you to become a market authority and thought leader.

The question becomes, how can you become an authority and garner lots of attention?

Image Credit From Zazzle

Start By Creating A "Stalker List"

If you want attention one of the best ways to do that is to associate yourself with people that already have lots of attention, and "ride their coattails" so to speak.

Find the 5 to 10 big celebrities in your market and "stalk" their every piece of content.  Take what they say and improve on it and show it to them or give it to them  Create "top 10 best of" lists of their content and include some killer graphics and data visualizations with it.  Now let me be clear, this content needs to be off the charts great.  It needs to be worthy of one of your market celebrities to talk about.  

Associating with your celebrities, and getting them to link to you, puts you at their level in the mind of your market.  You become a celebrity, and this can happen with an amazing speed as well assuming you truly are creating great content.

Do interviews with the celebrity and give that interview to the person for use on their site (again, associating you with them).  Or take their content ... lots and lots of it ... and compile it into an ebook or special report.  Now don't just dump their content into Word as is, you'll need to modify things a little bit so that one piece of content flows naturally to the next and one chapter builds on the previous chapters.  When appropriate, link to some of your own content on your own site.

Again, give that to the celebrity/big dog/guru/whatever.  Now of course there'll be information in there about you as well, again creating the association and links back to your own site and your own content.

These strategies are designed to not just associate you (and therefore create an authority presence in the mind of your market) with the celebrity, it's designed to generate links from them to you, to get traffic from them to you.

These strategies are designed to obtain the attention of your market in a way that makes you an authority.

But Don't Just Become An Authority, Actually Be One

It isn't hard to capture attention once, the real trick, the real key is to capture attention repeatedly.

The problem is, doing that isn't exactly easy since people aren't just sitting around looking for someone to give their attention to.  If you want attention, you have to take defined and purposeful action to become an authority and to actually demonstrate that you are.

Now you don't want to say that you're an authority, simply speaking authoritatively is enough.  In fact in some ways this is where I talk about the creation of great content again.  If you speak with an authoritative "voice" at the same time that you're creating great content with great visuals, your market will naturally see you as a market authority and thought leader.

In fact, by associating yourself with other authorities, you garner more links of a higher quality (assisting your search engine placement), you garner more traffic, and a wider reach.

But How Do You Actually "Be" An Authority Other Than Speaking Authoritatively?

That's actually easier and more difficult than it sounds.  What it takes is:

1. Commit to lifelong learning in your market of choice
2. Be willing to be a thought leader and espouse new ideas and concepts
3. Be willing to say things like you say them, even if it means going against entrenched "wisdom"
4. Work hard to create absolutely the best content there is in your market space
5. Speak and write for free to establish yourself

What you want to do is start by writing free reports and making them available on your website.

Then move to combining content from major celebrities in your field into ebooks and linking to your free reports where appropriate.  Again, just give those to the celebrity so that they can give it to their people.

Then look around at your local newspapers and contact them to see if you can write some content at no cost.  Look for other blogs and write posts for them, again make these great posts and again link back to your content where appropriate.  Believe it or not, this almost always works, even writing content for papers or often even major magazines and publications.

Next, you need to begin blogging like crazy.  Create the kinds of great blog posts that you wish other people in your market would create.  Don't just be good, be great, and be willing to be great for longer than anyone else, in more detail and depth than any one else.

Go one step farther than even that and offer your help to others in your market for free.  Start a free coaching program or offer to give strategy sessions at no cost.  Be willing to go farther and do more.

Find out what seminars or conferences are available in your market and write the conference director or manager with a proposal to speak there at no cost.  This is a huge secret.  When you can become one of the speakers at a conference you are automatically deemed an expert by every single person in attendance.

You will also be considered an expert by the people that get any of the marketing for the event and an expert by the people that read blog posts about the event.  In other words, speaking at seminars and conferences can be huge for helping you become an authority and for helping you to capture your markets attention.

Dare to be great.

What Is Inbound Marketing

There's a lot of talk about inbound marketing.  My last article on SEO Chat was specifically about it in fact.


So lets first talk about what Inbound Marketing is, then how you do it to almost literally control search.

In a nutshell, inbound marketing is the convergence of content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization.

Knowing what "inbound marketing" is does you no good if you don't know how to do it, or just as importantly why you should be doing it.

Why Inbound Marketing Should Be Your Focus

Let me start by saying that if you're advertising I'm not suggesting that you should stop.  What I am saying is that inbound marketing absolutely should be the focus of your marketing efforts.

There is one overriding reason for this, one reason above others.  Inbound Marketing has, as its main focus, to make you an undisputed authority in your market.  As an authority you have your pick of customers at the same time you charge more and have better profits.

Inbound Marketing, once fully in place, can mean that you will no longer need to waste money on advertising because the best customers you can have are already seeking you out.  More customers than you can handle will look for you without even considering if there is anyone else in your market.

Inbound Marketing In More Detail

I explained what inbound marketing was and why you should be doing it, why it should be your focus, but there's more to explain before going into how it's done.

Inbound marketing starts with content creation, sometimes referred to as content or article marketing.  However, inbound marketing goes well beyond some of the inane article marketing strategies I've seen with taking crap articles and spinning them into more crap and putting them into even bigger crap article directories.  The problem with those strategies is that you become associated with crap articles uploaded to crap article directories that almost no one actually uses.

Inbound marketing starts with the creation of great content that goes beyond the 500 word length junk most people produce.  That content is then placed onto your blog and shared through social media.

If your content actually is great then you will find that the social sharing will spread out.  People will further share your content out which means top search rankings.

Additionally, the constant addition of detailed, in depth content for your market will also mean an overwhelming possibility of top search rankings.  Google likes new, fresh content and ranks sites well that regularly post new things.

In other words, over time, Google itself will see you as the authority in your market and for that reason automatically give you good rankings.

Not only that, but between the sharing, multiple top search rankings, and great content, customers will be much more inclined to do business with you over anyone else because you'll be the only person in the market actually answering questions.

How Inbound Marketing Is Done

Even in actual practice, inbound marketing isn't complicated.  In fact it's fairly straight forward.  The steps are:

1. Start a blog for your company.  If you have one, understand that a blog is not simply some mechanism for company press releases or milk toast about products.  If you don't have a blog let me highly recommend using wordpress.
2. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find out what questions customers are asking. (add what, how, why, and when to relevant key phrases to your market) .Take every question that any customer has asked either on search that you found or that has been asked to your sales or customer service teams, and create content around it and post that to your blog.  Share on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, and every other social network.
3. Create content on things your customers should know and share that content as well.
4. Do product comparisons to help your customers out ... in depth, detailed comparisons and give your opinion as to which product is better and why.
5. Give your opinions on anything and everything going on in your market.
6. Find forums relating to your market and engage in conversations there.
7. Find people on the social media sites talking about your market, especially Google+ and Facebook and engage in those conversations.

In a nutshell, that's all there is to it.

While that may seem like there isn't much there, the truth is that those seven steps constitute something incredible.  Something that can allow you to be the top player in your market very quickly.

They constitute your ability to demonstrate an overwhelming expertise in your market that no one else can hope to over come.  Preciously few markets have anyone in them doing anything like the above.

You can be the undisputed local market authority with all the customers you can handle.  That authority translates not only to more customers, it translates to the best customers that will pay you more just for the privilege of doing business with you.

How Create The Psychological Desire To Buy From You (part 1)

Understand How Buyer Decisions
Are Made In This Article

Content marketing is great, getting something to go viral is awesome.

But the truth is that those things won't actually make you more money.  At the end of the day you have to get people to want to actually buy your products and services.

This series of posts is going to deal with how people make buying decisions and will cover that process all the way down to the psychological level.

The goal will be for your business to implement a process that is so great, that appeals so much to how people make decisions, that someone almost can't help but purchase from you.

There are many techniques for doing this, and in this post I'll be sharing a few of them.

Continue reading to learn how people make buying decisions so that you can get more customers easier than ever before.

How To Quickly Generate Lots Of SEO/SMM Clients

The story of how I went from struggling and broke to highly paid consultant ... and how you can too

If you want to get more business for your SEO/SMM consulting practice then what I’m about to share with you can revolutionize how much you’re making and how easily you do it.

It is my hope that you'll avoid the mistakes I made (I explain the pitfalls) as well as gain an ability to more quickly experience success though the 4 simple steps I now use to gain top paying clients with less effort (my clients now have to explain to me why I should accept them).

Read on for the full story...

From Cold To Sold In One Conversation

How To Sell More Of Your SEO/SMM Services, Easier, and for MUCH More

Before I get into the report, know that you can download this as a PDF from Google Docs.


Businesses of every stripe and color can use much more help in the the SEO/SMM space.  Far too few are gaining the benefits that come from being found in the search engines and being engaged with their markets.

The thing is, I believe that with the global economy the way it still is that we SEO/SMM consultants have a duty to help small businesses.  Think of it like this: No matter where you live in the world, small businesses are probably the number one growth area for new employment.

If you can help a business to make more, then they can hire more people.  More people working means a better economy, which means more people working, and so on.

We, the SEO/SMM consultants, literally have it in our hands to improve our local economies and through that the economies of the countries we live in and through that the globe itself.

However, doing any of that assumes you can do two things:

1. That you can get business in the first place
2. That you are charging enough for your client to take you seriously and do what you say they should

What I want to do is show you exactly how you can do both. I want to show you exactly how you can close about 50% of the people (or more) that you talk to as a customer at the same time you are increasing your prices by at least ten or twelve times what you currently charge.

Would you like to do that?  Would you like to close business easier while charging much more?

Read on and I’ll show you how.

7 Secrets To Spread Your Influence For More Traffic And Sales

Lets face it, if you have a site of your own, then you want more influence.  You want more people to see your site.  If you have a business online, then you also want to make more sales.

My latest article at SEO chat explains exactly how to do that.  Check it out by clicking here now.

How A Hamburger Can Revolutionize Your Business

Far too many people sell the wrong thing.  I'm not saying that their products are wrong, I'm saying that they are selling them all wrong, with the wrong framing and to the wrong people at the wrong time.

On SEO Chat I have an article that shows how I could easily sell you a simple hamburger and coke for $1,000,000 quite easily simply by selling it to you at the right time.

I then go on to explain how you can use that knowledge for top search rankings and massive traffic.

Check it out by clicking here now.

How To Dominate Local Search

I have a special report that explains exactly how to dominate local search.  It's on Google Docs so you can download in any format you choose.  Check it out by clicking here now.

The EXACT Method I Use To Dominate Markets

As part of this article I am going to be doing an entire series that will show a live case study of me doing exactly what this post talks about. 

That said … lets talk about how I dominate markets.

SEO Chat - My New Video/Podcast

I'm going to start a weekly "show" that I'm calling SEO Chat.  I have an "episode .5" that I just posted to youtube and it will also be made available as an audio podcast as well.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

6 Strategies for Market Dominance

If you're going to be in business, then you should know a painful fact.  The evolution of the internet means that in any market, there are 10 or fewer players that get the lion share of the traffic (and therefore sales) and then there is everyone else that struggles.

If you want to succeed in your business then you need to make sure you're one of the top big dogs.

That starts by leveraging the power of information and being a thought leader.

Strategy #1: Putting your information onto iTunes and then making sure you're listed at Smashbooks.com ... and linking to your iTunes information so that it gets good links.

Strategy #2 & 3: It also means putting your information on Amazon in both print and kindle formats.  And while you're at it, why not have your products listed through Amazon as well?  Amazon is easily the largest buyer search engine in the world and for that reason you should think of them as your partner in business.

Strategy #4:  And since you are working to be a thought leader in your market and your creating information, why not also turn that information into video and post to YouTube (which by the way is actually the second most used search engine in the world).  Now, when you do that, if you're smart, you'll do something known as "title stacking".  What that means is you'll structure your title so that you can stuff your keyword that you are targeting more than once.  "Costmetic Surgeon Matt Goffrey Explains Best Way To Find A Cosmetic Surgeon".  In that example, obviously I'm targeting the phrase "cosmetic surgeon."  Or how about "Copywriting expert Matt Goffrey teaches copywriting."

Once again, I'm stuffing the title of the video with the keyword I want more than once.  The next big secret is to look at the videos that are currently ranking well in YouTube for the keyphrase you want and see what tags they are using in their videos and use them in yours.  YouTube will then assume that your video and the already well ranking one should be listed together thus pulling your video up the rankings quickly, especially if you also link to your video from other sources.

Strategy #5: Did you know that if you're an adwords advertiser that you can change your campaigns from PPC to CPA?  In other words, you pay Google ONLY on a "per action" basis, such as by the sale.  It won't matter how many clicks your ad generates, only how many SALES.  By paying on a per sale basis you can reduce your risk, increase your "ad spend", and get many more sales.

Strategy #6: This strategy is extremely counter intuitive, but it works like crazy, especially if you are smart and following strategies 1-3 above.  This strategy involves so-called "micro payments."  These are payments often of just 99 cents.  You can sell an insane amount of your best information and because it's so cheap (but still not free) get a lot of people buying it.  Further, because people are still "buying" the information you are viewed as more of an expert than someone else who maybe has only a blog.  Now, if you get REALLY smart with this, you can have entire "courses" where each step of the course is 99 cents.  Each piece teaches something really good and actionable and teases the next step.  Since the next step is only 99 cents it becomes pretty easy to say yes to that.  There are entire companies pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars doing nothing but micro-payments through facebook and iTunes.

Putting all of these strategies to work in your business can dramatically help your business to grow.

YouTube traffic

I talk a lot about giving good information and being a thought leader for your market.  YouTube is a big part of doing that.  Not only that, but tools such as the Tube Toolbox make building friends and followers easier which makes getting your message out to people in your market easier.

Now, Youtube should NOT be used to advertise your products, but instead to demonstrate your  industry/market/product knowledge.  It's a way for you to easily and VERY inexpensively (as in free) communicate with your market.

You can then tie your videos over to facebook, your site ... and in fact get people who are watching your videos to even click over to your site to look at products or services that you have.

Done correctly, Youtube can very easily be a massive traffic generator for your site.  More importantly, Youtube can be a massive SALES generator for your site.

Now here's the best part about Youtube ... it can dramatically help to increase your search rankings.  For one thing it gives you more pages on another site that are "yours" that you can get to rank well for specific key phrases.  Secondly, the search engines like seeing multimedia content and want to rank sites with multiple content types on its pages better.  This can be something that helps to bump you over and above your competition.

Are you using Youtube to it's full potential?  Do you know how to do this?

Contact me and we can talk about how to best use Youtube in your business.

What you do with it is just as important as getting it

There are a lot of ways of getting traffic, and as I've said in previous posts, ideally you're getting traffic from as many different sources as possible.

However, once you're getting traffic, what you choose to do with it is nearly as important as actually getting the traffic in the first place.  Far too many people simply throw traffic at a product page.

To me, this is a huge mistake.

Ideally, traffic will FIRST go to something that will give them some great information and leave them wanting more.  Which you provide when they sign up to your mailing list.

By creating an email list you get the chance to demonstrate expertise and the chance to create a relationship.

Now you can start to sell things from the position of an exert/market authority.  It'll be much easier to sell things for much high prices.

I often have clients tell me that this model doesn't work for any wide variety of reasons.  One person sold swords. Another crafts, yet another cleaning chemicals for manufacturers.  With every single one of them, without adding ANY new traffic, I nearly doubled their sales within 6 weeks.

All of them thanks to doing what I just said in this message.

When you contact me about getting your free strategy session (click the link above for details to do that) I'll explain how you can implement this strategy in your business.

You don't have to sell the product?

I'm going to sell you a hamburger for the low, low price of just one million dollars.

Really, I will, stick with me for a minute.  You see, I'm going to sell you that hamburger for just one million and you'll see it as a BARGAIN, and I'm going to do that by providing you a hamburger as what you are buying, but I won't actually be selling a hamburger.

That may sound strange, but stick with me for a minute.

Actually, let me say this first, what I am about to run you through is something that I totally ripped off from Kevin Nations.

That said, how much is a hamburger worth?

Now when I ask this question of my clients typically they'll look at me with a strange look and say something along the lines of, "a few bucks."

Now, lets take that same hamburger and make it with all natural organic ingredients.  It's being served at a fine restaurant with white linen table cloths and a maitre'd, now how much is it worth?

To this question I'll get prices ranging from $10 to $20.

Okay, lets take that same hamburger, the same environment, but it's also a charity event where you are going to get to sit at the same table with your favorite celebrity, sports star, or anyone else you want, now how much is it worth?

I've gotten numbers as high as 10 grand to this question.  But that's still not one million and NO ONE, even the person that said 10 grand thought that was a bargain price.

Now, notice what happened up to this point.  The focus, up until the last one, was on the hamburger.  The most you can make just a hamburger, by selling ONLY a hamburger, by being ONLY in the "hamburger business" is about $20.

Add in some other things and get into the business of letting people eat with their favorite celebrity and suddenly the price goes flying through the roof.  That's because even though the "product" is a hamburger, that's not what is ACTUALLY being sold.

Well, lets put you out in the middle of the desert.  You're 2 days away from starving to death but you're five days away from the nearest source of food.

And there I am, with a hamburger large enough to easily help you get out of the desert and to your family.

That burger can be yours for just one million dollars.

If you have it, you'd pay it.  That's because it's not a hamburger anymore, it's your life.

In other words, if you want to truly be successful, sell "freedom from hunger" to people that are starving, or "freedom from thirst" to people desperate for something to drink.

Now that last sentence was meant to be figurative, but you hopefully get what I'm saying here.

I've been hitting this drum pretty hard for a reason.  When it comes to driving traffic, when it comes to finding potential customers, or generating leads, you have to know "what" you are going to sell, and the "what" doesn't have to be the "product".

The "product" can be a hamburger, but the "what" can be freedom from hunger.

The "product" can be industrial cleaning chemicals, but the "what" can be "improved profit margins".

So, if you aren't going to sell the product, "what" are you going to sell?

Your Market

Are you actually in the right business?

That is a question I often ask my clients.  As an example, prior to Starbucks, you could walk into almost convenience store and get 32 ounces of coffee for just 25 cents.

Enter the now widely known Starbucks who's "product" is coffee where a mere 16 ounces was 4 bucks.  That's because Starbucks wasn't in the coffee business, they were in the lifestyle business.

Take a look at the grocery store Whole Foods and you see the same thing.  The products that they sell are organic foods, and health supplements.  However Whole Foods is not now, nor have they ever been in the grocery store business.  Like Starbucks, Whole Foods is in the lifestyle business.

Now I am not at all saying that you have to be in the lifestyle business to be successful.  What I am saying is that if you want to struggle, if you want to be "price shopped" constantly and your prices driven down, then stay in whatever commodity business you are in.

Success comes from being in the business of giving your customers something they desire.  Success comes from being in a business that provides real solutions to real problems in some unique manner.

You want people to see you as the only person who can provide what they want, and/or can provide the solution to their problem.

Now doing this is actually surprisingly easy and it can be done with ANY kind of business no matter what you sell or who you sell it to.  However, it does require some slightly different work than you are currently doing.  You have to want to be a market leader ... a THOUGHT leader in your space.

Once that happens, you can charge premium prices.  You can have enviable profit margins.  You can take only the best customers while sending the crappy customers that do nothing but complain to just go away.

You can be the leader of your market ... but you have to be in the right business.  Are you?

This is just one of the great many things we can discuss when you get your free strategy session.  Simply click the "Free Strategy Session" link near the top of the page for details.

Presentations That Sell

Let me start by saying that I really like Seth Godin.  I have his site in my RSS feed, I have his facebook page "liked", and I'll even periodically refer back to his site for the mountain of great content and ideas that he has.  In fact, if you're reading this let me highly recommend that you do the same.  Seth is easily one of the foremost marketing minds alive right now.

Having said that, there are times that he can get a bit ... opinionated about things that actual objective facts don't always back up.

Case in point is his opinions regarding presentations.  He talks about the right and wrong way to do a presentation somewhat often.

The issue that I have is that in all too many instances his opinions about presentations and how to properly do them is just objectively wrong.

In his post "Really Bad Powerpoint" Seth offers five "rules".

Now lets compare those rules to a "Ryan Deiss" style "presentation" at http://www.repmogul.com and you can see good ol' Ryan pretty much nukes every single "rule" Seth had to offer.

Seth says that a slide really shouldn't contain words, and should contain only graphics to back up what you have to say, shouldn't transition ... and so on.

Ryan Deiss when he does a presentation, his slides are NOTHING but the words being spoken with nearly zero graphics used at all throughout the entire thing.

Now I know that Ryan tests the living daylights out of everything, but did he test his method for doing presentations against Seth's ... or against something else?  Because I wasn't sure, I had to test it for myself.

You see, to me and my anal split-test-everything mind, the question becomes pretty obvious, "which method of doing presentations actually works better?"

No opinions, no wondering, no guessing, no choosing one over the other out of personal preference or because you like one of the presenters over the other ... actual objective FACTS.

Well, the answer becomes ... it depends.

So before I give you the results, let me explain how I tested.

I used basic A/B split testing across 10,000 visitors to one of my sites.  In each, the visitor was given nothing but a page with a video on it.  At the point the video only had 1 minute left, a subscription box would appear below the video and the video would direct people to subscribe to get the rest of the videos in the series.

There was no cost or anything, just enter a name and email address to get the videos, and that's it.  Now I'm going to say this repeatedly because it's important.  The words that I spoke were 100% the same in each video.  The only thing that changed was the visual elements.  Basically I wanted to know which visual style, Seth's or Ryan's, worked better.

But then there was a problem.  Seth gives a couple of different ideas for creating good presentations so which worked better?  Not only that, but because this was web video, would it be better for me to be in the video as the slides were shown or not?

That meant I had to do a few split tests.

Split Test #1:
Sample A) Followed the 5 rules, each slide represented a single idea with no transitions between the slides, the 8 minute presentation only had 4 slides.  The video was a screen capture and used only my voice, I was not visible in the video, only the slides were.

Sample B) Same as sample A ... EXCEPT that the "screen flow" application on my mac was used so that I could be shown giving the presentation along with the slides showing to the right side.

Results) In 10,000 visits split evenly between the two sample B obtained 11% more subscribers.

This test was done to determine how important keeping things "moving" in the presentation was.

Split Test #2:
Sample A) I used the "atomic" method Seth talks about.  The 8 minute presentation had 23 slides and showed only the slides in the video.

Sample B) Same as sample A except that again "screen flow" was used so that I could be in the video also with the presentation slides showing to the right side.

Results) In 10,000 visits split evenly between the two, sample B obtained 2.2% more subscribers.  Allowing for some statistical variance this is basically break even.

Split Test #3:
Sample A) The "winning" sample from Split Test #1
Sample B) The "winning" sample from Split Test #2

Results) In 10,000 visits Sample B obtained 9% more subscribers.

In other words, "keeping things moving" in the video presentation is of extreme importance.  At this point however I've only tested Seth's way of doing things.

One thing I want to point out is that in every video so far, the words that I actually spoke were the same.  The only variation was the information on the slides and whether or not the viewer of the video got to see me speak and move.

So now it was time to see how Ryan's method stacked up.  Understand that once again, the actual words I spoke were the same, only the visual element was different.

Split Test #4:
Sample A) Used a Ryan Deiss style where the words appeared sub-seconds before I spoke them.
No slide transitions were used, but only one sentence (typically) per slide was used to keep the slides moving. This was a basic screen capture video without me in it, only the words and the sound of my voice.

Sample B) The winning sample from Split Test #3

Results) In 10,000 visits Sample A obtained 36% more subscribers.

The difference between the two was so dramatically different that I tested this again with 10,000 visitors on another site in another market that I work in ... and saw nearly identical results.

I tried it a third time with a client's site and again got nearly identical results.  In other words, for doing web video where the end result is designed to get a person to take a specific action, Ryan's method obliterates Seth's.

A simple presentation with words appearing on screen right before you say them, and a slide never having too many words before the slide moves away to the next plain and simply out performs any method of doing presentations recommended by Seth ...

But Wait!

Don't think for a second that this tells the entire story.

You see, the numbers change significantly when you are doing a presentation in person.  If you are physically in the room with the other person.

I'm going to skip the whole detailed explanation of the tests that I performed and just give you the bottom line.

Seth's rules for doing a presentation with one slide to represent a single idea, VERY few (or better yet no) words on a slide, heavy use of graphics to represent the idea you are conveying, no slide transitions, not giving "notes", and leaving a written (as in prose, not a simple print out of your slides) "leave behind" works FAR better.

In face-to-face sales presentations, doing things Seth's way obliterates every other method.

Now I'll have to admit that I was extraordinarily surprised to see results that were diametrically opposite based only on the fact that the person was watching a video on the web versus if the presentation is face to face.

However, the numbers don't lie.