484 – More great questions from the Grab Bag: Tom talks Ask Me a Question

Episode 484 – Ask Me A Question
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred and eighty four of Screw the Commute podcast. We're doing another episode of Ask Me a Question. I do these every so often to fill in, and I get so darn many questions that repeat. I thought, hey, I'll make them podcast episodes. And that way people can go back and listen to a whole bunch of miscellaneous stuff that that's not you know, I don't go deep on any one topic like I do normally on Monday. So so it gives you a little variety here. So how would you like me to send you big checks? Well, well, if you're in my affiliate program, I'll do that. You can just ask me for details at Tom@screwthecommute.com. We'll give you details. I'll probably get in touch with you to see how you plan on promoting and maximize the money for all of us. Pick up a copy of our automation ebook. You've heard me talk about that before, but did you download it and did you implement it? That's the question. Just listening to me run my lips all day long on these things doesn't help you do the darn thing that download the darn book and just pick one thing and implement it and then pick another thing and implement it.

[00:01:39] You know, just make you really lightning fast and save you tons of work and allow you to steal ethically, steal customers and all kinds of stuff. So catch that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. All right. We're still going strong with our program to help persons with disabilities in my school. I really need and want your help with this. I want to get a lot of awareness out there. Hey, we're going to have a big contest pretty soon, too, where you could win a scholarship to the school that you could either use yourself or give to somebody else. Save them hundreds of thousands of dollars, get them an actual skill that's in high demand. Wow. You'd be the most favorite parent. Or, you know, uncle or aunt or whatever if you if you won the prize. So we'll be rolling that out here shortly. And we're also coming up with that per month in September. So watch for that. Anyway, check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign and go see some of the people that they're so inspirational, the people that are in the program now. And we're going to roll it out even bigger. So check that out.

[00:03:04] All right. Let's get to the main event here. Ask me a question. What's the my first question here? Well, here it is. What's the fastest way to make money online? Well, I think you'll be surprised that the answer. And it's not the only way. But this is a way that just, you know, just will happen like overnight if you decide to do it and it's eBay and you can clean your basement at the same time. All right. Yeah. You don't need a website. All you need is a PayPal card. You got to be able to collect the money somehow. And I'll just tell you a quick story about I got plenty of eBay stories, but this quick story is about a friend of mine who takes 80 to 100 bucks to yard sales. Every Saturday morning and there's one thing about eBay, if you look at eBay in the right near the main search box, there's another little link that says advanced search. If you click on it. It takes it to another screen, there's all kinds of parameters, but all you got to do is click the little box that says completed listings only. And what that does is it brings up all the auctions in the past 90 days for whatever you're looking for or whatever your, you know, product that you have in the search bar and tells you how much it sold for and whether it's sold or not. So what she does is she goes to yard sales and she might see a like, let's say a tanker truck.

[00:04:34] You know, there's nice high quality metal toy trucks. And she'll go on eBay and say, oh, it's selling for 50 bucks on eBay and they're only asking five dollars at the yard sale. Well, guess what? She's going to buy it, take it home, repackage it, ship it out and sell it for 50 bucks. So she she's for consistently for years is made netted a thousand to eleven hundred dollars a week doing this. So, yes, you can do this. And there's plenty of ways to make money fast. But eBay is a great one, and they'll do whatever they can to teach you how to use it. They got all kind of resources, so. So there you go. All right. And by the way, we don't preach, get rich quick. You're not going to get rich from doing that. But it's certainly a way to bring some money in. OK. Tom, can you explain the KDP select program? OK, well, folks, first of all, KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing as part of Amazon and the select program. I want to concentrate on one deal in the select program. It has many things it'll do for you, but this is the main one that I use. They have a deal where, if you agree to not sell your digital product or your e-book, most eBooks. Anywhere else for 90 days, they will give it away for free for five days out of that 90 days.

[00:06:01] And you say, well, so what what's the big deal? Well, first of all, my philosophy always is you write a book always to lead to some bigger sale, not to just write the book. So in my case, they gave away 2500 copies in five days of an eBook that if if one person does with the e-book says it means 600 dollars per year for me. And they gave away 2500 copies in five days. Well, out of those 90, I've done this multiple times over, you know, over the years. So I don't want the little bit of money I'd get for the book. I want the six hundred dollars a year per person. And some of the people of the six hundred dollars a year comes in for multiple years, some as many as 15 years or more so. So that's what you want. Why this select program is so important? Because, you know, I'm good, but I can't give away 2500 copies of something, you know, in a couple of days. I'm not Amazon. And they I mean, they have hundreds of millions of people coming there every day. So that's the KDP select program, Kindle Direct Publishing. The select program allows you to make that deal with Amazon. And so and there's all kinds of other deals that if you happen to have purchased my Kindle masterclass, there's all kinds of ways you can get distribution on Amazon. So check out that Kindle Masterclass. We'll have the the link in the show notes.

[00:07:36] OK, next thing is Tom my Wi-Fi is spotty in my house. What can I do? Well, I'm not Kim Komando. First of all, who's the big techie wizard? But I do have some ideas for you. Yeah, I mean, this is not really my purview. But see, when you when you run an Internet business out of your house for 27 years, you learn some stuff about the technology of it. So first thing is, keep in mind, hardwire is always the best, fastest and most reliable. And that would require what they call an Ethernet cable. Now, you could get a and sometimes they're called a cat cable cat five, cat five, cat six and cat five was going to still going to work for you. But the the they don't handle the speeds as a cat five or cat six. I don't know how high they go with the numbers, but cat six will carry it for a long time. I use cat five for I don't know how many years. So if you could weasel the wire around you along your baseboards or under carpets or something to get it over to where you're working, you're always going to have a really good connection. Now, that doesn't. Solve your problem of your Wi-Fi being spotty because you don't want to have to sit in a certain chair. And if you move to a different chair, your wire doesn't reach or, you know, something like that.

[00:09:05] So that is one way to to handle this. And while I'm talking about actual hard wired cables, did you realize you can buy Ethernet adapters for your cell phones and tablets so they can be hard wired? All you do is go to Amazon and search for Ethernet to iPhone or Ethernet to Android adapter and thereby about, I don't know, sixteen dollars, something like that. And you can hardwire your cell phones and tablets and get superspeed on them and not rely on that. Of course, again, when you hook to a wire, you're hooked to a wire. But if you sit in the same place and watch Netflix on TV and have your tablet with you, you can get super high speed on it compared to what you're getting now if you hardwire it with a 16 dollar adapter. Why we're again, while we're on the hardwire, there's things called switches or ports that you can get because maybe you want to you really like this idea and you want want to run a bunch of Ethernet cables to different places, but your router only has so many ports that you can plug in to. Well, I don't know, four on Amazon. They're like fifteen dollars. If you go to Best Buy, they're thirty dollars. But you could buy a five port Ethernet switch. And all it does is it plugs into electricity, you got to plug it into electricity. You take one wire off your router and and plug it into the little box.

[00:10:37] It's tiny. It's a little bit bigger than a deck of cards. And then you can run your cat five or cat six cables off of the other four ports to run four different places. And you're still hard wired. You don't lose anything. The speed stays up high. So and then you can go to one end of it and run to two or three different devices with another switch at the end of a line. You know, so it's very handy. I have them here all the time because I like the hard wire, because I'm working so fast, so hard from certain places. I don't want to be slowed down with Wi-Fi. So so that's one thing. All right. So that's all the hard wire stuff that you could do. Now, another thing is you could get a mesh system. A mesh system is a is a wi fi system. Where and and trust me, I'm no comm commander. All right. I'm just going to give you my little take on it. It may not be exactly correct, but the end result is, is you have these little devices are spaced around your house. And then as you go from area to area, your phone or your tablet automatically switches to the other thing that's got a high class signal. So it's kind of like having a router. This is really pitiful explanation, but having a router everywhere you go so you can have these multiple ports all over the place and you could get the highest speed.

[00:12:11] It's still Wi-Fi, but you're not going 60 feet to get Wi-Fi. You might only be going 10 feet if you have one in that particular room. So, so so just look into mesh Wi-Fi systems. OK, that ought to help you out. OK, next thing is Tom I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars per month for for very the various membership softwares out there. What's my alternative? Well, for years, all my students have been using a simple WordPress site with a plug in called WishList Member. Will have my affiliate link in the show notes. If you if you decide, you get it. I think it's one hundred and forty nine dollars per year for one site. And there's another plugin that we get. I think it's about forty dollars a year. It's an auto registration plug in. So basically when you have a membership site, all you're doing is locking off certain pages in your site. Unless people pay. I mean, you have to have a pay mechanism, also paypal or kick start cart or something like that. And you know, those those have fees involved, but they do so much more than just collect the money for your membership site, you know, with the email marketing and all the up sells and affiliate stuff, everything all there. So. Can't really equate the membership site to the shopping cart system.

[00:13:34] OK, so that's what we use and that's what my students use. And it's just awesome. And it's, you know, relatively cheap. If you're looking at one hundred and fifty plus two hundred and thirty dollars a year divided by 12, you know, so it's a tiny monthly fee compared to some of the ones some of these darn things are three hundred dollars a month. You know, so it's crazy. No need for all that. OK, next thing is Tom. I've heard lots of people talking about drop shipping. What do you think about it? Well, I'm really not in favor of it in most cases. I'll tell you why. Because your margins are smaller. You know, I'm I love the digital products or products that you create yourself at home are 90 some percent profit. Ninety seven percent for digital. So I don't like that. And you still have to handle somehow returns. And I don't mean maybe not. You don't have to physically handle the product, but you still have to take the call from the customer because they're dealing with you as a drop shipper. So they say, hey, this thing was broken. What did you know? I got it right. I want to return it and get another one or I just wanted to get my money back because I didn't like it. You know, so you have to handle all that stuff and some other things. It's relatively complex to set up. It's set it up so orders come in and go directly to the drop shipping company.

[00:15:05] And, you know, they have to have your payment on file so they get the their share of the money. And I mean, it's just like it's I mean, it's doable, but it's just complex. And what happens if they screw up? Well, guess who gets blamed for it, you get blamed for it. Or if their products are crap, you get blamed for it. So I'm not not in favor at all. It's too much out of my control because I have a great reputation in my business and I want to keep it. And depending on somebody like that, to ship products and take returns and make sure that they're quality and make sure they do it in a hurry, you know, just. And again, the margins are too small when you could do the same amount of effort put into digital products. You'll make way more money way, way, way more money, and you won't be giving it to them and dealing with all the hassles. So, no, I'm not in favor of dropship.

[00:16:02] OK, next question, what is a VPN. Well, a VPN stands for virtual private network. And what it does is it kind of encrypts your stuff that you do on your your computer and your cell. You can have them on cell phones and tablets, too. And it hides your actual IP address. It has like, you know, it bounces it all over the place so nobody can pinpoint where you are.

[00:16:30] And it kind of obscures your online stuff that you're doing. So what do you do with this? Well, it's great for public Wi-Fi networks, so you're much more safe using, you know, if you're at Starbucks or someplace on public Wi-Fi. And it protects your privacy to a point, not 100 percent, but it protects your privacy so people can't really see what you're doing and browsing and and so forth. See, because your ISP. Can see everything that you're doing, everything. And so they sell the data many times to other people to send their ads to you. And, you know, like I said, it's kind of invading your privacy. But here's the thing. Even if you go to Facebook through a VPN and you like something. Well, Facebook knows that you. You know, so that's not 100 percent private. And there's lots of other places that do the same thing for your cookies and all this stuff. So it's not 100 percent, but it's really good. And one of the benefits of it, you can access things anywhere where maybe you're not supposed to. So I know I had students in China that they're very strict on what they allow through the Internet. So they got a VPN and they could circumvent those restrictions. And most places, it's not illegal to do so. Or, you know, a couple of things. Maybe Netflix in Ireland has a show that you really like, but it's not available in the U.S..

[00:18:04] Well, you get a VPN. Pick an IP address that makes you look like you're in Ireland and then you can access Netflix in Ireland. So that kind of stuff, maybe you want to advertise a product in Sweden and you want to go see what kind of ads and what kind of things they're doing in Sweden. Well, you can't if you don't have a VPN, you have to, because, you know, everything knows where you are. So in this case, you pretend you're in Sweden with an IP address in Sweden, and then you can access and look at the ads and see what's going on there. So that's handy. Handy thing. Oh, another really cool tip for a VPN is you can save money. See the airlines, you know, the fees that they charge for ticket prices are different everywhere. Nobody on Earth can figure it out. So if you're willing to take a little bit of extra time, you can go through a VPN and go to different places, pretend you're in different places, and check the the ticket prices for the same exact ticket. It could be cheaper in different areas. There was a ritzy area. They might keep the prices high in fancy zip codes and a lower zip code or, you know, lower income zip code. Maybe the prices are cheaper for the same exact flight. And and they don't you know, they don't know that you you're still in the ritzy area when you're looking for the ticket price.

[00:19:40] It just appears to them that you are in the cheaper area and it probably shows the cheaper prices. So this happens on all kinds of things. So if you're real price conscious user VPN to check things in different areas, and you'll be amazed that the difference in prices now there is a downside to it. It's going to slow you down. You're browsing a little bit, you know, so and varies. So. So that's one downside. And you got to realize it's not 100 percent secure. Like I said, Facebook still knows if you like or make a comment or something from your account. And here's the big warning don't use free ones because free ones have to pay the bills somehow so they might still steal your data and sell it to people, you know, so get a reputable paid one and you can find them online. I'm not going to tell you which ones I use and everything, but but just make sure it's paid. And they brag about their you know, that they're not going to sell your stuff. Now, if you really want to jump up on security and I'm not going to tell you all I know about this, this this is taking it to another level as you get the Tor Tom here browser. And again, like I said, I'm not going to tell you what I know about this kind of stuff, but this is super, you know, super high level security.

[00:21:02] Nothing's ever 100 percent. But when you see how I will tell you a term, it's called an onion browser. And so just look up Tor and you'll see a lot of people willing to tell you lots about this stuff and what you can do with it and what you can't do with it. So you check that out. And anyway, VPN is very handy. They're relatively inexpensive and allows you to do a lot of cool stuff. But nothing is 100 percent if you're trying to if you're some terrorist or something, screw you. You know what I don't want to hear you're using these techniques. All right, everybody. So just want to remind you about the the pilot program. We have to help persons with disabilities really need your help. I'm always open to people that, you know, that could help or that are interested in this topic of helping people with disabilities. We're getting them full scholarships. They're already making progress. And two of the people are blind. Geez, how inspirational they are of just chomping along may take a little bit longer to get the work done, but they get the darn work done. I'm really, really proud of being able to help them. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. And then, hey, go get yourself a VPN and sell something in Sweden. All right. I'll catch you on the next episode. Vetrepreneur month is starting Wednesday.

Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
Or join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com