552 – Be unique and stand out: Tom talks Add Uniqueness

Episode 552 – Add Uniqueness
[00:00:09] 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 five hundred and fifty two of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about adding uniqueness. But before I get into the main event today, I just learned of a WordPress plugin that you might want to install. It's called Index now, and it immediately alerts the search engines when you put new content on your site. Now it does a lot more than that, and I'll probably have an entire episode on it in the future. But right now it's being accepted by Bing and Yandex, and Google is checking it out. Probably going to accept it, I imagine. Now my sources say that there's not really any downside of adding this plugin, which will keep you from waiting for the next time the search engine spiders decide to visit your site so you can get indexed immediately. Especially good if you have last minute events or live events, you can get the promotion out right away. All right, I hope you didn't miss episode five. Fifty one. That was Nate Palmer, and he is the guy that kind of was like Popeye's muscle on top of muscle. But he's not a fanatic about it, and he teaches business people how to use nutrition and morning routines, and he's he's got a thing called the million dollar body. So check that out. Episode 551.

[00:01:48] And hey, if you'd like me to send you a nice big affiliate commissions, you can refer my stuff. So just email me at Tom@Screwthecommute.com And we'll give you details on how a referral program could work for you to add income to your bottom line. Now, pick up a copy of our automation e-book. Been given this away for a long time and people are using the techniques and really, really cutting their workload down and being able to spend more time with customers and prospects and make more money. So download your copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then pick up a copy of our podcast app while you're over there at screwthecommute.com/app. Now we're still in the middle of our great pilot program to help persons with disabilities get educated, so we're given scholarships to persons with disabilities. Two of the people in the program are blind, they're making great progress, they're learning internet and digital marketing, and we're going to get them either hired or in their own business or both. So I'd love to have your help with this and something you can really be proud of supporting. So check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you can click on the Go Fund Me campaign, and you can actually see videos from these people and their blind shooting videos, and they do it better than I do on some of them. So check it out. Help me out on that something you can really be proud of.

[00:03:25] All right, let's get to the main event. The thrust of this episode is to be the same and be unique. So I'm not talking about coming up with some revolutionary new topic that no one's heard of. I'm talking about delivering things that people want, but adding special elements that set you apart from the competition. Now, I doubt you're naive enough to think I'm the only internet and digital marketer, pro speaking and entrepreneurship teacher, all the topics I specialize in are being taught by hordes of others. And I must say in a not so humble fashion, most less way less qualified than me. But I mean, you can pretty much walk down the street and swing a dead cat and run into someone who claims to be able to teach you to get rich online. And another thing that cracks me up or these pro speaking teachers, most of which have never made really big money speaking, and they're teaching unsuspecting people how to be professional speakers, so that's terrible. There's so, so many fake it till you make it people out there. But therein lies the problem.

[00:04:41] Consultants, coaches and seminar leaders are see, easy money doing what us real professionals do, and they concentrate on finding clients that don't know any better or who are easily swayed by pie in the sky. Dreams of great riches with little work. So how do you set yourself apart from those people? I'm going to tell you many of the ways that I've done it over many years, and hopefully you'll get some ideas you can use in your business to add uniqueness, even if you've got the same old topic or product as everybody else does. Let me start way back, even even before the internet was around. Let's pick up during the years I owned a nightclub. In the dead of winter, we had a beach party. All the girls were in bikinis and the guys were in swimsuits. So what you say? Wow. Well, it's a neat idea, but how can that apply to you? The basic premise here was to switch activities normally associated with a particular season. In this case, beach parties were in the summer. Obviously, I had mine in the dead of winter. So what could you do that is out of season? Could you do a Black Friday sale in August and promote it as getting a jump on Amazon or something like that? The other thing we did was hold ladies only classy male dancer nights once a month. This packed in four hundred screaming females with hundreds of guys waiting to get in after the show.

[00:06:27] And of course, they were drinking like fish in our other bar while they were waiting. Now you might think that's not much of a big deal. Tom. Well, it sure was in those days when those kinds of shows were only in big cities and Las Vegas. No, I'm not suggesting you peel off your clothes and pretty much sell sex and booze. But I'm just saying you have to think of what you could present in your field that maybe is ahead of its time or something that was only seen in other industries. That's why I never complain about the beginning of my speaking career, where in the first five years I spoke in 87 different industries. Yeah, it was hard because I'm a big stickler on customization, but I I saw some sales techniques in one industry, and when I presented that that technique to another industry, they thought I was some kind of genius. Well, no, I'm not a genius. I just pay attention to what other people are doing and either adapt it or take it to places where no one has seen it before. And like I just said, you should research other industries, and you will most likely see techniques, products and services that could be adapted and presented to your industry, then you can be a genius. All right, let's jump to right after the nightclub years, that was a pretty low point in my life.

[00:08:06] I was on my way to being a millionaire before I was 30 in the nightclub business. And then the drinking age went from 18 to 21 and wiped me out. I had the second biggest nightclub in the state, but I lost $400000. I got hurt with no health insurance and in nineteen eighty six I couldn't walk. I was living alone in a vacant house on a mattress with a table, a chair and something probably most of you have never even seen a black and white TV. Well, I surrounded myself with humor books to keep my spirits up. And I was living off credit cards. And one day I was watching Candid Camera on that little black and white TV, and that's when I got the idea for my entertainment company pranked masters. See, everybody loves candid camera, but nobody could really participate in it unless they happen to get caught by the candid camera and live in California. So I took that idea long before punked and Jackass and all those other crazy shows were. This is in the 1988 somewhere around. And brought it to the entertainment industry where people could actually participate in it. So I knew I would need a big city to do this, so I moved to Washington, D.C., area. I starved to death for the first six months. All we had in those days was yellow page ads that took a long time before the next Yellow Pages would come out and ads in the back of Washingtonian magazine.

[00:09:46] So I starved for six months, but I was doing this crazy stuff we had over the hill preachers and I had caskets. I would take the set up for your over-the-hill birthday party and there's long stories there. They're just hysterical. But anyway, for this purpose. The it was crazy enough that The Washington Times picked up and did a feature article on me, it brought the casket down, did a photo shoot with me dressed like a priest and it was crazy. So business started picking up. Then, you know, a lot of the newspapers watch each other. So The Washington Post picked it up and did a feature article. Then business really picked up. And then Associated Press watches all the kinds of stories around the country, and they picked it up and oh my goodness. Business went crazy. I was doing radio and TV all over the world that did the Tokyo Today show and, you know, Australian and Canadian broadcast networks and all over the United States and the business is just going wild. So anything that you do like this possibly can get your publicity. And I even wrote a book on how to be a kick butt publicity hound with Jon Stewart. So you want to think, what can I do? That would set me apart enough that it would be actually newsworthy for publicity wise and just coming up with a new pricing schedule or hiring a new person probably is not going to do it.

[00:11:20] It's got to be something unique. So let's look at this. I took a concept from TV that everyone loved and made it real. Where anyone could participate. Now, what could you do? That's on TV nowadays. Or maybe it's now it's a popular YouTube channel and incorporate that idea into your business. Well, I can't tell you. You have to take these ideas that I'm giving you today and brainstorm and keep your eyes open for possibilities. Now, how about I give you a really gross example? All right, but I'll I'll bet you'd love to have this lady's success. You may never have heard of Dr Sandra Lee. Well, she's also known as Dr. Pimple Popper. All right, so folks, listen hear me out on this before you get grossed out. The latest figures I could find were that there were nine thousand six hundred dermatologists in the United States. How many of them do you think have ever had 73 million views on just one video? How about fifty nine million views on another and how about 49 million views on another and on and on and on? Answer one, Dr Sandra Lee. She took one off the wall aspect of her business and had the guts to blow it up when all her nine thousand five hundred and ninety nine uppity colleagues were too professional to do something like that.

[00:13:01] Well, Dr. Lee is laughing at them all the way to the bank, all the way to the Pimple Popper bank. I don't know if there is such a thing. So what is one aspect of your business that you could blow up? Maybe you could find some ancient technique and modernize it, something like Matt Furie did. Matt Furie was or is a martial artist and wrestler. He took one hundred year old wrestling public domain course, modernized it, put it on video and sold millions of dollars of the course. And he could certainly advertise it as time tested since it was over a hundred years old. All right, there's another idea for you. So after the entertainment company, I got into pro speaking and I was doing humor in the workplace speeches with. And then here's that term again, unique stories from my practical joke business. Then around 1994, the commercial internet started and I jumped all over it to learn how to sell my products around the world. I mean, at the time, you know, selling cassette tapes and books and stuff, and it was hard enough to sell them across the street, let alone around the world. So I totally jumped on this internet stuff, and that's when I started my mentor program. That was way back when I lived in New Carrollton, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. And that's when another unique program emerged.

[00:14:37] Not quite as gross as Dr. Pimple Popper, right? But that's when but camp was born at the time, people were begging me to do an internet marketing boot camp to teach them all the stuff that I had known or learned. Now, with my comic background from the practical joke company, I just couldn't stand the thought of calling my seminar a boot camp. Because that's what everybody else does. So I put on my thinking cap and I was sitting at my computer selling stuff online like crazy, and that's when I thought to myself, Gee, I'm sitting there on my rear end in front of this computer making all this money, I'll call my seminar but camp. And it caught on, and I've done them in 11 countries around the world. But but in London, they made me call it bum camp. And it's actually the longest continuously running internet and digital marketing seminar ever. There was a couple of guys doing them in those days, but I don't know what happened to them. I'm still around. Then I started getting asked to speak at other public seminars. I was one of the headliners at the famous Chicken Soup for the Souls co-founder Mark Victor Hansen in his mega seminars, and that morphed into Author 101, where I headlined that event twice a year for many years. And some of the some of the behind the scenes words says that if it wasn't for me, the whole thing wouldn't have been profitable.

[00:16:12] So when I started my mentor program and started selling at these public events, it's another example of where I zigged when everyone else was zagging. Ok. Zig instead of zag. Now, many of you listeners have heard of my mentor program where you pay an entry fee and I don't get my big money unless you make big money. Now, that was so much against what was going on at the time. People at my level were asking 50 or a hundred thousand up front to coach others on internet marketing, and I knew a lot of these people to be rip offs and you may as well set your $50000 on fire and at least you get some warmth out of the burning paper. So, so I pissed them all off when I started offering my program with just an entry fee. And I tied my success to my mentees success. Well, people love this idea and started signing up like crazy because they knew I wouldn't disappear on it. And they're still doing it today after 20 some twenty three years or so. Now in the US. Oh, God, I missed it, and I think it's 25 years now. Wow. Quarter of a century. And many of those rip off supposed coaches have disappeared off the scene as more and more people realized those people gave no value that would help anyone but themselves.

[00:17:46] So what can you do to zig when your competitors are zagging? I'll just throw out some crazy stuff here. Maybe you hold a two a.m. webinar on a Saturday night and give out Starbucks gift cards to the attendees or and of course, that does help you if you're in the U.S. to get more people in Europe. Because it's not the middle of the night for them. And remember, I'm just trying to stimulate your mind to start thinking of what your competitors are doing, so you can go the other way, adding your uniqueness to the mix and grabbing a bigger share of the business that's out there. Then I decided to take things to levels never heard of, all the while making sound business decisions. And that's when the Great Internet Marketing Retreat Center idea was born. The idea of having retreats is as old as the hills. Most of them currently and in the past 15, 20 years, probably or more. Are held at hotels with the retreat leader also at the hotel. Once in a while, the retreat leader may hold part of the retreat at their home. And then people would go back to their hotel in the evening. So my unique idea was to have a home retreat where people would actually live in my house for an immersion weekend. I'm sure this idea had been done before in some other arena, but never had it been done. And I believe it's never been done since in the online industry.

[00:19:27] So in two thousand two, monthly retreats were held at my estate home in Virginia Beach. I mean, it's the highest level access you could ever have to somebody at my level. Now we have all the amenities we have to soreness and indoor hot tub, a workout room, a theater tennis court TV studio. We have a wet bar, although we don't. We call it the blog bar because people have created so many blogs and websites while sitting there, but we don't actually serve or pay for any alcohol during their treat. You're allowed to have it if you bring it, but but you know, we don't serve any. Now we've got a fish pond and all kinds of stuff, so if that wasn't enough, we picked you up and at the airport in a limo, you have no expenses when you get here. You know, a lot of times if people would attempt this, they get you their captive and then upsell you like crazy to some outrageously big amount of money, but not here. You have no expenses when you get here, and unless you decide to buy some of the little software or something that we recommend during the retreat, but you don't get up, sell the stuff. And and and here's the most important part, folks. All the meals are included. Oh, man, boy, do we eat now? Oh, excuse me, unless you're vegan or when I get a pre visit questionnaire that says they're vegan and I have to buy $4 cookies that I don't know my recycling cardboard tastes better.

[00:21:03] Well, a lot of them bring a lot of their own food. But what's funny to me is sometimes they get here and they say, Oh, heck with it, I'm not vegan this weekend, and they start scarfing up all the other stuff anyway. That's a lot of fun, and it's really a life changing experience for so many people. And let's talk about it being a good business decision. See, because the house was generated because the house generates money income. I legitimately, and I emphasize, legitimately get all kinds of tax deductions and the students pay off this million dollar property, which when I bought it was one point two million and probably two million now. So what could you do along these lines, could you buy a much nicer and bigger house if you did the same idea? Now one thing to keep in mind people will pay a premium for a unique experience. And if you don't believe me, hey, ask Elon Musk for a ticket for a ride into space. All right. Hmm. Let me think about that. Maybe I could. I'm just thinking about this right now. I could do an internet marketing retreat and space. We'll have to call him up and see if any space space x rockets have a projector screen and a good internet connection so I can do a little training while I'm up there.

[00:22:30] So the whole point of this episode is to get you thinking outside the universe. Speaking of Elon Musk, I don't think he made it outside the universe yet. The I left the box behind years ago thinking outside the box and and and that's how, you know, I'm doing this so you can stand out from the crowd with unique offerings not normally found in your industry. Now, before I before I've I'm going to have a special message right at the end for you. Super conservative types. But before I do that, let me tell you about how I could help you. I just told you about a lot of the amenities of the mentor program. But one other unique thing that I did not mention was that all the training is one on one. Because we tried to do group training and it was a disaster. I don't say it was a disaster, but it was to me it wasn't up to my standards because I had to dummy five things down so much that for the lowest common denominator. And then the advanced people are bored. And if I talk advanced, the beginners intermediates are lost. So I just hated it. I quit it. It wasn't wasn't good. So everything is one on one, and that's unique. Nobody at my level will even talk to you, let alone, you know, teach anything.

[00:23:51] That's all I do. I'm a crazy fanatic. You don't have to be as fanatic as me. But but that's another benefit of this is wherever you are. We take it from where you are and ship your way ahead. And another unique thing is I have the only licensed dedicated internet marketing school in digital marketing school in the country, and you get a scholarship to that where you could either use it yourself for extra training or gift it to somebody, which I'll tell you what if you look at the tuitions and stupid rip off fees that these college, these college people would be in jail. You know, I have a consumer advocate TV show in development. They'd be in jail if they weren't colleges because of all the money they're they're stealing and putting all these kids in debt and then the kids get out and they're competing for jobs at Starbucks. You know, so no, this this scholarship is something you could be the one of the greatest legacy gifts you could give to your kids or your grandchildren or nephews and nieces, whatever. So that's part of it. So anyway, if you want to check it out, check out great internet marketing, training, great internet marketing, training and you get everything that you heard of in this episode. Plus there's other things. So I'll tell you I've never had a lawsuit or a complaint in twenty five years of doing it where I can't say that for the other people and I triple dog dare people to put their program up against my.

[00:25:17] Nobody will do it because when you check off all these value that you get, and most of it is my risk, you know, paying these people to help you and do all this stuff in hopes that you do the work and get the money, say so I can get a commission for a while. Oh, and it's I forgot to tell you it's capped, so you're not stuck with me forever. Say so. Just nobody can compete with this. Check it out. Great internet marketing training. All right, now, the message for some super conservatives. I know some of you super conservative types are only listening this far to see what other terrible crazy idea that I have, right? Well, all I can say to you is look around. Yes, there are super conservative, highly successful people. But there are far more highly successful people that got successful by being willing to stretch the boundaries of the standard conventions in their industry. So I challenge it, come up with some unique things that you can do to set yourself apart. Oh, well, that's my cell phone ringing. I got the catching sound on my cell phone. So, oh, I got to go. It's Elon Musk calling me back. Ok, everybody, I'll get you on the next episode. See you later.