562 – She helps you deliver knowledge: Tom interviews Ellen Finkelstein

Episode 562 – Ellen Finkelstein
[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 sixty two if Screw the Commute podcast, I'm here with Ellen Finkelstein and she is a prolific writer and content producer. She's been cited on ABC, NBC, CBS and the Microsoft website, and she's one of only 18 people in the USA. I'm not going to tell you what until we bring her on, and then you'll see she's really, really up there. So make sure you pick up a copy of our podcast app so you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. It does all kinds of cool stuff when you, you know, if you're listening to the podcast and you get a phone call, it'll dim, you know, stop the podcast and then when you hang up, it'll pick right up where you were and all kinds of cool stuff. So grab that at screwthecommute.com/app. And then as always, I want you to pick up a copy of our automation e-book. I mean, you will thank me if you just do a portion of what's in this book. This is what's allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and sixty five thousand customers without pulling my hair out and really to ethically steal customers from other people too slow to get back to people. You know, this is just there's just all kinds of free and cheap tricks and tips in here that will just massively increase your speed of getting your work done. So check it out. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And we're still in the middle of our wonderful program I'm so proud of to help persons with disabilities get trained in internet and digital marketing so that they can not only not have to kill themselves to go to class every day. At some, you know, school that's going to just teach them how to protest, basically and not can teach them stuff and overcharge them for it so they can legitimately study from home and legitimately get hired from home or start their own business or both. So I'd love to have your help with this for doing a Go Fund Me campaign. We've got three people in the program so far, and guess what? Two of them are blind and they're doing videos.

[00:02:44] So when I hear you crying the blues, you can't do videos just shut up because you can't. These blind people could do it. You can. So check it out it. IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Of course, this will be in the show notes, along with all Ellen's great stuff that you'll hear about. Check out the Go Fund Me campaign, and anything you can contribute is great helps out. And if you hey, if you're really flush with cash, you could sponsor a person yourself and boy, that's something you could really be proud of. So check it out.

[00:03:19] All right, let's get to the main event. Ellen Finkelstein is here, and I should have asked her for sure if it's Finkelstein or Finkelstein, but she'll tell me here in a minute. She teaches experts who want to get their knowledge out to the world, how to reach more people with profitable online products and courses. And she's created and sold dozens of online programs, and she helps experts do the same so they can create change for men as many people as possible. Ellen, are you ready to screw the commute?

[00:03:54] I am Tom and I'm excited, and Finkelstein is just right.

[00:03:57] Finkelstein OK, good for me. So, so boy, you've been in the game a long time. I saw your LinkedIn profile and I've known of you for many, many years, so I'm glad that we're crossing paths here today. But so first of all, I want to talk about you. You're a prolific writer. You've got all kinds of books out.

[00:04:20] I do. I started working at home when my kids were really little. I needed something to do at home and I started doing technical editing. And then there was a publisher. It was IDG Books which was bought by Wiley and Sons, and they had a book. It was going to be called AutoCAD for Dummies. Quick reference. They don't do the quick reference ones anymore, but they had an author. They had signed up for AutoCAD for Dummies. It's a drafting program and AutoCAD for Dummies. Quick reference, and he bailed out on them on the quick reference and they were desperate. And so they let me write the book, and that was how I started.

[00:04:55] Well, that's that's amazing. When I looked at your Amazon profile more, there's just book after book, after book after book, but there is something that you know, I didn't tell you. I was going to bring this up, and I know it's a kind of a sad topic. But in December of 2020, flash actually died.

[00:05:17] Yes, may or may it rest in peace.

[00:05:21] Helen has written books on Flash. So what did you what did you think when you heard that? I think they announced that it was going to die a couple of years before that. What did you think?

[00:05:32] Well, I thought it was sad, I suppose, but Adobe bought it, bought it from Macromedia and Guy, and they had their own animation program, so they really wanted to kill it, I think. And actually even Macromedia at all. So, Adobe, they kind of killed it by making it for programmers only as opposed to from designers, for designers. And I actually when I want to animate stuff, I do it in PowerPoint these days because it's easy and you don't need to be a programmer, but yeah, I'm the co-author of five editions of Flash for Dummies. But what it's worth right now?

[00:06:12] Well, they're collector's items now. I bet, you know. So yeah, they're probably they're probably on sale for eight hundred dollars on Amazon.

[00:06:20] Well, I can't complain because the that book sold really, really well. And the first royalty and I was sharing it with my co-author was about a third of the down payment for my house.

[00:06:33] I probably have a copy in my library. I have three libraries in this in the retreat center, so it's probably in there somewhere. But speaking of PowerPoint, you, this is where you are a big shot of the world in that there's only 18 people that are in the USA that are PowerPoint MVP's. What exactly is that?

[00:06:55] So it stands for most valuable professional and it's a Microsoft award, and they have it in a lot of their different products. So there are I mean, technically I'm a Microsoft Apps MVP, which includes all of office, but we ignore that because I really just focus on on PowerPoint, but people who focus on word or excel or some of their programming things as well. So they just you have to be an expert in it and you have to give your knowledge away freely, which kind of means for free. That doesn't mean you can't make a living, but I do that by blogging and by emailing. And so I've been and I've written books on PowerPoint, so I've been teaching people about PowerPoint for a pretty long time.

[00:07:37] So you should be a gazillionaire if everybody, if every speaker that I know. I should hire you because they all suck at power.

[00:07:50] Yes, so people, people misuse PowerPoint a lot. There's an expression death by far, right? And I don't really know why, because by now, everybody knows that you shouldn't just put up a wall of bullet points on, you know, because bullets kill people.

[00:08:06] Well, they might know, but that doesn't mean they do.

[00:08:10] Yeah, it's funny because really what they're doing is they're putting up a teleprompter for themselves. But what happens is, and there's some research on this when people see that they read the text and while they're reading, they can't listen to the speaker. And so if you don't want people to listen to you, then put up a wall of bullet points

[00:08:31] And put it behind you so that you have to go, look, look at the screen instead of the people.

[00:08:36] Exactly. So you have to turn your back on. Yeah.

[00:08:41] Now you may I don't know if you know this about me or even if you've ever even seen me speak, but I never used PowerPoint. I just put the stuff that I want to display on my desktop. And then, you know, what I've seen is, you know, typically your time gets cut. And so then people are like either talking faster to try to get the slides or people feel that if they skip through some slides, the audience feels they're cheated. So the only time I use PowerPoint, I mean, I used it 30 times out of three thousand speeches because I was a spokesperson for CBS, and they owned one of the biggest websites in the world. And I was a spokesperson and I had to do 30 speeches and they made me use it. But other than that, you know, I never use it for that. I use it for webinars and right, and I use it if I need a graphic or an ad or something I want to make and it's easy, you know, to do it. I mean, I'm sure I'm not as slick like you, but but it's a great program, and I had a website for years called, Oh, what's something like? I hate PowerPoint or something or PowerPoint stinks. That's what it was. Yeah. And it was Powerpointstinks.com.

[00:09:59] Microsoft never came after, you know,

[00:10:01] They didn't, which was, you know, it never went really big because I know that they would have had that. But what was interesting was is that there was it was full of Google AdSense ads for PowerPoint, right?

[00:10:16] So that was that was your key word. Yeah.

[00:10:21] But now are you also a word expert because I need somebody to call when I get stuck?

[00:10:28] Well, I'm not. I wouldn't call myself a word expert to the level of being an MVP in it, but I wrote a lot of books for major publishers and they I had to use word. So I'm pretty good at it.

[00:10:40] Yeah, I run into things once in a while with, you know, with place placement of graphics. Some sometimes one

[00:10:48] Me, one Colombe. Next time it happens. And if I can't get you the answer, I'll find you somebody who

[00:10:53] Oh, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, one one guy told me. Instead of inserting the graphic into the text, insert it, insert a text box and then insert the graphic into it into a text box. Do you ever hear of that?

[00:11:06] No. But I think what you're missing is that when you insert an image, then you can change its alignment. There's a little box in the upper right hand corner and you can set it to type or square, and that lets you move it around where you want because by default, it's kind of aligned with the text. And so if you want to move that image around and place it exactly where you want and if you want the text to wrap around it, you should choose either square or type.

[00:11:38] Well, I wish you could just drag it exactly where you wanted it and

[00:11:41] Leave can you can when you choose that type of of alignment?

[00:11:45] Oh, that's. Yeah. Because with me, it just jumps all over the place and I've finally give up on it. But call me, I will well and put in captions on and stuff like that. I try. But but let's get into your you're really a prolific product creator yourself. So what tips do you have for people that are, you know, that are experts, but they, you know, it's the expertise is only in their head.

[00:12:15] The first thing I say for people, and I see this a lot, people have knowledge and they want to get it out of the world and they are experts and it's still in their head is to get it out of your head because it's actually a burden to, like, have to. Remember all of this and think about it, so the first thing is to create an outline. And after I started writing books, I mentioned this, we talked about AutoCAD. They ended up giving me a book called The AutoCAD Bible, which went into 17 editions and it started at 800 pages and ended up at twelve hundred pages. And you can imagine the table of contents for that. When you submit a proposal to a publisher, you have to give them the table of contents. So I really, really learned how to organize a huge, huge amount of content. But even if you're doing it, just informally, writing out an outline is the first step. Lots of people don't start writing. It doesn't have to be a book. It could be a course or any type of product. They don't stop it because it seems like such a huge, big project. But once you have an outline, you just start writing below each heading. Mm hmm. And then it's just organized there for you, and you're breaking it up into small little pieces and it's much, much easier.

[00:13:27] Yeah. And. Now, this might be blasphemy to you, but but I tell people one way to to to start out, to get your outline, to see all the topics that should be covered, we go to Amazon and pull up a book on the topic and then click Look in, and they usually show you the table of contents into the books and you say, Oh gee, I forgot I should have something about that in there. So they kind of did the work for you.

[00:13:57] So, yeah, look, certainly looking at the competitors is something everybody does. I don't, I don't think that's blasphemy.

[00:14:03] Oh, good. So what's the what's the next site? You start fleshing out stuff?

[00:14:08] Yes, you do start fleshing out stuff. But I also wanted to give another tip because I think this is something that affects about half of the people in the world. So I discovered that some people are good at writing and some people are better at speaking. It's just one of them or the other is going to be more natural for you. So I had an experience working with this woman. We were working. She was a professor. We were working on a website about how to get a job at a, you know, after you finished college and she's trying to sit down in front of the computer and write the text of this web page about it. I can't do it. I don't know why I say it all the time. And so I said, You know what? Get up. I'm going to sit in front of the computer and then you just tell it to me. And it just like was so easy for her to speak it. And that was how I discovered that for some people, speaking is easier than writing. And so if writing is hard for you, then you should dictate in both word and Google Docs let you just dictate. And even though you'll need to be some cleaner, you can. If that's easy for you, you can get stuff out really, really quickly. First of all, you can speak faster than you can write. And so that just might be another easy way for you to get. The content out

[00:15:22] There, are you in favor of ghostwriters for those kind of people like they they, you know, get all the major ideas on tape or something and then have someone finish it off because some people are, you know, suck at writing.

[00:15:37] So I would call that an editor, I think, as opposed to a ghostwriter. I mean, I do feel like if you're an expert, you need to put that expertise somewhere. Whether you're dictating it, you know, it needs to get into a document somehow. And then, yeah, somebody could clean it up as well. That wouldn't be a no.

[00:15:56] I thought a couple of your books I saw on Amazon that you were a co-author. So yes, what's the difference there between, you know, because you do see celebrities, you know, with another person listed, but the celebrity didn't write crap. They just were the celebrity, and the other person wrote the whole thing. So.

[00:16:15] Yes, yes. Like the books Donald Trump wrote. Exactly.

[00:16:18] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're right. I think so. When you're in a co-author, how do you really work with that other person? If they're I mean, they I assume with with you, they were really contributing something important.

[00:16:31] Yes. So I I I have one book that I was like the developmental editor for that I didn't understand the topic at all. It was called Jakarta Struts for Dummies. And you don't know what Jakarta stresses. You don't. You don't Tom really great

[00:16:51] That my valedictorian status has been put on hold for that.

[00:16:57] Well, I didn't either before I did it. So it's a framework for programming for Java programming, and the other person on the book was the expert in it, but he had never written anything any before. And so I'm listed as a co-author. They actually wanted to put me first, and I told them that was ridiculous because I was a well-known author at that time, so they did put me second, which made a lot more sense. And he would write, and then I would make it make sense because we're talking about programming, which doesn't make sense to too many people. But all the other books I've written as a co-author, we took different sections of the book. So, for example, my Flash for Dummies books. The person I co-wrote with was a programmer and part. There were parts of flesh that required programming, and so he did that section and I did the graphics section of that book. We kind of split the book or my books with Connie of Greene. Do you know Connie? I do. Yeah. So I have two books with Connie Regan Greene, one for speakers and one for authors, and they're both about how to turn your speaking or your writing into an income stream into an online business. And we just took separate chapters and split it up because we're both experts on it. That's how I prefer to work.

[00:18:10] Got it. Got it. Got it. So. So so once they start, there's a lot more to get in the book out. I mean, you can go self-publishing or you can try for a major publisher. So what which way do you lean?

[00:18:26] I started, as we've discussed with major publishers, because that was the work that I got. Now I want to talk about that power that AutoCAD book. It was called AutoCAD Bible. They have Bibles on a lot of different things and it was huge. So the full price of that book was $50, and I, my royalty was 10 percent of the wholesale price. So that was twenty five dollars. So I got two dollars and fifty cents per book of a $50 book.

[00:18:56] Now, I mean, you know, you know me.

[00:18:58] So that's like, yeah, so so that book sold a lot, and the rest of my my down payment for my house came from mostly that book. It sold a lot. For years, you know, people talk about being a best seller when they're a best seller for five minutes on Amazon. That book was in the top three of AutoCAD books for years, actually. It's a great book. It's gone now. It's over. May it rest in peace. But as I developed my first website. As an author platform, and I had started developing an email list and started blogging, I realized I was kind of learning. I see other people publishing books. I realized that I could create a piece. So this was a is a third option to the one that you mentioned of self-publishing, like on Amazon or going with a major publisher. But the first place to start is to create a PDF and just sell it on your website. And that was the first thing I did, and I realized that I could write my own book, sell it off my website and get like ninety seven percent of rather than 10 percent of the wholesale price. And that was how I started really doing business online. My first book, two books, were about AutoCAD. One was 101 tips every PowerPoint user should know. That was my first book in 2004, and then I wrote Slide Design for non designers, and those books have sold thousands of copies, made me thousands of dollars, never going on Amazon just off of my own platform.

[00:20:30] It's very interesting because that's that's the way I started all my students as a PDF book. It costs nothing to develop. Ninety seven percent profit. I sold my first one in the year 2000.

[00:20:44] Ok, you beat me by four years Tom.

[00:20:47] And then I sold tens of thousands of them by then. And also another thing that a lot of people that listen this know, know about me is that, you know, many of them well, I won't say many of them, but some of them are giveaways that lead to something bigger to buy. And I have one have one book that I wrote in a layover at McCarran Airport. I remember it vividly. It took me four hours. And it's brought in as of this morning, three point sixty eight million. Wow. Yeah, so because it teaches you how to do something, but you can't do it unless you have the tool to do it, and then I get an affiliate commission on the on that, so.

[00:21:30] Exactly, exactly.

[00:21:31] Yes. Kinds of things you can do with these.

[00:21:34] Right. And in fact, the book I wrote, one of the books I wrote with kind of Reagan Green for authors is exactly how to do that is how to take a book. And then inside the book, have a link to your website where you're selling people things and and and having offers and so on like that. So. Absolutely. That's the best way to start. And that was how I started, and it was how I learned to do things like put a buy button on a sales page, you know, really simple things that you have to do in order to make money online.

[00:22:08] Yeah. And yeah, when we say quick, four hours is pretty quick, you know,

[00:22:12] So it is pretty quick and most people don't finish it in four hours. But I think once you have the concept there and if you have an outline and especially if you're dictating. And I found out recently, you can even do this dictation both in word and on Google Docs, on your phone. So you can do it like while you're cooking or while you're exercising or while you're waiting in line for, I don't know to get tested for COVID. Whatever people wait in line for these days, you can really just do it anywhere.

[00:22:44] So are you saying that that word automatically transcribes it for you?

[00:22:49] Well, they have something called a feature called Dictate, and you click it and you start dictating it. It'll automatically transcribe, and Google Docs does the same there. It's called something slightly going to tools, and it's called voice type or something like that.

[00:23:03] So if you're if you're fairly, fairly clear, what percentage of accuracy is it?

[00:23:10] Well, I would say 95 percent. Oh, it's quite good. It the place that it loses is things like and you can tell it, period. You can say period new paragraph or new line. You can, if you know to do that, you can get better accuracy. It's more like the formatting and punctuation that it gets wrong.

[00:23:31] Well, also probably, you know, like if it was Finkelstein or Antion or something, you know,

[00:23:37] Some yes, of course, nicknames and things like that and certain things that will get wrong. And you can, if you want, you can stop and correct it at the time and go back. But I just recommend just going through it and then editing it afterwards.

[00:23:50] So you're saying Google Docs has a similar function?

[00:23:53] Yes, it does.

[00:23:55] Awesome. Yeah. So so folks, you probably already have this on your computer, both of these cases and or access to them. And so there's no excuse, really, Ellen, for people that are experts to get this stuff out in a saleable format, right?

[00:24:12] I agree. I think that once you have that done, I do feel like you should go out and hire somebody on fiber to do your cover to make it look nice. Hmm. And there certainly are things that you can do to make the e-book look nice. And in fact, I was just teaching this to recently. Things like knowing the features of word like making borders and doing call outs, which is box text and making nice headings. One of the things I learned when I wrote for dummies books is how important it is. They have a rule, they have a lot of rules. But one of them is if you're going to make a list of three things, it has to be broken out into a bullet when a bullet points. And so you break out the text so that it's much easier to read. It's a principle of of web design also and just make things colorful and lots of. That's another thing about self-publishing an e-book is it's really easy. I know that you're having a little trouble with this, but I will help you with this. But it's really easy to put images in an e-book in word or Google Docs that on your own. But when you go to publish something on Amazon, that's a little more complicated because of their format.

[00:25:28] Yeah, and I get it done in PDF. It's just that I wish it was more precise and easy where I could just drag exactly where I wanted and and so I just have to improve my skills on that. But I definitely believe in graphics because, you know, Ellen, I think I've mentioned this the other day. People are morons. They can't read anymore, you know, and like the state of Oregon says, you don't have to pass reading or math to get a high school diploma. You know, so yeah. Yeah, so you got to open up white space and graphics. I know you're a big fan of graphics and the

[00:26:03] Big fan of graphics. Exactly.

[00:26:05] Yeah, yeah. And in fact, one of what something you had here, I said that the tell and show method that you developed. Tell us about that.

[00:26:15] Sure. So and this is based on some research by the. But that when you present a slide, it has to do with PowerPoint, but you can take those concepts and apply them in a lot of different situations. You want to tell somebody the point and then you want to show it. And so you show it with some kind of graphic. It can be a photograph. It can be a chart. It can be a diagram, whatever it is. But people need to visualize it. And just talking doesn't help people understand as well. And also too many words don't. So the idea is that on any one slide, you basically have a title. You know, just some simple statement and then you that tells what you're saying and then you show it.

[00:27:02] Yeah, and the only caveat here is make sure you have the rights to use the graphic because,

[00:27:10] Oh yes, of course, absolutely.

[00:27:11] Yeah, there there are companies that their whole business model legal firms to to just hit you with a federal copyright infringement lawsuit for a quarter of a million dollars and then settle that out for four to seven thousand bucks, just for one graphics. So don't don't pooh pooh this and don't trust Google images to say that it's OK to use stuff that's not trustworthy.

[00:27:36] I agree. And in fact, even in PowerPoint, there is a Bing search where you can search for images and supposedly they tell you if it's acceptable or not, and it's not reliable. So if it's published somewhere else, you should assume that it's copyrighted. So you should, you know, use something like Pixabay or Unsplash or by an account of of images, you know, stock images.

[00:28:06] Yeah. There's a new one on this thing called pixels. Yes, pixels is just gorgeous photographs, and then I pay for a thing from clip art. I've been doing it for years. I use it almost every day and it's got cartoons and it's got pixels, photographs and clipboard and everything you could ever want in a million years. So it's cheap, so. So just don't don't play with that idea because I don't want to hear you crying the blues when you, you know, get that federal lawsuit against you.

[00:28:41] And by the way, Pixels has a PowerPoint added in so you can get those pictures from within PowerPoint. And yeah, so absolutely just do the right thing. Yeah, can.

[00:28:53] Canva is very popular, too. We've had all this e-book students have made their covers on Canva, and they have hundreds and hundreds of templates where you can just change the. You even have to go to fibre, you can just change the text. And they're beautifully designed already. So. So but anyway, with with them, when you when you get done with the PDF book, then if you want to turn it in to Amazon, it is a little more complicated. But they did make it easier with this Kindle create software, so they have it for Mac and PC, but you definitely put the graphics in separately because if you just try to import your word, document God help you. Yeah, or Jeff Jeff Bezos help you. Well, we got to take a brief sponsor break when we come back. We ask Elon what a typical day is like for her and her business because there's a lot of entrepreneurs here want to be entrepreneurs and, you know, screw it and want to screw that commute, and we'll see how Elon has built her lifestyle business. So. So folks, about twenty twenty four or twenty five years ago, I kind of turned the internet marketing guru world on its head and the guys like me. And there wasn't as many women in those days, but we're charging fifty or a hundred thousand bucks up front to help you learn this digital and internet marketing stuff.

[00:30:19] Well, I knew a lot of these people, a lot of them were rip offs, and you give them that money up front. You never see them again. So I said, you know, it's too risky for small businesses. So I thought, you know, I'll I'll charge an entry fee and then I'll tie my success to their success. So for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to net two hundred thousand. Wow. People really like this idea, and they knew I wouldn't disappear on them because I wouldn't get my fifty thousand and and seventeen hundred students later. It's still going strong. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful mentor program in the field of internet and digital marketing ever. I triple I always triple dare people to put their program up against mine, and nobody will do it because you have an immersion weekend at this giant retreat center. You have a separate trip where we shoot videos and our TV studio for you and put the graphics on and and edit them and send them to you. And all our training is one on one.

[00:31:20] We don't believe in group training because if I'm talking to an advanced person and beginning beginners or lost, and if I'm talking to the beginners, the advanced people are bored. So no, it's not up to my standard. So for me and my entire staff, it's one on one. We talk to you where you are and help you proceed, and you also get a scholarship that you can either use yourself or gift to the school that I talked about where we're helping the persons with disabilities. It's the only licensed dedicated internet marketing and digital marketing school in the country, certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's. High quality distance learning. So that's just a few of the things that make this so unique and so successful, so check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. I'm very accessible. Love to talk to you about it.

[00:32:20] Let's get back to the main event. We've got prolific content creator Ellen Finkelstein here. And Ellen, what's what's a typical day look like for you to get up early? Do you have some kind of routine? What do you eat? What's what's up?

[00:32:35] You want to know what I ate this morning? Yeah, so. So first of all, I'm not an early morning riser. I'm not an early morning person, but I get up at 7:00. I do meditate and I practice transcendental meditation and an advanced program called the Cities Program. And that actually takes me almost an hour and a half in the morning. Wow. So I start work at 10, and I just one of the things I love about the entrepreneurial life is that I can I can mold it around what I want to do in this case, meditating in the morning, and then I do it again in the late afternoon,

[00:33:08] Another hour and a half. Yeah, wow. Wow.

[00:33:12] So I so I work for about 10 to four between four and five. I usually exercise, do some exercise and rest and relax. So on like that, I don't work in the evening, except maybe for checking some email or some social media or something seems really urgent, whatever it is, but it's comfortable that way. Now I do work on the evening, on the weekends because I'm really not working that many hours each day, so I'm taking an hour for lunch. So like, tend to that's like a five hour a day. So I do some work on the on the weekends as well, but not with with clients. So it's a little bit more relaxed and I learn I'm always trying to learn new things. So Saturday is my learning day, for example, but basically that's that's my routine. I'm a vegetarian and you want to know that? Yeah, I had I had a smoothie for breakfast this morning.

[00:34:11] Now what kind of toothpaste to use to? I mean, we really want to

[00:34:14] Know if you want to. If you want to wait, I'll go into the bathroom and check.

[00:34:19] So you know, what cracks me up is that Tim Ferriss at that wrote that four hour work week book, you know? Yes, he like works 80 hours a week to promote his four hour workweek.

[00:34:35] So when you're working for yourself, it's it's a very different feeling. You don't feel like you're putting in hours. And so and everything's much more flexible. And when my kids were little, I needed the flexibility to be with them. And now I have the flexibility, maybe not during COVID. But you know, I have the flexibility to travel where I live in Iowa. But now we're in Florida. We can I can move around, I can put my computer in a bag and I can be working wherever I want. So I just love that.

[00:35:05] So you got a couple of things you got to give away and then a program tell about that stuff.

[00:35:11] Yeah. So we were talking about creating products, and I was talking about outlining and all of these things. So I do have a free offer called a product creation worksheet. And it's basically what it does is it goes through the process of conceiving of your product, including some market research and then actually creating the product and then marketing it. I'm a big fan of helping people not just do one of those things. So, you know, I can help people create a product. But if I can't help people sell it, then what's the point? So I like to include all of that includes creating a marketing plan and actually promoting it. It's just a free worksheet and that's at change the world marketing slash freebies. I have a whole menu item called freebies and you'll find it there. Everybody will find something they like there. And then I have a course called Create and Sell a profitable online product, which is an extension of that. It's actually a three module course. It's called plan. The modules, a plan build and promote and just shows you how to create a product plan, what it should be, so that it will sell and then create it easily and quickly and then actually promote it and sell it.

[00:36:33] That's what we like because just, you know, that's one of the things that a lot of creative people fall down on. They're great at creating the product, and then they want to create another product without selling the first one.

[00:36:47] Yeah, I yes, I absolutely agree. First of all, very often creative people don't like the idea of marketing, right? They also aren't really good business people, necessarily. And so sometimes I've been lately really harping. On the idea that you have to have an audience and so, so many people, and this is so sad, they'll create a product or a course and they'll put it out there. But nobody comes because not enough people see it because they haven't built up an audience either their own email list or social media or through partners. So they're. Another thing I just had to build your audience.

[00:37:23] Well, yeah. And then they also have to do a different type of writing, which is advertising copy, you know, to make you

[00:37:30] Want to write? Yes. Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:37:33] So it's more than just putting the product together. You have to do all of them if you want the success. So. So, Ellen, thanks so much for coming on, then give us a peek into your life. Well, I was I mean, we didn't hear about the toothpaste, but maybe next time.

[00:37:49] Tom, we'll keep that a secret. And yeah, well, nobody has to know what kind of toothpaste I use.

[00:37:56] So OK, folks. So now the the product creation worksheet is that changed the world marketing freebies? And where do they find the course

[00:38:10] So they should just go to change the world market index products? Ok. Rather than giving a long thing, yeah, they just change the world marketing. They'll see on the menu. There's one thing for products and this one thing for freebies, and if they look down, they'll see. They'll see that.

[00:38:24] And there's other products there, as I think, Oh yeah, that might be perfect for you if if you have specific needs and stuff. So. So anyway, good. Good job there. Thank you. Ellen, telling us about your lifestyle business. I'm just picturing meditating three hours a day. Wow. I mean,

[00:38:46] It's kind of fun, actually. It's not. It's not boring.

[00:38:49] I might do it in front of the refrigerator, but meditate on what am I going to eat right now? So. So anyway, but that's the beauty of this. You built a business that works around your lifestyle, and we just love it. So thanks for coming on.

[00:39:08] Thank you for having me, Tom.

[00:39:10] Ok, everybody check out changetheworldmarketing.com/freebies and then /products to check out all our own stuff. Don't forget to help out with the persons with disabilities in our school. All those links will be in, and along with Ellen's links, will be in the show notes. So, catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.