563 – A variety of Grab Bag queries: Tom talks Ask Tom A Question

Episode 563 – Ask Tom A Question
[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 three of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to do another ask Tom a question. These are compilations of questions I get all the time seven days a week, and so I thought I'd pick some ones that apply to everybody. There's just a mishmash of things here, and you know, I'm sure there'll be something here that will make you think, Oh, I should be doing that or I shouldn't be doing that. All right. So we're going to talk about today. Hope you didn't miss episode five? Sixty two. That was Ellen Finkelstein. She is a prolific writer, but she's also a PowerPoint expert. And, you know, I never use PowerPoint in my speeches, but I do use them in other ways for making graphics and doing webinars and stuff. And boy, she is the tops in that, and she's got some other interesting stuff for you. So check that out. Episode 562 and to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number. Hers was 562. Today is 563.

[00:01:35] All right, let me get a couple of questions, and then I want to tell you about our how our program is going for the persons with disabilities, but but the first thing is first question was what's the best way to use autoresponders? Well, first of all, there isn't any best way, but there is.

[00:01:56] A lot of great ways you can use autoresponders to take care of customers and all kinds of stuff, so. So one of the things is what I call customer service. Automated customer service. This means that when somebody buys something for you or ask a question or something, you can have an automated response. So it could be in the middle of the night and they can get a response from you. You can also use chat bots for this, which is a modern way to do things. But auto responders, if you ask. Some of the people have been around as long as me and. Ask them. What are some of the most powerful things ever invented for online marketing? Almost everybody would say the sequential autoresponders sequential means that it you can have follow up messages in a campaign where in the old days when the auto responder was first invented. You could just do one message, but now you can do follow up messages, so customer service is one. And that customer service, good customer service and fast customer service leads to more money and more sales. Now next thing is automated upsells. Now, before I do an upsell with an auto responder, I want to make sure people are getting at least three emails from me, especially if they're new.

[00:03:23] That helped them to give them tips or do some way to take care of them so that they get used to getting emails from me. That helped them in some ways, so that way, when I do send an email to just sell something, then they're not like, Oh, this guy, that's all this guy does is sell me, sell me, sell me. No, they're saying, OK, well, that's part of the deal. And then I might send some more of that. Just help them say so. I give him a lot of free stuff away that that helps him. So that's another way, automated upsells, so after maybe they purchase something and they get a bunch of emails that help them, then I say, Hey, here's a coupon code. This is another just a sales technique. It's automated because of the auto responder. Here's a coupon code. Since you bought Product A, you're not going to get Product B at a discount, and I get automated sales coming in sometimes long after the original sale. And the more expensive the first product was, I usually go longer before I upsell them because I don't want them to feel like I'm nickel and diming them to death. So, so, so these are all little psychological things, but it's automated using. Autoresponders. Now, another thing you can do with autoresponders is E! Courses either free or paid, and you can have an E course that I think I have a whole episode on this.

[00:04:49] I don't know the episode number off hand, Larry. I'll maybe put it in the show notes, but E! Courses are delivered like once a day or once a week. I usually do the free courses once a day to keep because the people are hot, so you want to get keep after them. And then if it's a paid course and maybe they have homework in between each part of the course, then you can do once a week or whatever you know makes sense for you. But it's all delivered automatically. That's the whole thing. And then UNE course is also the course and the tips or whatever you're giving could be in the actual email. Or it could be a link to a page on your website, which is kind of a better way because you get a website visit which looks good to Google, and they're on the website for a longer period of time, which looks good to Google and all the search engines because they're the time on site adds up to your, you know, search engine stuff. And they can see a lot of other things that you have there while they're at your site that they might want to buy. So so the modern way to do it is to not put the whole course in the email. It's to put the link to the page on your site that has the part of the course.

[00:06:08] Part one, part two, part three, whatever. And don't don't name the pages one two three four five because people can just guess and find the next page automatically. Then there's a lot more to E! Courses than this, but that that'll get you started anyway. Autoresponders. There's no best way whoever asked that question. It's just they're great and use them. Make sure you use them. I probably have five hundred sequences of autoresponders going out right now while I'm sitting here recording this. Ok, next question, our membership or membership sites still viable? Yep, I'm in some, I have four of them myself copywriting nine oh one brutal self defense, great internet marketing, training, amazing public speaking. I think I had another one I can't remember right off the top, my head. But but anyway, you know, the thing is, is some of them, I don't have to think about much. Some of them I do have to because membership sites, they could be a lifetime membership where they just buy something and they have access to it forever. And I don't have to, you know, put new stuff up all the time. Or it could be a membership site that like great internet marketing training where I'm always doing new stuff, say keep keep members happy. So, yes, it's a great thing. Now if you can niche or if you're, you know, if you're a cool person, you'll say niche.

[00:07:37] If you're if you're niche it down so that it's very specific. You'll get more people and they'll stay longer because they're very interested in that topic. It's a little bit harder to just do general kind of membership sites. And it's a recurring income for you. You can build community in there where people never want to quit because they made friends inside the site say, and there's discussion boards. Once you get enough people, you can have discussion boards. So yeah, there's still very viable. Ok, next question. Should I put my services on my home page? Well. Here's the thing about home pages, and here's a concept over the past, I don't know four or five years that you really need to pay attention to. And it's called glanceable marketing. So when someone hits your home page, you want them to no one know immediately that they're in the right place and you can use taglines, which is less one quick line to say what you're about. And, you know, big headline of what you're about or what the topic of the site is about so that the people can instantly say, Oh, this is perfect, this is what I was looking for. See, if you just start blabbering on about all your credentials and all your products and services and how you serve enterprises and how you serve solopreneurs will and you know, just all this heavy duty dense text, you're just asking for trouble.

[00:09:16] You're just, I mean, you're not you're asking for nothing because people will bounce. They'll just say, Oh, this is too hard, especially when they look at it on a cell phone because you know you're you're one paragraph, say, and what you do might fill up the whole screen on a cell phone. And then people look at it and they say, Oh man, it's too hard. And, you know, I'm very brash about this by saying people are morons. You have to. That's the way you have to think about the world nowadays, and it's a sad state of affairs. But I mean, look at that. The state of Oregon says, Oh, you don't have to pass a reading or math test to get a high school diploma. I mean, what is the world coming to? All right. But you know, it's something that you've got to face as a marketer. And so you you've got to make it easy for people to to get to know you. And by dumping your, you know, everything you ever did in your whole life on the home page, you're just asking for people to bounce because it's too much to absorb what you want to do. And this is not even a new concept. I learned this from nineteen ninety six when Cory Rudolph was helping me. That you want to lead people to things, get them engaged, get them clicking deeper.

[00:10:33] But don't throw everything on the home page, make them click deeper when they want to read more and see more about you, your home page should be to grab them. Let them know they're in the right place and then click deeper to your stuff. You load too much stuff on there. God help you. Ok, let's see. And remember, that's called glanceable marketing, they need to be able to glance at it and immediately know it's right for them. Ok, next question is, do you like PDF? E-books better than Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook? And and I the eye book kind of stuff. Well, I don't like them better or worse. I like both PDF. This is what I always start my students out as a PDF e-book and then converted to Amazon Kindle. You are wasting your time with Barnes and Noble Nook. Amazon Kindle is the nine billion pound gorilla. There's they've got the market, and you can't do certain deals with Amazon if your book is all everywhere else is an electronic book because Amazon has this thing called CDP Kindle Direct Publishing, but their select program means that they will give your book away for five days out of every 90. Pretty sure that's still the deal. Well, and you say, well, what good is that? Well, this is really good because if you're smart, every book you do will lead to some big sale of something a membership, speaking engagements, consulting contracts.

[00:12:15] That's what books are for in my not so humble opinion of marketing. You know, they're there are hassle, right? But you you should always make it lead to something bigger. So if Amazon's massive amount of people can give away, you know, thousands of your books where you might not be able to sell thousands right off the bat, then? Now you got the chance, you know, thousands more chances of getting the big stuff, which is where the big money is, say so you don't want to to jeopardize that relationship with Amazon by fooling around with, you know, Barnes and Noble Nook, which I don't know, probably nobody even heard of that say so unless you're just a barnes and Noble, you know, disciple or something. So now with PDF, you can get more money for them. They're extremely easy to create Microsoft Word. Convert it to Adobe PDF. That's it. And no cost involved, and you can get the same price or more than you can get for regular books because it's immediate gratification. You get all the money, you sell it off your website, you can have affiliate links in it. You don't have Amazon looking over your shoulder to make sure that you don't put too many affiliate links in there and none of that. So PDF is great. Kindle is great in its own right, but don't waste your time on the other stuff. All right, next question, can I email a list I typed in from a directory? Absolutely, you can.

[00:13:54] And if you want to get kicked off your website and if you want to be labeled a spammer and shut down on your email service, go ahead, do it. I get this all the time. People say, Well, I got this list and you know, they're all. They're all accountants. I'm an accountant. I should be able to email, well, you just don't know what's going on because you're violating the canned spam act. You're sending what's called, you see unsolicited commercial email. And no, you can't do it unless you want to be a spammer and get kicked off and you say, Well, I get all kinds of spam all the time, you know? Well, yeah, but those people are professional spammers and they're switching, hosting services, switching email services. They're usually highly technical, so they can they can manipulate and start, start their own server. And and then when they get kicked off, they do it again somewhere else. You know, you don't want that hassle or that reputation. So said, you know, now people have made a lot of money spamming. I mean, there's a book, an older book called Spam Kings, but most of that stuff has been eliminated nowadays. But no, you're going to kill your reputation if you do that. It's absolutely you're a spammer, you know, you know, I've heard every excuse. Well, I'm part. I pay my dues to the organization, blah blah blah.

[00:15:20] None of that matters. You are a spammer. If you if you do that, so don't do it. All right, next question, should I install Yost plug in on my website? Well. I'm pretty sure Yost is a plugin for WordPress, so you got to have a WordPress site, I believe, to use Yost, Yost and all in one SEO pack or ways that make it very easy for a mere mortal to do the search engine optimization on their website. And now, many of you know, for six, seven years now, I've been I blew off search engine optimization. You know, I just go to paid traffic, which I can control very quickly. But that doesn't mean I don't want you to to or that I want you to shoot yourself in the foot by doing stupid things and and not doing easy things that could help you with the search engines, I want you to do that. And these plug ins, Yost and all in one SEO pack is what makes it easy for you to do that. So answer is yes, I would do that. Yes, I would do a little bit of training on it so that every time you put a web page up that you do it properly and you have a better chance of getting free traffic from the search engines without spending a lot of money on search engine optimization, people that tell you, Well, we'll get you some.

[00:16:47] I just got to a guy the other day that was at a networking meeting, and the SEO guy there was saying, Yeah, it's eight hundred dollars a month and we should be able to get you some traction in about six months. You know, for that six times a thousand eight hundred dollars and maybe you get some traction in six months and probably not. Ok. Because I know these people. And so with that amount of money, a fraction of that, you could have traffic coming in tomorrow. That's buying your stuff with paid traffic. So you're better off learning to pay traffic. But yes, you should have a search engine plug in all in one SEO pack or Yost and just do the basics of the title and keyword and meta description and so forth. It very, very easy to learn. All right. All right now, before I give you the last one. I want to remind you about our program to help persons with disabilities. I've always known that my school is just perfect for persons with disabilities because they don't have to travel. They can legitimately get high quality distance learning at home and they can legitimately be hired at home and or start their own business or both. So. So this is perfect for them. So I started this program with three people in it now. We want to go to five people and we want to hire some persons with disabilities to help run the program.

[00:18:21] But anyway, they're progressing really well. And two of the people are blind and they're making videos, and it's just very inspiring. So love to have your help on this. You can visit the school site at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and click through to the Go Fund Me campaign. And any little bit you kick in is as great and highly appreciated. And hey, if you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor somebody yourself so you can get in touch with me and I can help arrange that for you. So. So anyway, it's something you can really be proud to be a part of, and it's going beautifully and we're really going to change these people's lives. And then I took a grant writing course. So when I prove the concept with these three to five people, then I'm going to roll it out to big companies and foundations and help hundreds or thousands of people with disabilities. So. So love to have your help on this. All right. So the last question here is, do you do text marketing? Well, I believe in text marketing for certain markets. You got to be careful about it, though. And I have done some of it. But you know, there's a it's more expensive than email, but people do check their test text right away where they might sit on email for who knows how long or never check it.

[00:19:44] So there's pros and cons to text marketing. The reason I don't go crazy with it is because I got a lot of people when I started doing this. That said, Oh Tom, I was just getting on a plane and your text came in and it was a promotional thing. And you know, and I almost missed my plane, you know, so. So I got a little negative feedback of the text marketing because it is very intrusive. But I get some of these political ones four or five times a day. You know, please give me some money, give me money. I need money. So. So yes, I have done it. I don't do a lot of it. I haven't done it for several years, at least, and I believe in it. I think it can be a good thing, but you need to tread lightly and make sure that you're not overstating your wealth. Come in something that's so personal when somebody's cell phone that they have with them all the time. You don't want to bug them to death and get a bad reputation. So, so yeah, I think it can be effective, but don't overdo it. All right. Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Send your questions my way and when I get a bunch of them, then I do one of these episodes every once in a while and we will catch you on the next episode. See you later.