451 – Are you making these common online mistakes?: Tom talks Booby Traps

Episode 451 – Booby Traps
[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 four hundred fifty one of Screw the Commute podcast. We're talking about booby traps today. And I'm going to cover a bunch of things that sabotage not only new online marketers, but even experienced business people. And some of them are the worst. I got to tell you, I'm absolutely sure you're making some of these mistakes. All right. So we'll get that the minute. Hopefully, this episode for 50, that was our big four hundred and fifty eight episode. We had Judith Briles on here talking about book marketing and in an off the wall idea that in a few months sold 10000 books at a place you would never guess in a million years. OK, so that was Episode 450 and of course, to find an episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number 450 for her. All right. How did you like me to send you lots of money? How about that? Yeah, well, if you refer me and my products and services, we have a very robust affiliate program. So you can make anywhere from eight dollars and fifty cents there for a referral of a simple ebook or something all the way up to 5000 bucks for a speaking engagement.

[00:01:43] So email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you want to hear more about that and pick up a copy of our automation e-book, we sell it for 27 bucks, but it is free for listening to the show and you will thank me. I'm telling you, you're going to thank me because if you just used a couple of the things in this, your workload is going to go down, way down, your speed is going to go way up and that speed is important. I'm actually going to talk about it today about how I ethically steal customers from other people because they're too slow to get back to him. All right. So pick that up. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet. It does all kinds of cool stuff and you can take us with you on the road. All right. Well, I normally talk about my school now before we get into the main event, but I'm going to jump that up a little bit higher in that we've got this big promotion going on with the school to help people or persons with physical disabilities. So we've got to go fund me campaign to finance the whole thing.

[00:03:04] We're going to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. And we're going to really change the lives of these people, because not only can they study legitimately from home, they can be hired legitimately from home, which is kind of obvious now because of the pandemic. It's always been that way. But now it's in the forefront and they can start their own business, too, if they want. So this is where really change in people's lives. And I'm very excited about it. So so check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you can see the program. Please contribute to the go fund me any any little bit helps if you're so inclined and your flush with cash and really want to change somebody's life, you can actually sponsor a person by yourself and that's it cost a few bucks. But boy, there's no nothing like change in people's lives, I'll tell you that.

[00:04:03] All right. Let's get to the main event. I call these mistakes that people make "booby traps" because many of them are hidden and then they hurt you really bad before you even know what hit you. OK, so that's a booby trap online. I can teach new online marketers to do these things correctly, but the worst are experienced business people who have had great success in one field and then decide to go online and then they fail miserably.

[00:04:34] So your offline success does not necessarily translate into online success. Yeah, I was pretty darn successful before the commercial Internet came along in 1994, but even me, the continuous learner that I am, didn't make a nickel for the first two years until I got good training. In fact, one of the booby traps I'm going to discuss is expecting immediate results. I hear it all the time. Hey, Tom, I put up a great website and I have a great product, but no sales. This this Internet thing doesn't work. No. You naively think just because you watched this stupid Wick's ad on TV and put up a cute looking site that people will now flock to you and make you rich? Okay. No, that's not the way it works. That's the way they want you to think it works. But honest people like me are going to tell, you know, it's hard work. It's very worth it in the long run. It's made a wildly great lifestyle for me and wildly great amount of money. But I had to work for it. OK. Well, let me take a sidebar here, if you see national ads for Web stuff. You can be absolutely freakin sure. All right, they are targeting people that don't know any better and they're going to sell you every worthless thing ever invented because their sales staff can tell in about 10 seconds that you do not know what you're doing. I don't care how successful you were in some corporation or you know, any of that.

[00:06:14] They laugh at you because you don't know what you're doing in this field and they sell you all this stuff and you don't know that it's worthless till it's too late. So they and they have ads on TV that are supposed to be funny, showing people selling super weird stuff online. I kind of remember this one guy dropped some kind of goo on the floor and stepped in it. And now he's supposedly selling these these slippers, you know, are these shoes. I mean, this is just stupid stuff. All right. And those ads are meant to send the message to you that your regular good quality stuff will sell easily. They want you to think, hey, if those weird things sell, mine should sell. And one of the reasons experienced business people have trouble is because they think they know everything they need to know about business. And all they have to do is throw it online to double or even triple their sales. Many of them can't even do the basics on their cell phone or computer, and all of a sudden they think people are going to flock to their Instagram account and then buy stuff. I mean, I was on a call the other day. The whole hour got tied up because the person couldn't send a simple photograph from their desktop to their cell phone and vice versa.

[00:07:34] All right. So so no, you got you got to have skills to do the work online. Now, I have to say, one thing that I was blessed with was a dad who taught me about continuous learning, and he only went formally to the second grade. I can tell you without hesitation, he knew more than any Harvard graduate by far. In fact, he'd make them look like stupid kindergarteners already so smart. And I personally watched over a couple of years when I was in high school, my dad, like I said, only went to the second grade formally reading the entire 26 volume, plus all the supplements World Book Encyclopedia. It was unbelievable the things he knew. I wish people today had this attitude of continuous learning. And the attitude today is that I can be a dummy and Google will tell me what I need to know when something comes up. Well, well, those idiots, you sure have a lot of faith in batteries and and most of them can't even change a tire. If their cell phone was dead, they'd have to live the rest of their short life on the side of the road because they wouldn't know what to do with a bunch of morons. Well, with a continuous learning attitude, I'm always taking courses on stuff I just took an Instagram course and it's crazy, all the details and they're evolving all the time. You can't just take a course and then forget it for years.

[00:09:07] Just on that one tiny slice of online promotional vehicles. It was it was it took me, I don't know, 10 hour course, and then I had to go implement this stuff and then then Instagram changed. Really, they're doing updates all the time to try to keep from people going to tick tock. And so I had to start doing Real's and guides and all kinds of these other things that you never heard of. If you took a class a year ago, say so. So, yeah, you got to keep after this stuff. I took a course on chat boards. I've taken various courses on Facebook and YouTube advertising and tons more, and it never stops. If you're looking for something, you can set it and forget it. This ain't it now. Yeah, I have plenty of stuff that's bringing in money constantly over time, many years in a row. But even those things change for while. You can't just let it go forever. So you got to stay on this. Anyway, let's get into some of the booby traps, and in this, by no means is the entire list that would take 10 episodes. All right. I just want to tell you the things I run into on a daily basis with my students that have to be fixed for them to get the success that they want. Now, they're in no particular order and I'm going to reference lots of my other episodes where you can go deeper into the topic of these booby traps.

[00:10:34] OK, first thing is mobile, everything you do on your website, you must double and triple check it on cell phones and tablets. If you don't, things probably look weird where most people are working nowadays. So you've got to put mobile as a big, big priority. Next thing is key words. Now, this is something that's the number one episode of Screw the Commute because it's the biggest problem. I see everybody builds all the stuff they get what I call CSI guys. It's not the the TV show. It's crappy, stupid ideas. And then they throw up all this website and social media and then they hear crickets. So keywords research is the first thing that you do. Check it out, episode one. But you also need to jump up to Episode one 30. That shows the differences because of voice search. People don't search with talking into their cell phones and tablets as they do typing. So you have to make the adjustments for that. So that's episode one 30. All right, like I said, none of these are in order, although key words are should be one of the first things you do. All right, sales in discount coupon coupons. Now, if you're sensitive to harsh language, stick your finger in your ear right now, because I'm going to say something that's pretty much true. People are greedy bastards.

[00:12:01] People are greedy bastards. They buy from sales and discounts and they love that. So if you never have any sales, you're probably not going to sell as much. Now, there's some of you they're going to hold out. Well, I don't discount because I'm a hot shot. The Tom beats me at sales all the time because I'm too good to talk to people. So those are the speeches they roll in like their big shits. And then and then I take all the money. I love it because they come in with their entourage and and. Oh, you got to buy now because I'm getting on a plane because I'm important and you're not. And I just love that I take all the money. But but anyway. Yeah, you got sales and discount coupons and I cover now you got to have the ability to do that in your shopping cart. And that's why I cover shopping carts in episode 10, all the stuff you need to know about shopping carts. And of course we promote like crazy. And I have used for 19 years kick start cart. All right, now, social media is a necessary evil, OK? It actually, you know, I kind of hate social media because you got to fool with it so much. But but it ties into your Google ranking. Now, one of the things that people do for search engine optimization is inbound links. In other words, the more people that link to you that are quality sites, the better you look to Google because Google says, wow, if so many people are linking to the site, then it must be a good site.

[00:13:35] So they give you a higher ranking. Well, people cheat on this all the time with these people, these black hat optimizers. And so Google said, you know, all these links are crap. So if they were real, Google is saying in their in their mind. Somebody is talking about you, so if you're not don't have a big presence on social media, but you've got 40000 links to your site. They figure you're cheating, you're cheating, and somehow you're never going to see the light of day in the rankings. So, yeah, you got to do the social media. But my philosophy and everybody that works here knows the whole idea is to get them the heck off social media onto an email list, which I'll talk about email a little bit later. But you got to do it and everyone has a million details. Like I said, I took a 10 hour Instagram course, and by the time I was done, there was new things I had to learn about Instagram that weren't in course because it changes that fast. So, yeah, you got to you got to do social media. All right. Another booby trap is getting sucked in with fancy sales letters because some of these people are great copywriters so they can make anything look like the greatest thing that you ever needed in your whole life.

[00:15:00] And I've said for years, OK, here's here's my saying. You can take a piece of dog poop. And poor sugar on it all day long. It ain't going to turn into candy. Okay, so what they're doing with these fancy sales letters is taken dog poop, corn, sugar all over it in the form of words that make you think it's the greatest dog poop ever and then you buy it and waste your money. My students aren't allowed to spend any money unless they ask me, because after being through this for 27 years and seeing thousands and thousands of these letters back, you know, just just websites alone, I've critiqued over 10000 Web sites so I can see things that you're never going to see as a newbie or an established business person coming in to the online arena. So I save tons of money for my students, more than they'll ever spend with me, because I don't allow them to spend money on fancy stuff. And if it's even close to being legitimate, I buy it myself and check it out to make sure it is before I would let a student buy it. All right. So don't get sucked in with fancy sales. However, the next thing that's related to that is you must get good at copywriting. This is the number one skill in my entire 44 years in formal business long before the Internet came along is saying words, writing words that people make.

[00:16:34] People want to buy your stuff. And I want you to do this and use the techniques ethically. And I have a whole free webinar on that. We'll put the link in the show notes so that you can see I go really deep on five critical copywriting techniques and then show you all the rest of it you need to learn. So check that out in the schnitz. All right. Next thing is not using oh, and also I have a whole course that's one of the most DJ's. I mean, I paid 4500 bucks once just to take a course on headlines. All right. Had to fly to Texas for it. So this course is 297 and it's the most comprehensive you'll ever see anywhere. So that's at copywriting901.com. The fast track to writing words that sell. All right. Now back to the booby traps, not using video. You can use video for so many things. And if you don't think you look good on video, you can use screen capture video, which I have been using now for 21 years, making millions of dollars with screen capture video. This is where anything you can show on your computer screen can be captured on video and they hear you talking about what they're seeing. They never see your face. So if you don't like yourself on video, well, first of all, you should get over that because nobody cares.

[00:17:58] They care about the content unless you're a supermodel or something. Then you get lots of views, you know, doesn't matter at that point. But if you're not using video, you're not getting paid for four courses for free courses leading to other stuff to buy. You're not using video for advertising for in-house training of employees. So you got to get good at video. I've been doing video for over 40 years. We have our own studio here at the retreat center, which if you're in my mentor program, you get to use, you know, so, you know, video is is the bomb. All right. Next, booby trap is no targeting. The worst thing I hear is my product is good for everyone. Well, maybe it is, but you can't sell it to everyone. And I, I like to use an example. Let's say you have invented a face cream. That's really great. Well. It would be good for young women or be good for older women, but the thing is, you can't sell it to both at one time. The things you would say to a 50 year old divorcee that's getting back in the dating market would be totally different from what you would say to a 17 year old with zits going to the prom. OK, totally different. And and also. What if it's also good for men, are you going to say the same thing that you'd say to the 50 year old female divorcee that you would say to a man, a 40 year old man that's married to just having complexion problem? No, it's all different.

[00:19:44] So maybe your product is good for everybody, but you can't sell it to everybody you must target. Even Weight Watchers is doing this now about, I don't know, year, year and a half ago, they started targeting men, which they always for 100000 years have targeted women. They started targeting men. Do you think the ads were the same as they targeted for the women? Heck, no. I sit here all day with the TV on no. And now I've seen they've made another pivot. Pivot is the big buzz word of the past year to target couples. Are the ads the same? No, they're different, but it's still Weight Watchers. OK, so you must target your person and and that's where your sales copy and everything is going to be targeted to that specific person. They call it at Avatar. You know, how old are they? How much money do they make where they male or female? You know, all that stuff is is India so targeting big booby trap. All right. Next thing is keeping your website updated. So WordPress is the gold standard. Don't let anybody tell you a different WordPress is the gold standard. You see all this crap on TV? Like I said, it's meant for people that don't know any better.

[00:21:04] But you still have to maintain it. I mean, recently we've seen several sites that had one of them had 43 inactive plug in and no plug ins. And most of them were inactive, just clogging up the system. And the active ones hadn't been updated in years. Many of the sites had SSL certificates that were expired. That's the security certificate that shows that your site is secure. So, yes, you can put Web sites up, but you you got to maintain them. It used to be, you know, they would run for years, but that's a different world out there now. So you got to check, keep checking. Some of the things can be automated. You can have automated backups on your website. You can have broken link detectors that notify you via email if something's wrong, you know, so you can do this stuff, but you can't just ignore it. All right, now the next two are related, these booby traps, readability and usability readability is episode 312 and usability is episode 313. So readability, let's talk about that, I mean, do you remember ever hearing that newspapers were written that like the 12th grade level and then it went to the eighth grade, then it went to the fifth grade? Currently, it's a third grade level. People are morons. Schools are not teaching people how to read. They're just shoving them through with a bunch of other B.S.

[00:22:35] They're trying to teach them. And finally, at least the parents are starting to revolt against these highly educated idiots. I actually bought that website, highly educated idiots on these school boards that are just freaking nut cases. They're just crazy idiots so the kids can't read. And so everybody coming up can't read. So if you make it harder on them, OK, they can barely read as it is. And I actually had a student listen to this. She was from Puerto Rico. She was a high school and college graduate, and she couldn't actually read till she was 31 years old. Can you believe this? This is absolutely true. I said, how could this be, how could you do this? She said, well, I was from Puerto Rico, I was in New Jersey. The high school attitude was move them through, move them through, just get them graduate in and out of here. That's all they cared about. So nobody, you know, she couldn't reach her high school then. She was so street savvy. She got people for four years in college to do all her work for and graduated from college and still couldn't read and still couldn't read for ten years after that. All right. So if you don't if you think you're your visitor is going to be a Ph.D. in in in English, maybe maybe you have that little niche. But most people, they can't read they're morons. So and I know that sounds harsh.

[00:24:10] And in your face, I'm trying to help you, OK? You have to think like that, because if you write all this highfalutin corporate B.S. language and people can't read it or it looks too hard to read, forget it. They're leaving. They'll leave in two seconds. I mean, you've heard that that crazy attention span thing about goldfish have an attention span of nine seconds and people have one of eight seconds. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know and this harsh thing that I'm saying, people are morons, they can't read. And, you know, you just have to make a site full of emojis if you want to if you want to grab them. So that's readability. You got to pay attention to that, get rid of your highfalutin crap language that nobody's going to read. And also there's rules about just the way the thing looks on the screen. There's the wider the line of text and I see this every single day in my life from major sites, from major brands. You can't read the crap because some idiot it person that doesn't know any better, that just gets a salary and is in, you know, in charge of punctuation in the chip division of Intel, you know, does is clueless, never made a nickel online, never had to worry about these things. But the darn text is too wide. It's like a tennis match trying to read it and nobody's going to do it.

[00:25:44] And and then long paragraphs. This is again why you check things on mobile. You write a typical paragraph. It's going to fill up the entire screen on a giant cell phone. Guess what? People are going to look at that say. I mean, this is too hard and they're going to leave. All right. So readability check that on episode 312, all the details of that and do the darn things on your Web site. All right, useability, that's episode 313 is the site easy to navigate, do things make sense where they go and where they're put? I actually won best of the Web and Ink magazine. Now, at the time, the site cost me six hundred and fifty dollars. Today it would cost me 150 and I beat three other million dollar Web sites from major corporations because they're idiots. You know, you got these pencil pushing idiot executives that don't know any better listening to a bunch of it, people who don't know any better and putting their website up there. And my little crappy site beats them. Why it beat them? Because the panel of CEOs that were used to to judge these blind sites, they didn't know who owned them. I think they they must have taken the names off of them, just showed the navigation, everything. My sight one, because it was easy to get around and they could find what they wanted fast.

[00:27:12] That's all the highest level people with the biggest purse strings cared about. They didn't care about your fancy, you know, slider pictures and all this stupid stuff and all these stupid stock photos with the obligatory Asian person and black person and all of they didn't care about any of that. They just wanted to find what they wanted fast. So that's usability. Check that on Episode 313. Does it sound like I'm passionate about this, folks? I mean, after seeing, you know, thousands and thousands of people making these stupid mistakes, now, they're they're not stupid because they're stupid. They're stupid because they don't know any better of what online is compared to offline and new people don't know any of it, you know. So so, yeah, I'm not trying to be mean here. I'm just trying to help you not make these mistakes so you can have the success you want. All right. Next thing is simple SEO now I hear everybody saying Tom do you have anybody can do SEO for me I'm thinking no I don't because you're crazy if you concentrate on that, other than very simple, basic things that you do for MCO. I was taught by the best of the best and taught it for years, I had the top three spots on Google Earth excuse me. I had either one, two or three on Google on major keywords for 12 years straight. I was taught by the best of the best Michael Campbell.

[00:28:50] And those days he could get all 10 slots for his himself and his clients. In fact, the search engines are calling him up. Say, hey, take it easy there, Mike. You know, so. But you know what? That's all gone. That's all gone over five years ago or maybe even more. I went to paid traffic. Other than simple SEO, you need to know about title tags. You need to. And it all goes back the keywords, keyword placement on your website. But in the old days, I would teach these things like keyword prominence and and percentage of this and that and the other in the title bar. So all of that is out the window. In fact, Google came out quite a few years ago and said, if your site is optimized too perfectly, I mean, there's no degrees of perfection. But if it's obvious that you're optimizing to suit us, you're never going to see the light of day. We're going to screw you over. They didn't say screw you over, but they pretty much inferred that you're never going to see the light of day if you've got all this perfection in your keyword placement. Everything they want the user to have a good experience. So simple stuff. Yeah. So that you don't shoot yourself in the foot tidal tags. And like I said, the blog posting titles and article titles and in Boulding and some things you can do, but you don't need an SEO expert.

[00:30:14] I can teach you in a half hour what you need to know. All right. Let's say next thing is this kind of tied to that is people want to avoid paid traffic? No, I don't want to pay for ads. Heck, no, no. I'm going to I'm going to write blog posts for the rest of my life and cross my fingers that Google likes them. And and then if I get two people from Google, I'm going to throw a ticker tape parade and then Google is going to turn a dial and I'm going to disappear off the face of the earth and start all over. All right. That's crazy. It's just stupid when if you learn how to do paid ads and find out where the bargains are, which I teach you all that stuff, you can have targeted, super targeted. I'm talking super, super, super targeted traffic coming to your promotion within a day or so. And you can find out if it works or not, because one of the old saying is fail fast, we don't want to wait six months or a year to find out things don't work. That's not how how you get rich. You get rich by failing fast. Find out in a day that it doesn't work. Make a change. Try it again. If it doesn't work, try it again. Oh, it worked. There's the winner in three days instead of six months, say, or actually it would be three years probably to do all those kinds of testing in the old fashioned way.

[00:31:38] All right, so, yeah. Learn how to use paid traffic and learn where the bargains are. All right, next thing, spamming these people get I hear this all the time, people come up to me an event I'm speaking and say, Oh, Tom, I got this list of four million people that I'm going to send this out. And as soon as I hear four million, I say, oh, wait, hold on, hold on. There is no way on earth you have four million people that you're allowed to email to that are going to respond. There is no way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This I said I said I've heard this so many times. No, you don't. And I had this one guy from a big publishing company tell me this. I said, forget his first name. It was Terry. So, Terry, I'm telling you, you're going to come back to me next time we're at this event and you're going to say, Tom, I wish I had listened to you. So he comes up to me at the next event. Tom, I wish I to listen to that list was bogus. It was all spam now. And he actually got lucky because see if your website is advertised in a spam email, somebody that knows how to complain can get your website shut down. Did you know that? How do I know that? That happened to me years ago.

[00:32:56] I paid for a legitimate ad in a publication that I thought was legit and it wasn't. And my website got shut down for, I think, ten days till I could talk my way out of it. So, no, you got to only email people that have agreed to get the emails. Anything other than that you are playing with fire. I'm telling you that. Don't do that. Now, speaking of email, I want you to get really darn good at e-mail because email is where the money is and I don't again, all these young people. Oh, yeah, we're making a fortune on Instagram. And I remember the big money from all the big players is from email. And I don't care what they say. That's the truth. And if you dug deeper into all these people on social media saying they're getting rich and dig deeper there, they got email. OK, so you see, the thing with email is you're on it's under your control. All the followers and things you build on, all these other platforms, they can turn one dial or change one policy and you just disappear off the face of the earth or they ban you or do some of the other crap that these idiots, highly educated idiots, are doing today. So you got to get good at email and and promotions and subject lines in and Zeigarnik principle, which you learn in the copywriting to get more people to open stuff.

[00:34:25] And, you know, all these legitimate things can make you a fortune. So get good at email. All right, now back to the knot, persistent, I mean, even doing things perfectly doesn't mean you will get faster results to many of the entities. And here's why you could do something. Exactly how how I teach it and how it's supposed to be done. Here's why frequently you don't get immediate results or I'll say frequently for virtually all the time, you don't get immediate results. And it's because they don't trust you, the entity doesn't trust you. Why don't they trust you, because these black hat people do every trick in the book to try to cheat Google and all this other than Bing and every place else, Yahoo! So the search engines got smart and said, hey, listen, we don't trust you any any new entity. We just do not trust. That's where the mythical Google sandbox came in, which means nobody knew site. It's a high ranking in the first six months. Not as Google admit to this. No. Does everybody like me know about it? Yes. OK, so. So you've got to build trust in in that you're regularly putting good content up. I mean, this is like I said, this is if you don't go to paid ads, paid ads, you can bypass all of this. But if you want quick results, you get paid ads.

[00:35:55] If you want to build something for the future, which I'm perfectly OK with that. As long as you're getting immediate results, I want you to build your site up so that you start getting free traffic. Absolutely. But just don't you can't depend on that in the short run. And most people are impatient and they want immediate results. Well, I'm telling you, go to paid traffic, but if you want long term results, build up quality stuff over time. And I'm saying do both. All right. Next thing is trying to do too many things. The learning curves on every one of these things that we talk about are enormous to do them right. So if you say, oh, I'm OK, I might get my social media going, I'm going to do LinkedIn, I'm going to do Facebook, I'm going to Instagram. I'm the tick tock because that's really the rage. I'm going to do Pinterest. OK, good. Spend a month on each one, just learning the basics. How about that? All right. Or you might have to hire someone to concentrate on that one entity for a month just to get the basics. All right. So you try to throw all of these together. I'm OK to grab your your username if you learn how to do that, because you have to think about that, too. But trying to do them all at once is just ludicrous. You can't do any of them any good and it's all going to be diluted.

[00:37:23] You're better off picking one where you feel your target market is and beating the hell out of it for a long time till you get really good and get results before you jump to the other ones. So trying to do too many things, just crazy. No, I've never seen anybody successful doing it. All right. Poor customer service. I've always been a stickler for customer service my entire career. And I want you to imagine this. Imagine that you're you're in an appliance store. You're actually in the store looking at a at a dishwasher or something. And you ask a question of the salesperson. I'm laughing and and they say, we're going to get back to you within 24 to 48 hours. You're standing. Right. We're or let's say and I think this does happen in shoe stores, you could say, hey, you have this shoe in a size 11, somebody goes in the back and comes out two weeks later and says, hey, can you fit in a 10? I mean, you know, you hear stuff, you know, we'll get back to you within 24 hours unless it's a weekend. So people don't take good customer service online, they hide from people, they don't answer their emails, they put a stupid form on their website that no one on earth since Barney Wood said the Flintstones were around. Nobody has filled one out because they hate the forums, because nobody gets back to them.

[00:39:06] Why would they fill out a form knowing you aren't going to get back to them? And speaking of that, your contact page should have your phone number, should have your time zone where you're located so people know where you're at. All of this stuff, not a stupid form. You're just screaming, I don't care about you. I'm more important than you. Screw you. OK, that's what you're screaming. Even check your voicemail message. This is the one that cracks me up. You hear this everywhere. I'll get back to you at my earliest convenience. What kind of moron and you might be the one that has this on your voicemail. So I'm calling you a moron on this one little sliver of your life. OK, what kind of moron would tell a potential customer, hey, whenever I feel like it, when it's convenient for me, I'll get back to you, you little piece on worthless piece of garbage. Dirt to hell is wrong with you. What is wrong with you? You listen to my voicemail, it says. Hey, I'm sorry, I can't get you I'm going to get back to you as soon as humanly possible. Now, what does that message does that send it sends like, hey, you're really important to me, I'm going to do whatever I can do to get I'll jump out of the airplane so I can get a good signal to call you back.

[00:40:27] So check your voicemail, see if you're a moron or not when it comes to voicemail. All right. Now, before I tell you some of the last two. Which I think are going to kind of blow your mind a little bit. I really want to tell you about this, this program we're doing for the people with disabilities, you know, they they have massive trouble with mobility, getting around and going to a regular school, which would probably rip them off anyway, make them buy books and charge them all these extra fees. And and just just really make it hard on that song that's on just a regular person that doesn't have a disability. I'm giving them an opportunity, we're going to have five scholarships for people that have these problems that they don't have to buy any books, they don't have to pay any fees. They don't have to travel and, you know, take three hours to get somewhere where somebody else could get there in 15 minutes. They'll have to do any of that. And they were going to give them job assistance. So if they want to work somewhere, we're going to try to get them hired or help them start their own business. So. When this program is successful, I'm actually taking a grant writing course, remember Mr. Continuous Learning? Making connections in the grant field to roll this out really big and show them here's what I did with these five people and change their lives.

[00:41:58] And so we go to foundations and big corporations to roll it out way bigger. This is my vision, OK? And I need your help with it, because we've got to hire extra people. We're going to we're going to hire disabled people to help run the program. So we're doing a go fund me campaign because it's going to like I said, it's going to cost a lot of extra money to to do this program. But if you help out at all, you know, you're helping to change these people's lives for the better and being part of this big vision of helping lots of people. So so please check that out. You can see the go fund me link at IMTCVA.org/disabilities, plural and anything you can give. We were proud of it. Thank you. Every little bit helps, but if you're really flush with cash and you want to do something extraordinary, email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and you could, you could sponsor one person yourself which like I said, cost some bucks. But there's been some of you out there flush with cash. Come on, help help out folks with it. OK, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it. IMTCVA.org/disabilities.

[00:43:16] All right. So the last two things are booby traps. This is, this one's going to surprise you quite a bit because we've heard the saying content is king. Absolutely. And it used to be the more the better. But one of the famous people working Facebook is Mari Smith, one of the top people at Facebook that should work at Facebook. One of the top consultants with Facebook, she said at least a couple of years ago, she said people are jamming out content like crazy. But they're getting no engagement. In fact, they're putting out too much content, so the more content you put out that people don't engage with, the worse you look to Facebook. Facebook thinks, wow, they put out a lot of stuff. That's garbage. OK, that's the way it looks to Facebook, though. She suggested reducing the amount of content enormously. And making sure you get engagement, I just one of my students today was in that boat, I said, look, you reduced to once a week for a very, very in-depth Facebook post, and then you prime the pump by driving people to it with your email and then see what what happens in all of these social media platforms is that when you put a piece of content up, they do what's called a micro test. That means in the first hour, a couple hours, if a lot of your friends and followers and likers and all that stuff don't respond, they don't bother showing it to anybody else. They figure, why bother are using our bandwidth when nobody cares about your crap.

[00:45:00] So the idea is, is put less content, make it better quality, make sure the time of day is don't put it up at three o'clock in the morning when the micro test will be over. Before anybody is awake, say so. Find out the best time for you to put it out. Then you send an email to your list telling them all the use copywriting. Remember, you're going to you've got to make them want to click over to your Facebook post or Instagram, whatever it is. And then. You can beg him if you want, say, hey, this is a great post that is going to help you do this one, this and please, please, please, when you're over there, make a comment like the thing, because it really helps out my my profile, something like that bag if you have to. OK, but less content and more quality and then prime the pump and then you'll start seeing Facebook and these other places start showing your stuff to more people and you'll start growing your thing instead of just killing yourself, putting stuff up every day that nobody cares about. And for years we used automated tools to slop stuff up there. You got no engagement. So I'm turning all that stuff off, you know, because it costs money for these tools, though. So it's a different world. And the last booby trap. Is not learning about remarketing and remarketing is is something where you've probably all.

[00:46:25] Been exposed to this in that you looked at something on Amazon, let's say, and then all of a sudden you start getting emails about that product and you got you see ads for that product around the Internet all over the place. It's like they're stalking you. Well, that's what remarketing is. So you you have to learn how to use pixels. This is way too deep to tell you all about this, but basically Facebook and Google will give you these little pieces of code that you can put on your site and your shopping carts and this and that. And then when somebody hits there, you don't know their name, but you know that they were there and then you can advertise back to them. So you're building up an audience. It's called on Facebook and Google. And there's other place everybody's getting on the bandwagon. Probably LinkedIn has a pixel to I think I don't I don't know. You put those in place. Even if you're not ready to advertise, you're building an audience of everybody that has come to your website or your blog posting. So so an example. This is let's say you write a blog posting. I have one. Where is college really worth it to promote my school? Of course, I don't think it is for most people because they're you know, if they weren't colleges, they'd be in jail for some of the things they're doing.

[00:47:45] But anyway, so everybody that hits that page gets pixel. And so I know when I advertise that they have already seen that article. So I can say, hey, you saw that article of mine about college, really worth it. Well, we've got this other quiz on the college ripoff quiz you can take. And here's the link to it. See, so they've already seen we know that they've already seen that blog posting. And so then I'm sent I'm advertising only to the people that have seen that. Well, the conversion rate on remarketing is way bigger than just called traffic. Say so. So learn about Remarque. OK, so I could probably go on, like I said, for nine more episodes. Not mistakes, but you get the idea. These are booby traps, these things will kill you and you won't even know it if you just listen to the national ads or put a website up, you'll be rich or your business will thrive. You know, even some of the celebrities they have don't use this crap. All right. That they have promoting it. Say, I built my website with Wix. No, you didn't. You lying sack of shit. You did not, you know, so or they might have one just because they're paid endorser, but that's not where they made their money, put it that way. So anyway, check it all out, please. Check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities and assist with the Go Fund Me campaign and I will see you on the next episode. Catch ya later.

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