461 – Ask Tom Get Answers: Tom talks Ask me a Question

Episode 461 – Ask Me A Question
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode four hundred and sixty one of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to do one of the things we do every once in a while called Ask me a Question and they'll be also some things, some opinions in here, some new things that are just brand new that you need to know about. And maybe a little rant in there where if you're if your ears have sensibilities, you might want to shut this off for a minute. When I get on a little rant that I get sick of some crap that's going on. So. So I hope you didn't miss episode for 60. It's the shortest it would be easy to miss because it's the shortest episode ever a minute and fifty five seconds start to finish. So I was for Independence Day. And how would you like me to send you some big cheques or PayPal or gold bullion or Bitcoin or crypto or I don't know, all that other stuff. I'm not going to send you Bitcoin. I would have no idea how. We have an affiliate program where you recommend stuff that I sell and I send you a big commission. How simple is that? And you don't get returns from me because I give good quality stuff. I can hardly remember how to make returns.

[00:01:40] So if you're interested in making commissions, email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and we'll give you details. Now pick up a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me because if you even do a portion of what's in that book, you're going to save enormous amounts of time or cover way more people faster. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And then while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. All right. We're also right in the middle with helping five disabled people get scholarships to my school. We're doing a crowdfunding campaign on Go Fund Me, please help out this. We're going to change these people's lives for the better so that they can not only learn from home, but legitimately work from home. And you can check out the full details that IMTCVA.org, that's my school site, disabilities, plural, and then click on the Go Fund Me campaign and it'll tell you the people that are in. So far we're still reviewing resumes of other folks and how it's all we're going to work out. Plus we're hiring disabled people to help run the program. So this is something I'm really proud of and I'd love to have your help in it to help change these people's lives.

[00:03:09] All right, let's get to the main event, ask me a question. All right, so here's the first question. What do you think about clubhouse? Well, clubhouse falls into my category of double edge technology. I'm not talking about them being poor quality at all. Not at all. I'm talking about my philosophy, having been in this for 27 years. Haven't seen all the places come and go. Myspace. That was supposed to be the end all be all of everything gone. I mean, it's still I think it still exists, but who knows? Who cares, right. So, yes, I jumped on clubhouse and I like the concept because I can listen while I'm working. I don't have to sit and watch a webinar to see the visuals or any of that stuff. I can jump in when I need to, like, you know, people ask me to jump in. A lot of times that's cool. But here's the thing, there's so many other places that have the potential to just crush clubhouse. For instance, Facebook is working on live audio rooms. Twitter has audio spaces, you got Reddit talk, you got even LinkedIn is working on one. So when these big entities go after some little entity. Who knows what's going to happen. I know a lot of people are putting a lot of time in the clubhouse and building these big followings, but, you know, just like I said, maybe I'm making a mistake.

[00:04:45] Who knows? But. With all those other people jumping on the bandwagon, it may fracture the whole clubhouse thing and everybody flies to some other place that's got that's getting bigger and faster. And then all the work they put in the clubhouse, it's not all for naught. But now they maybe they they got a big following on clubhouse, but then Facebook live audio room starts taking off like crazy, so. Now they either have to split due to different. Platforms, because probably a lot of people won't jump from clubhouse, but that a lot of people will. And, you know, so now you got whatever you do, you got to do it twice or three times. So so I'm sitting back with my double edge technology. I think I got six or seven hundred followers there from just the little time I spent just watching to see what happens. You know, there's plenty of other things I got to do to make money, you know, so so I just don't put all my eggs in one basket for some new entity. All right. This next question is, why do you still use a paper calendar? I hear you bragging about it all the time. Well, here's the thing, folks. Not once ever in my whole time in business, long before the Internet ever has my paper calendar crashed or or done something stupid, like, for instance, there's been three times when. A booking has gotten messed up.

[00:06:27] For me, being on somebody else's podcast and I don't mess up. All right. And they all had to do with Kalinda, why, I don't know, but here's what happened. I booked my time slot. Eastern Time Zone, The Times listed in the Eastern Time Zone. And some of these they booked me a month in advance or six weeks in advance, I got a lot of things to do. I don't remember every little detail of what's going on. I have to go back and and remind myself. So I signed up with County in the Eastern Time Zone. Then reminders start coming in. But for some reason there in Pacific Time Zone. Well, who stops and reads a reminder that close when you're as busy as I am, you see the time boom you signed up Easter, it should be an Eastern, right? No, it was in Pacific three different times over the hundreds of interviews that I do. So my paper calendar never does that crap. Never. And so in people's efforts to be lazy and look cool, they're just screwing up because they're lazy, you know, and I'm all for technology. They're using all the stuff that you can. But if you're going to use it, you better darn well monitor and make sure people aren't getting screwed over by your stupid reminders that are in the wrong time zone. All right. So I use a paper calendar. It never crashes, ever. So that's why I do it.

[00:08:06] All right. Hey, Tom, I heard that e-mail open rates are no longer going to be provided. How will we know the success of our email campaigns? Well, that open great thing, you know, is just coming around and it's Apple that I think is leading the way on that. So I don't think all open rates are going to disappear overnight. But here's the thing. And I never. Think of myself as some kind of futurist or do predictions of things. All right, I just do my work, sell things to people that that help them and are good for them at a reasonable price. And that's how I work. All right. However. I do or I have talked about this in the past, that the Openreach. Don't mean anything, really. To your bottom line. Would you would you rather let's say you had a list of 5000 people? And you had. 2000 people open your email about a new product. And you had. Ten people by. All right, so that's the first scenario, 5000 lost, two thousand people opened your email. Ten people bought. Or would you rather have? A thousand people open your email, five thousand sent, one thousand open and 50 sales. OK. I mean, if you hesitate at the answer to that question, you maybe shouldn't be out on the street alone. Maybe you need some help with with handling your finances. Maybe you shouldn't have a credit card. OK, I don't know.

[00:10:00] But you're not making very good financial decisions. Your bottom line, which I have always preached, is not open rates. It's sales. It's sales. It's that I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that's the bottom line is. Have you sold more stuff because of that particular email? You know, people do testing, split testing all the time and to try to see which email gets opened more? Well, no, you have to track people all the way through to see which e-mail gets more people to buy. OK, so don't worry about open rates. Concentrate on making great offers that get people to buy. And I'm not saying being obnoxious, I'm just saying. Just because more people open your email doesn't mean crap, right? It could be all tire kickers and whatever you have in the email didn't stimulate them to buy. Well, that's a bad email, no matter how many people open.

[00:11:06] OK, next question. What are WebP? I'm not even sure if that's how you pronounce it. W e b and then a capital P images. Well, it's a new image format. And, you know, JPEGs and PNGs have been around forever, I can't even remember anything before that, but this is a new image format. And I think it has to do with WordPress, which is the gold standard, don't let anybody tell you anything different. However, modern day browsers are all able to open these Web images, but they're frequently 30 percent smaller and file size than their average JPEG or PNG equivalents. And this means that your site is going to load faster, which is a big determinate not only for the search engines, but for people, they're used to stuff fast. And if you delay them at all. They're going to click away to something else. Now, I'm new to this myself. But you you know, you can right away start playing with this, you can use services like squoosh, that'll convert images that you have to this web format and then you can upload them to WordPress and put them on. Now, there's more to it than that, but it will get easier. Scuttlebutt has it that in the future, WordPress updates are going to do this conversion for you. But you can go to squoosh.app, and then I'm going to have a link to a complete discussion about these images at a WordPress help support page that talks all about this. You have to look on the page to you see the part about Web page. There's a lot of help files on this page that I'm going to give you something to pay attention to. It's not going to be that hard to implement, but it is going to help your site considerably.

[00:13:18] All right. Next question, why do you keep saying not to use the boost function when placing an ad? Well, here's the thing, folks. Putting ads on line correctly is extremely complicated and more complicated than I can even comprehend. I mean, I do it to a pretty high level. But not to the highest level, the highest level are the people that do it every day, agencies that see little tiny nuances and, you know, just all kinds of little details to. The ad platforms in my not so humble opinion. Just love to take all your money, you know, they could care less if you if you are successful with your ads and they can see. When you put an ad up. And they can tell if you don't know what you're doing, just by the way, you put the ad in. And then they're more likely to just take your money now. Nobody is going to admit to this. All right. They're not going to admit to this, but people in the know know what's going on. So the boost function is designed to just take your money. Very seldom do they work and turn profitable. And they know that the person that doesn't know what they're doing will click on it and throw in 10, 15, 20 bucks thinking, hey, I'm advertising online. Well, yeah, you're pretty much throwing money down a black hole. And if hundreds of thousands of you or millions of you folks do this, it's just pure profit for the places that allow you to do it. Now, here's here's the thing. And you know, I've been preaching this for years that don't do the boost function because they're just going to take your money.

[00:15:21] Well, I just got confirmation I was doing a podcast with a email marketing expert. Excuse me, an ad expert, sorry. And he told me about some major company that does this kind of testing, put the exact same ad in. Exact same budget, exact same targeting. And the boosted ad got 40 percent less response than the one that was put in through the ad manager. 40 percent higher response and ad manager for the exact same ad. Well, what does that tell you? It tells you that they think, oh, a professional that may have a big budget that they can use over time and stick with us, we're going to give them better results so that they stick with us. But the other people that are that have no idea what they're doing, we're just going to take their money because there's always a million of those in the in line to have their money still stolen. You know, and I mean, even the way you put the ad in, the ad manager can tell that you don't know what you're doing. For instance, you you know, maybe you start with a three dollar a day budget and you get the ad working and it's making money for you. So you say, I'm going to jump the 30 dollars a day or 50 dollars a day.

[00:16:48] You just you might as well. I've said this before. He may as well go to some cheerleader's supply company, get one of those big megaphones and scream, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm an idiot because they can see that. And here's here's what happens behind the scenes. So in your three dollar a day budget. They they put you in the best places so that your ad makes money or works better. The places that they know will do better for you, but when they see that you jacked up to 50 dollars a day. They're saying, oh, man, are we going to steal that money so they run your ad and a whole bunch of places that hardly ever convert. And they take all your money because they figure you don't know what they are, they pretty much know that you don't know what you're doing because nobody does that. Nobody jumps instantly from three dollars a day to 50 dollars a day unless they're there who say so what they want the people that they want to make happy are the people that know what they're doing, because the people that know what they're doing may be an agency or working for a big company that has one hundred thousand dollars a day budget. To put it into ads and this is not uncommon, one hundred thousand dollars a day, how do you think, you know, these places pull in billions of dollars in their owners, become billionaires? All right.

[00:18:24] So they want to keep those people happy and run their ads in the best places and and help them in any way possible to keep them happy with you. They know you're going to get discouraged and you blew 50 bucks or 100 hundred bucks and you're going to quit. There's nothing else to get from you. You're never going to be a professional at this. And so they just rob you blind and know that there's a million people right behind you that are going to hit that boost. But so, no, don't hit the snooze button. At least learn the basics of using the ad managers in these various platforms. You'll have a better chance of success. All right. And I'm all in favor of paid ads, but not unless you learn how to do it, at least to a basic level, so that you're not making the mistake.

[00:19:15] OK, next question. Can you spell check your Web site? Well, yes, you can. And it's a good idea that you do so. There's a company called Website Planet, and they did this testing, comparing pages with typos and grammar problems and spelling problems, and they learn some interesting stuff. So in one test. They found that typos on the landing page, in other words, the first page that somebody hits your site increased the bounce rate by 85 percent. That means the bounce rate is is how many people come and immediately leave your page.

[00:20:01] And immediately is a variable time period, but that very quickly leave your page. And it and typos on the landing page reduced the time on site by eight percent. And both of these bounce rate and time on site. Are factors to say whether you get higher or lower ranking in the search engines. So. Just these typos hurt your Google ranking because more bounces and less time on site makes your site look worse to Google. All right, now, if you're doing that, they learned that bad grammar, especially on Google ads, reduced the traffic from your ad by approximately four percent. And raise the cost per visitor by more than 70 percent. Because when Google sees this, they still might run your ad, but your ad has what is called a low quality score. And so the lower your quality score is, the higher your cost is, in fact. Well, and what that means is, is they used to, like, just not accept ads that weren't high quality. But then they said, you know what, we're just going to charge him through the through the roof and let him run the ad. That's not high quality. Now, it doesn't mean that you can run really bad ads or break their terms of service and stuff like that for money. But it does mean that if you don't take care of this, you're going to pay. OK, so in the show notes, I've put in three places that you can use to spell, check and grammar. Check your entire website. Some of them are free. And they're all going to be in the Shonna. So, yes, you can spell and grammar, check your entire website and yes, you should.

[00:22:02] OK, now I'm on my soapbox. So if you have sensitive ears and don't like to hear people ranting and raving about stuff, then check out for a couple of minutes. But the question is, as I've heard you say, quit crying about spam. Why do you say that? Well, the first reason this is a lot can be learned from your spam email. Your spam email can tell you what is obviously looks like spam. And that you should avoid doing when you email Mark. And it also tells you what grabs you enough to open the email. And so that you can replicate what they did with your ideas in subject lines and substituting your own products and services. There's a lot of very talented spammers. They just have the wrong outlook on on life to me. All right. But. Frequently they're very good copywriters and they're they're good at writing copy, and there's plenty of stuff in the email that you can swipe, which is, you know, what we typically call a swipe file in copywriting terms, which is perfectly legitimate to swipe copy that grabs you and then substitute your products and services. So doesn't you know, you're not just plagiarizing somebody else's stuff.

[00:23:35] Now, here's my soapbox as I get people that want all the benefits of this online business, but they're big sissies who can't take so much email. Hey, listen, email is where the money is, you moron. All right. You want it. You want all these benefits. You want all these riches that I've enjoyed for twenty seven years. And you want to cry about some emails, get over it, or else, you know what, go sit in the cubicle and just let it make somebody else rich and forget the online stuff. There's going to be emails, there's going to be emails, there's lots of emails, there's going to be thousands of emails. Get over it. Learn how to to to turn that into a positive for yourself and get an online business. Get out of the rat race, get off. You screw the commute. But don't be a big freakin sissy like the generation coming up is that can't stand anything. You little pressure will screw you. Go sit in a cubicle and quit your job because you can't stand it and go get another shitty job and keep doing it to the rest of your life. Suits me all right. Just don't come to me and cry about emails. That's where the money is. All right, that was my rant, it does upset me when people. Oh, my. Oh, here, I'm going to get back on the rant again, they want all this big stuff, but they won't lift a finger to do it.

[00:25:09] They won't spend a couple hours learning YouTube and how to really maximize your YouTube channel. No, no. I'm just going to put a video up because I want people to see my gorgeous face. No, you're a moron. You're a moron. Everything out here takes enormous amounts of details to do it right. And you're just kind of just flooding with a bunch of B.S., the Internet for stuff that doesn't work. And then you blame the Internet. You blame teachers like me. I mean, I don't get many of that because I don't take you if you got that stupid attitude. All right. But so there's two rants for the price of one. How about that? So. So just don't come to me and cry about email and don't cry about the cost of your shopping cart. All right. You just you just you don't have it. You might not have you might not have the temperament for this. You're better off getting in the car every morning, going to Starbucks, spending seven bucks, going to work, complaining about everything on Earth and coming home and doing it all over again the next day. That's what you're destined to if you have the attitude, oh, I don't want to invest in myself. Oohhh emails going to hurt me. Oh, my God, you make me sick. All right. All right.

[00:26:31] Let's get to another question. You see, I have the capacity to lay it on, you know. Because I can't help you if I just patch on the back for all your B.S.. All right, get over your B.S. and I can help make you rich. All right. So all right. So here's the next question. How can I improve the sound of my podcast? OK, well, I'm not sure what your sound is like from the question, but I will tell you some of the basics. First of all, you want a good quality, dynamic microphone. Now, dynamic is a specific technical term. If the microphone says it's a condenser microphone. Don't do it unless you have a full audio booth, sound, soundproof sound booth, then OK, I'm OK with it. But condenser mikes are way too sensitive and they will pick up all this crap that you don't want to be on your your audio and some of it you can't edit out. Some of it will just take your way longer to edit out. So just start out with a dynamic microphone that that's less sensitive but perfect for home studios and things like that. All right. So that's the first thing then you got to pay attention to your what's called room dynamics. Do you have carpet on the floor or not? Do you have harsh drywall walls that are just there's nothing on them. Just a flat surface. Same with your ceilings. So what this does is it makes an echo.

[00:28:15] And which makes you sound really cheap and really terrible. Now, there's ways around it you can put wall hangings, cloth wall hangings to decorative, so it looks nice on your walls. You can I mean, this one guy, Derek Decker, which we're going to be doing another webinar with him shortly. If you have high ceilings put get in an outdoor pool umbrella, big thing to hang out, put over top of you while you're recording so that the sound doesn't go all the way up to the ceiling and then bounce back into your microphone. So all those kinds of things. So, you know, I got a whole course on this I'll tell you about in a minute. But but the room dynamics are really important. And then the outside dynamic, you are you near an airport? Are you near a road that's got a lot of traffic on it. Maybe the traffic's only at rush hours. Maybe then you can record, you know, midday or mid-afternoon so that there's not as many cars and trucks going by. There's ways to handle this. One of the ways I love is to get a big cardboard box, line it with foam like this egg crate foam that you put in a on a bed for bedsores or even I've heard this. And this might even be better stuffed full of rags and towels. And then you cut a hole in the side, stick your microphone in the box and you'll get way better sound then than anything you could do in your room.

[00:29:48] You can also put your microphone over by a closet that has hanging clothes and speak into the closet. The clothes will be hidden at all. Right. So those are some things there. But then in your editing and I mean, depending on your budget with equipment, I have this this thing here, it's called a compressor limiter noise gate. And so a noise gate is something I can turn a little dial. And, any noises under a certain amount, it'll just cut them out, like if I had a fan going, if it's extra hot or something like that. Or air conditioning running, if you're in a really hot environment and you really can't turn the air conditioning off, you can hear the noise gate. Then the compressor limiter limiter is if you if you get really loud, maybe like I did on that rant, I didn't get really loud screaming, but but it cuts off so it doesn't go so high. It distorts. And then the compressor is what makes your sound so people with crappy earbuds on trains and planes can still hear you. It kind of pushes all the high end sounds and the low end sides towards the middle where most of your your voice is. And that way people can hear it better in crappy little ear ear buds and stuff.

[00:31:13] So those will really help help it out. Then in the editing process, you can use what's called EQ, which can raise up to better sounds and lower the bad sounds. Also, you can use noise reduction, which, you know, whatever you didn't the noise gate didn't get out, then the noise reduction can typically take out. Now, you also want to be careful with plosives. I'm going to do one on purpose. Now I'm going to take this out to. That's the P sound, and if you put your hand in front of your face and just go P, you can feel the air hitcher and B, you can hear the air hit your hand. Well, that's like a sledgehammer hitting your microphone. So you want to be careful not to do that and you can get pop filters. Those are just clamp on ten, fifteen dollars that go in front of your microphone. I just touched mine is kind of moving on me. So all of that will make you way, way better than whatever you're doing now, but I do have a fantastic course on this that includes an e-book. It's called What I Learned After Three hundred and eight successful podcast might update that because I'm on episode four. Sixty one today. So then you've got a video tour of my podcast studio, then you have a consultation to help you personal one on one consultation, and then you get a shout out on a episode of Screw the Commute and you get a full one on one special edition interview on Screw the Commute.

[00:32:49] And all this is only two hundred ninety seven bucks where people are charging thousands for this. So there'll be a link and shown us that you can click on. So there's a bunch of questions for you. Hope some of them help you out. Now, you also get a copy of my crowdfunding ebook. It's called Crowdfunding How to get the Money to Finance Your Dreams and Never Have to pay it back. How cool is that? If you contribute to the crowdfunding campaign I'm doing for these disabled people, so when that book is done, everybody that contributes will get a copy of that book that I'll be selling for 27 bucks. And really, it's worth millions to you because you can literally, if you plan crowdfunding campaigns. Right. Financed just about anything you can think of. All right. So so in my case, I'm financing the tuitions and the salaries for the people to help run the program. So check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities, click at the top on the crowdfunding campaign. You'll see the people that are in it so far. And we really thank you for helping out. I'm going to I'm going to help help these people change their lives. And I need your help, too. All right. So that's it. Catch ya on the next episode. See you later.

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