463 – Survey your way to great riches: Tom talks Surveys

Episode 463 - Surveys
[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 and sixty three of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about surveys. You can get an enormous amount of media coverage and turn that coverage into cash by doing surveys correctly. And another thing, you don't even have to get media coverage to turn it into cash and you can make money with surveys without ever even doing a survey. And I'm not kidding. All right. So get to that in a minute. I hope you didn't miss Episode 462, or actually all last week, I did two episodes on asking me questions, and 462 was about ebooks, Gmail, Ecourses, mentoring, coaching programs, Microsoft Exchange, email, web stories, disqualifying people for ads and heat maps and anchor text. So I covered a lot in 30 minutes there. So that was episode 462. And of course, when you want to go to a back episode, you just put screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number that's 462. Today is 463. Now, if you'd like me to send you big checks. Well, we have a referral program, you know, and I hardly ever get returns. I can hardly remember how to do a return because we specialize in high quality, reasonably priced stuff that we do here, products, services, everything. Just email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com.

[00:01:52] If you're interested in that program and pick up a copy of our automation ebook, it allows me to work really fast, save lots of time, reach more people. And all the stuff is in that book that we sell for twenty seven bucks. But it's years free for listening to the show. Go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree and while you're over there and of course all these links will be in the show notes while you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's at screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now, I'm really, really I hardly ever ask for anything from anybody. I want your help. I need your help. We're doing a program to help five people with disabilities. Go through my school and we're going to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. It's really something good. You can help change these people's lives. So just go to IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That's plural disabilities, i.e click on the Go Fund Me campaign. Go over there. You'll see some of the people in the program already and please contribute whatever you can. And hey, if you really flush with cash, contact me directly and we can, you can recommend a person and as long as they qualify, we'll get them in the school.

[00:03:20] All right, let's get to the main event. Let's talk about how you can use surveys to get lots of publicity and turn that publicity into cash. Now, one of the ways you make money is that being published in major publications, either mainstream or niche. Now, if you're a fancy person, you say neesh. All right. I'm from the other side of the tracks. I say niche, but it makes you the expert, which means you can raise your fees. Now, I've always said, in fact, there's was a sign hanging up at the school. The only way to exceed the average fees in your industry is to become better known, while surveys and the bragging rights of being featured in major publications can help raise those fees. All right, now, I told you earlier, you don't even have to do your own survey. All right. You can crunch publicly available numbers and make your own interesting conclusions. In other words, you can compile all the other surveys on a subject and make an article or blog posting about them. And when you promote that, which I'll tell you about how to market your surveys later, this creates back links to your article or blog posting, which is one of the main factors in whether you come up high in search engine results or not. I'll talk about that a little bit more about that coming up later. Now, a long time ago, I did a survey about stage fright and at the time, I never even thought about trying to get publicity out of it.

[00:04:54] I just wanted those people on my list that were interested or had that problem to come to me for training. And they did, which made me a lot of money. Now, what I found was that I didn't really want to work with those people, not not that they were not weren't they were great people, all of them. I just found I could do better with people who weren't afraid because I'm known to train professional speakers and most of them don't have I mean, it's hard to shut them up, let alone having stage fright. So I teach them how to market their speaking services and how to be really, really pro level grade on stage. And so I didn't even need any media coverage because I identified people and companies interested in this topic, you can do the same thing now, some board immediately and some bought after follow ups, you know, with auto responders and all that. But either way, it was money in the bank. Now, journalist love good surveys, good surveys. All right. Because when they decide to use one, most of the writing has been done for them. It makes it really easy. And they pay attention to the research that reveals, you know, in your particular survey, unexpected answers or something that their readers probably didn't know or bust the myth. You know, a lot of times they say.

[00:06:24] So when you do a survey really well that illustrates a trend or point, something the, you know, a reader wouldn't know, it makes it really easy to get your surveys printed. Now, what really doesn't work is obviously just advertising your products with the use of the survey. Yes, we get that and they get that that you're trying to promote yourself. But if it's over the promotional, no, it's not going to fly. Now, controversial surveys can get you even more coverage. Judith Briles is a frequent guest on this podcast, did research about how women stab other women in the back. All right. And they got her tons of publicity. She even got in the National Enquirer with a good quality, non sensationalistic, if that's a word article, just because it was controversial. Now, the value of backblocks, another big benefit of surveys is that you can get lots of other websites to link to your survey results. Feedback links are one of the main factors in your ranking in search engines. Well, why? Well, because if a site links to you, it's like a vote that your site actually the page that they're linking to in your site is so good that the other site was willing to link to it. Now, the more important the site is that links to you, the more, let's say, virtual votes you get. So if Joe Blow looks links to you, that's maybe one link or it might be a negative link if it's some spammy Web site.

[00:08:06] But if Forbes magazine links to you, that could be like a thousand votes, OK, and then everything in between. So back links are very valuable and surveys done well can get you tons of them and can really jack you up in the search results. Now, one of the tricks I'll show you shortly is to research the back links to websites on your topic that are on page one of Google, you can go you can use tools to go find out who's linking to them. And that's the first people you approach to link to you. All right. So we'll talk about some of those tools a little bit later. Now, if you want really big participation. You can give an incentive for people to fill out your survey. Now, if you want a more accurate survey, don't give an incentive, and I learned this from Ryan Levesque in his book called Ask which the first half is kind of him just bragging about himself. But the second half is really gold. And he talks about how giving incentives just makes people just do it just to get the incentive without giving incentive. You get the people that are most, you know, really interested in the topic and it gives you a more accurate survey. All right, now, one of the ways to get survey participants is to search out Facebook groups and ask for participants. Make sure you check with the admin of the group before you post your request, just as a courtesy or make sure you read their terms of service to see if those kinds of things are allowed.

[00:09:46] And one of the things I do is to get in with groups is just offer to interview the admin and then they put their interview in the group for me. So that's a good way to get in. Good with admins. If you have a podcast, that is, which I'll be glad to teach you to do for only 297 bucks, which is which is really cheap, by the way. And you get a feature on screw the commute. So that's a pretty good deal. All right, let's see here, but I'm going to have a little bit later on some of the ways the markets are serving. All right. So what works with surveys? Well well, here's one guy's opinion, and he happens to work at a news desk in the U.K. at a big mass market newspaper. He said lifestyle studies and popular culture favorites tend to go down. Well, this is a quote. We need to have good photos with them. And from our point of view, that's from his publication. If they feature or point to celebrities, that's all the better. All right. But that's only one journalist you can do an interest. Interesting surveys on just about any topic. So let's talk about that now. How do you do that? Well, many survey experts say that focusing on the answers will do better than focusing on the questions.

[00:11:09] So avoid none of the above type answers that doesn't give you a lot of data to work with, instead ask survey participants to pick like the best option out of whatever you've put up there. Apparently, yes and yes. No questions seem to produce higher and more compelling percentages. Remember, you're going to report this and that. So many people were surveyed in this amount, this percentage said this and that and the other. Do you see that all the time on the news stations and every cable everywhere? Now, make sure you structure your survey so that you get a lot of different facts and figures to report because you don't know which one is going to interest any particular publication if you only have one little data point. Well, maybe that most publications don't want that one, but maybe they would want another one. So try to get multiple results from your survey. Now create charts and tables and video roll, Berro is where you hear the person talking on TV, but there's other pictures showing at the same time that's called B Roll. So and then you also have infographics that kind of show what you're talking about in in graphic form. They love that. Now, make yourself available to the journalists that respond, make sure you're easy to get a hold of because that can be the difference. If they want some nuances or want to ask you some questions, that could be the difference of getting published or not.

[00:12:52] All right, so how do you do this? Well. You need a software that's going to help and you don't have to, but boy, you'd have a lot of work to do. So SurveyMonkey.com is one of the most popular, you know, inexpensive ways to do this. But what you should do first is research. See if there are tons of other surveys. You may not have to do one. Just like I mentioned before, you could just curate them. In other words, give a brief synopsis of each of the other surveys and make an interesting article or blog posting on. Now, what I would do and what I have done is Google your topic, plus the word survey. And you'll find all the other kinds of surveys that are out there on your topic. And immediately, if you're thinking about doing this, you should work on this back link analysis. I'll address that now where you want to see who might be interested in the results of your survey or maybe even put in your survey out there for people to sign up on. So then it's helping market your survey to get the participants in your survey to analyze like what you do is you you bring up the sites that are your competitors who come up first on Google. And then you do a back link analysis on them. Now there's places like Moz.com, semrush, ahrefs.com. These will be in the show notes.

[00:14:31] And by the way, next week, next Monday, I'm going to be going more in-depth on back links and what they can mean to you, even though, you know, like I said, I gave up on Eskow years ago and it was really good at it is just too much work nowadays. But if there was one thing I would suggest you do other than the basics of the title tags and some simple stuff on your Web site, these back links are is where I would put my time, because getting links to your site is, like I said, can be thousands and thousands of votes making your site look really great. All right. There's plenty of ways to do it besides surveys, but surveys is one way. OK. Anyway, that's next Monday. All right. So the tips these next set of tips are a combination of my experience and a place I refer to a lot of times, search engine news. At least the first four types of questions that I'm going to tell you is something you'd like to include in almost all your surveys. Overall, you want to keep your surveys relatively short, unless you're really trying to get small numbers that super accurate for some particular reason. But keep them under 10 questions and maybe two minutes or so to fill out. All right, so the first four here are questions that were suggested by search engine news to include in every survey.

[00:15:56] No one maximize your results by asking what category the participants are respondents are in, that way you can take the results and customize them for a particular industry or division of the category. For instance, let's say if you had a a beginner and advanced topic, I mean the same topic, but beginners are advanced. Well, if you ask people are you a beginner or an advanced or intermediate whatever in this topic, now, when you get the results from all the beginners, which you can filter with survey monkey. Then you can when you target your your results, it can be towards beginners and people that would be interested in stuff for beginners, and then you take the advanced respondents and targets other places that are more advanced. Say that's just an example for beginner advanced, but let's say you're in publishing. Well, there's so many different things in publishing like. Children's books, science fiction, autobiography, whatever it is, you know, I don't know, there's loads of. But you you can have a big list of them as the first question, and that way you're seeing if somebody clicks children's books, well, then you're going to target all the children's books, you know, sites on Earth with your results. You're not going to go to the sci fi sites and try to push, push children's books, you know, so so that's one of the first questions you want to categorise people. Number two is a story or open ended questions so people can put in how they use the product or something, something like that, which gives you access to information you probably hadn't thought of.

[00:17:51] You might get some really cool stories of how people did stuff. It could be media hooks, you know, if they use some a product or service for some weird thing and got results, whatever. But it's stuff that just with your opinion on what question you should ask, you're probably going to miss loads of stuff. So give them an open ended or called story question. Then an opinion question with a rating scale is suggested that something like how much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? And then you make a statement and let them click where they are on the scale. Here's an example. Tom, with his boyish grin and devilish laugh, looks and acts much younger than his age. There's this devilish laugh so you can you can click that. In my case, I would put it on the scale, agree. And I wouldn't even give him any description. But anyway, that's an opinion question with a rating scale. And then the last one they suggest is a permission question, which asked for permission and contact info to follow up to get even more stories in depth uses. With the best respondents to your survey, you'd like to follow up and feature them or get even deeper information from them that you can then use in marketing your results.

[00:19:20] OK, so that's four of the questions you have to formulate the rest of them that match your topic. All right, then you need to make a title for your report or blog posting or article, whatever it is you can have different titles to for different industries for the same survey. Remember, we categorize them so publishing people could go to a certain page on your site and. Right. Excuse me, sci fi people could go to a certain page on your site, but you could still have another page for the the children's books, you know, and you can make different titles for both. So you can mix it, in other words, you can mix and match and dice all this stuff up and use a lot of the info, then prepare your graphics and infographics, video, whatever you're going to include, which is very important. You want to make the job easy and then pick the the places, the journalists or the websites or blogs with a quick query. You know, in other words, don't bury them and send them all your video and graphics and everything right off the bat, if they're not interested, you're just going to make a mad and next time you hit him up, they're going to blow you off. So just send a quick query, but let them know that you have berel graphics and supporting material. And what you're sending the message is, is you're going to make their job really easy, OK, marketing your survey.

[00:20:42] So you have to market in two ways. One, to get people to take the survey and to to promote the results of the survey. Now, most media outlets won't I mean, major media outlets say won't consider publishing survey results unless it has a sample of 1000 or 2000 respondents minimum. Now, this doesn't mean I wouldn't pitch, even if I could only get a couple hundred people on a certain topic to take the survey, because a lot of outlets, that's good enough. Now, as I mentioned earlier, if you give an incentive, you will get way more people to respond so they can get your freebie or incentive. You can even give rewards to them for sharing to make your survey go viral. I have a whole book on viral marketing. Screwthecommute.com/viral. Now, if you want more accurate results, don't do this. Remember, no incentives. You can send the survey to your email list and plastered all over your social media, if you don't have enough followers or email subscribers, consider advertising the survey on websites that you hope will publish the survey results say that could even be part of the advertising deal. Pitch it to social media influencers on that topic. It's another way. Now, the same techniques are used to market the results of your survey and one way to give yourself an extra chance of getting the results published is called News Jacking. Now, the founder of that term, David Merriman Scott, or he coined it and I think he got it in the dictionary, was on episode 402 of this podcast, Screw the Commute.

[00:22:31] Flash forward to basically news jacking is releasing your survey results around some other big thing that's already in the news. Let's say you had an environmental topic while released the results around Earth Day, something like that. You can also write an opinion piece for online publications and newspapers. If you can't get a journalist to pick pick up the the survey just by pitching them. So, folks, surveys can really do you well and they're not that hard to do, and like I said, you can not even do one and still do one and do or make money from them. All right. So that survey. So please consider helping out on the campaign to help the disabled folks get their scholarships so they can not only learn and not have to travel. You know, these are people with physical disabilities, by the way. They can learn and not have to travel and they can legitimately work without traveling. And we're we're putting a job placement program in place for them. And like I said, we're going to use some of the money to hire people to help run the program. So anyway, check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and please do your part to help these folks that have gotten handed a rough hand. Put it that way. All right. We'll catch up on the next episode. See you later.

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