465 – Folks ask all sorts of things: Tom talks Ask me a Question

Episode 465 - Ask Me 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.

[00:00:09] Hey, everybody. It's Tom here with Episode four hundred sixty five of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm doing another Ask Me a question episode. Now, Episode 464 was an ask me a question about finding affiliates, laying out an e-commerce store, getting rid of ghost followers that are hurting your Instagram account, prepublication sales, which can bring you a lot of money in quick and screen capture video. So I hope you didn't miss that episode. You can always check back episodes out by doing Screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number, that was 464. Now, how'd you like me to send you big checks. Well, check out our affiliate program, email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com where if you refer my products and services we send you a nice big commission check. So check that out and you can be sure your people will be happy because we hardly ever get returns or complaints because we put out good stuff and never let the client down. Pick up a copy of my automation ebook. It's at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And I'll tell you what, this has saved me millions of keystrokes allowed me to ethically steal customers off. Other people are too slow to get back to the the prospects.

[00:01:48] So check that out. We sell it for 27 bucks, but it sure is free for listening to the show. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's at screwthecommute.com/app. And you can put us on your cell phone and tablet does all kinds of cool stuff and we have training on how to use it. And you can take us with you on the road. Now, if you're a regular listener, you know, I'm really pushing hard on this program. We have to help people with disabilities go through my school and we got a go fund me campaign. We just topped sixteen thousand dollars. We've got a long way to go to the seventy six thousand dollars to get five people through and hire. Other disabled people to help run the program and were really improving the site and making things accessible for people and this is an important thing for everybody out there, is to make your sites accessible. So check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and then at the top, click on the Go Fund Me campaign and you can see the people that are in the program so far. Please make a contribution a little bit later. I'll tell you how anybody that contributes gets a copy in my new book and we'll get to that at the end.

[00:03:15] All right, let's get to the main event. Ask me a question. All right. So the first question is, could you explain the Zeigarnik principle? Now, I've been talking about this, the Garnick principle for many, many years, Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian psychiatrist, psychologist that uncovered the principle of the human mind that the human mind cannot stand unfulfilled curiosity. So we use this to our benefit in our copywriting most of the time. And in our emails and blog postings and all kinds of stuff, the idea is, is that you say something that makes people curious of what you're talking about or what the answer is, and they even use it on the business card. Smart business people don't just go to networking events and hand out business cards that people just throw away. They use the back side and ask some kind of question that can only be answered at their Web site. And so let's say you're a realtor and you are on the back side. You say, hey, I found the secret to getting two points off of your next mortgage. Visit my site, Joerealtor.com/twopoints to find the answer. You know, so people are going to say, oh, I'm going to keep that and go to that site when I get home, rather than just forget all about you before they leave them the meeting.

[00:04:45] So that's one way to use it. Another way that I use all the time and many marketers do is the subject lines of your e-mails. See, that's the number one thing that gets your email open. It's not the number one thing that gets you, keeps your email from being deleted. That happens to be the fact that they recognize who it's from. That's keeps your email from getting deleted. But the number one thing that gets it open is the subject line. And by the way, I always have to throw in extra stuff. Subject line should be 140 characters or less, including spaces. And the most important stuff should be to the left in case it gets truncated or cut off. And, you know, I only have 36 characters available in my email program. I mean, there's more available, but that's how many I allow to show to see if I want to open the email or not. If you do a good job at curiosity and your subject lines, you'll get way more openness to your email and then inside the email, if you do a good job in the body, you'll get way more. Click through to your Web site. And here's an example of a subject, one of my biggest ones ever. It's boy, did I get in trouble. That was the subject line. I don't know how many characters that is, but is not many.

[00:06:09] People that have been on my list for a while have like, OK, what did Tom do now and what kind of trouble did he get in? They had to open it to find out. It's so so that's how you use it. So it's basically creating curiosity. In fact, we had like a real long pamphlet type of sales letter at one time at the bottom of every printed page, I made sure that the sentence didn't end at the bottom. Because nobody wants to quit reading in the middle of a sentence. OK, so it forced them to turn to the next page to finish that sentence and it sucked them in to keep reading at the bottom of every page. It never ended in a period, say. So curiosity is one of the the most powerful techniques you could ever do. And of course, I go into this and 30 other really powerful techniques in my copywriting901.com course.

[00:07:15] OK. Oh, well, one more story I got to tell you about curiosity, and this is the Garnick, so I'm doing it and this happens. I'm reminded of this because Britney Spears is in the news right now because she's trying to end this conservatorship where they're running her whole life. But anyway, years ago I was I remember this vividly. I was in a hotel in Los Angeles getting getting ready to go down and do a speech back. This is back actually when I actually wore ties.

[00:07:46] I remember this because I'm sitting there, put my tie on. And the news is on and news directors use this all the time, they tease you with something and it makes you curious. So you stay and keep watching. And I've had news directors in my program that have told me, yeah, we just lied to you. We tell you it's coming up in the next segment. No, it's not coming up to the end because we don't want you to change the channel. So anyway, I'm watching this and they do a tease. It says, guess who Britney kissed will tell you in the next segment. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't give a darn about Britney Spears. But I wonder who it was some kind of dawdling around, put my tie on and get my stuff together to go downstairs, next segment comes by No Britney and that that's it again and again, thinking the same thing. I don't really care. I should go downstairs, but I wonder who it was. And this was after she had had this big brouhaha with kissing Madonna, you know, so I think yeah, I think it was right around the time. So. So anyway, it's clear at the end of the show, the news thing and I'm almost late going downstairs. And finally it was this kid that she married for like 12 hours in Las Vegas. So it got a guy that knows the technique to stand there for a half hour dawdling around, putting my time to find out. So very, very powerful.

[00:09:24] OK, let's see. Next question, our PDF books better than Kindle books. Well, there's not a better or worse, but I will explain to you what how the method that I use with my mentees, we always start with a PDF e-book. Always. Because it costs nothing to do, you can make the cover for free on Canva, you can write it in your word processor, you can convert it to PDF, and you have no investment in this piece of intellectual property that you can then sell as much as a printed book. So we always start with PDF. And another reason it's so easy to edit the word processing document and reconverted as soon as you find something you wish you'd have said or you find a typo and you always will. I never seen a book ever by any big name author, anybody going through the greatest editing process on Earth that didn't have mistakes in. So it's easy to change. Then we convert it to Amazon Kindle, we don't waste our time on any of the other Barnes and Noble Nook or something. Amazon Kindle is the big 900 pound gorilla. By the way, I have a mastermind. I do every so often. That's a 12 week course. There's so many details to this.

[00:10:48] It sounds easy, but then how do you sell it? How do you format the Kindle book? How do you format the PDF book? How do you write the copy for it? Where do you how do you sell it on your Web site? All of those things Bayway back to Kindle. Once we convert it to Kindle, we're not driving people to Amazon to buy it. We want the traffic, Amazon has to find it and buy it. We want the people that we're have, we have control of, like with our email list and our social media to go by the PDF version, which is normally at a much higher price. So that's there's not one better than the other. They're just different. The pricing points are different. But the people that come off of Amazon probably never heard of you. And so they're not going to notice. And plus, they'll be happy that it was cheaper than the PDF version. If they do eventually get to your website, which we teach your methods to get them to your website so that they have to opt in to build your email list. So. So there's all these things that are involved in it. But one is not better than the other. You do both.

[00:12:06] All right. Next question. Should I concentrate more on social media or building my email list? Well, let me let me rephrase that a little bit for you. All right. You should be concentrating on social media to build your email list. That's the whole reason that I have that I feel with social media is to get him the heck off of there onto an email list. In fact, if you looked at my all my profiles and stuff, you think, man, this guy's a nobody, because I understand the fact that Mark Zuckerberg or all the other guys can turn one dial and I disappear off the face of the earth. So I use all the social media to get them off of their onto an email list that's under my control. So, yes, you should concentrate on social media. Yes. There's things that can build your credibility. I mean, your Google ranking in part depends on your social media presence. You know, if you have a lot of back links coming into your website. Google is looking at it to see if you're cheating or not, they say, hey, if so many people have bothered to link to you. There's somebody talking about you, you better have a social media presence to back it up, say so. So all of these things are intertwined nowadays. But the bottom line and all the people I don't care what they're telling you, all the fancy ads and all the little wet behind the ears, people that are just got richer, all that crap email is where the money is. Email because it's under your control.

[00:13:41] Any time you want to, you can reach out to your people and all that. So, no, it's not a one or the other. It's using one to make the other really powerful. OK, this one's a spin off of that one a little bit. So Tom, ever since I've known you and in parentheses, they said over 18 years you've railed against HTML e-mail. Now I see you're using it. What's up with that? Well, HTML, email. That's the kind of email that you can have for formatted text like bold and color and change the size of the font and different fonts and all that stuff and graphics. Kamer on the scene around the year 2000, in the early 2000s, let's say. And guess what? It was invented by the porn people, by the way. So, you know, they invented a lot of the stuff that we use today because they there was so much money involved in it in those days. They had the best of the best tech people. In fact, one of them, a guy used to help me out. Had a job, he made one hundred thousand dollars a year, and this is over 20 years ago. Just negotiating with Visa and MasterCard, you know, a tenth of a percent difference in the percentage that they took because the porn ring he was working for was bringing in four hundred thousand dollars a day. All right. Anyway, they were able to invent a lot of this stuff that we use, you know, today.

[00:15:14] But it wasn't clear until the year 2016 where and if you hear anything in the background, that's little rescue dog I have here. She's a little upset. Anyway, till 2016, where it was just becoming universally accepted, when you send an email out, that's HTML that looks halfway decent when it gets there. In fact, there was a study that showed that up to 60 percent of HTML emails did not get to the recipient looking like it did when you sent it. Because there's all these different email recipients and cascading style sheets and stuff I don't fool with, so I just avoided it. Like every other top marketer on Earth, we only sent plain text for years and years and years. And I railed against it because there was so many negative spam filters because of the porn thing, gave you a negative point, just because of the format of the material, didn't matter what was in it. That's all gone by the wayside. And now the people reading it, more of the technology is standardized that they can see it half decently. But still to this day, I do not put any graphics in. The most I ever do is raise the font size. Change the font, use bold, I never you never use underlining because that means you can click on something either on an email ebook or a web page.

[00:16:50] Underlining means you can click on something. And if they can't click, they think something's wrong. So. I only use bold and color, that's the only things I do know, graphics and now another thing you can take really humongous Lelong links or affiliate links and bury them under what is called anchor text. Like click here with this massive link underneath of it. Click here is called the anchor text. So that way you can put really long, goofy looking links in an e-mail and not make it look stupid. So that's all I do. I included a link, gives you the history of HTML and goes in a little more in-depth into the technical details. But I got to tell you, it works now like it didn't work before and that's why I switched. You got to stay on top of this stuff to see things to your advantage. I still wouldn't be opposed to sending out a plain text, email, see plain text. You can't make it bold. You can't make color, you can't raise the font is just just plain text. But I made fortunes over the years with just plain text. So now I just added a little bit of emphasis with bold and color and but no graphics. Because another thing about it, you know, people kill themselves to make these fancy look looking emails, html. Well, a lot of people have preview windows in their email and the preview window to.

[00:18:26] To help avoid to make it faster and to help avoid any malicious code that's embedded in an email. The preview window strips out all the graphics, so your thing looks like hell where mine just looks like text and normal and, you know, in the preview window, say so again, it's not going to necessarily look when somebody gets it. How you thought it was so beautiful when you created it. And it's enormous amount of more work to create it properly so that it will be seen as good as possible everywhere. See, when you get something from Macy's or something or Nordstrom's, well, they've got a team of geeks that know what they're doing, watching every single thing about the email. But you don't so forget.. I mean, forget fancy HTML. You can use plain HTML, which is kind of an oxymoron, but just simple html put it that way.

[00:19:30] OK, next question. How do I find good people to help out with my online business? While I've been teaching this for many years to now, it's been a little bit more difficult in the past year. If you're looking trying to get a young person because of the pandemic, it's still possible some people are still doing it. So I suggest you get a high school student that's really tech savvy. I always tease that, get the kid that's never going to get a date in their entire life, OK? They just love their computer and they're thrilled to death that they're not cutting grass or flipping burgers to make extra money.

[00:20:06] Say we've had lots of good kids are recruited out of high school, including Ilya Pozin, who just saw it was my first geek I recruited and he just sold his third startup, Pluto TV for three hundred and forty million dollars. I thought of man. And he credited me in an article he wrote for Forbes that for starting him as an entrepreneur. And I tell him next time I come to L.A., you're buying dinner. So, so. So anyway, what you do is you get in touch with the high school guidance counselors. You say, do you have a computer club or a computer science that you're looking for employees for weekend evening and summer work. You can't compete with the school year. Now, they're going to be very protective of the kids. I always tell people you can't just go down to the high school and say, hey, I'd like to have a kid at least. At least that's what the policeman told me at the station. So. So, anyway, if you can get a hold of the computer science class or if they do have a computer club. That teacher is going to know all the little nerds in the school, we call them propeller heads and geeks and and we had one lady, they invited her to speak to the computer club.

[00:21:28] She had 18 kids of all kinds of highly technical skills. She's leaving is like the Pied Piper went into her to hire them. So anyway, the teacher getting hold of the parents and you can make a deal with the parents and and a lot of this stuff can be remote. But here's your tip. Don't pay by the hour if it's remote, pay by the job, because the kids will be playing around on tech talk for 99 percent of your hour and charging, you see. So. So I hate that. So I don't want to worry about that. So I just pay by the the project. So in other words, if they put up 10 pages on a Web site, you can go online and look at them and if they're good, then they get paid two dollars a pay, whatever you negotiate with them. And and I also tell you, don't go to the fancy high schools, go to blue collar high schools, because a lot of the fancy big, you know, neighborhood high schools, those kids have more money than you got and don't need you. You want the blue collar kids that are hungrier. So so that's how we recruit out of high school. Now. A lot of my long term people came off of Craigslist, but you got to have you know, I write these ads. The reason is Craigslist because no no other legitimate place would take an ad that I write because they're really mean and nasty.

[00:22:52] So I write an ad. Here's one of the tips. You want to put paid internship in the subject line, because I don't want a 55 year old out of work MBA that can barely turn their computer on bothering me. All right. I feel bad for their situation, but they used to have 20 people to run and do stuff for them and now they want to work for me where I'm supposed to depend on them to do tech stuff and and be tech savvy and show me how to do stuff on my cell phone. And they don't know. So I don't want them to apply. So when I came up with a paid internship, none of them apply anymore because no 55 year old MBA is going to apply for an internship. So that gives me young tech savvy people that only apply. And then I write an ad that's that sucks them in with all the great stuff you're going to learn. You know, you're going to learn from this international known guru guy and all this. I don't call myself that, but I put it in the ad and then all the things that they're going to learn about. But then after I suck them in, I say, but you better, you know, really care about your work. Because if you're a worthless slug that doesn't, if he doesn't throw you out of here in five minutes, the other good employees will.

[00:24:11] So that scares off all the losers. And, you know, I'm very blunt. You know, there's losers out there. There's a high percentage of them in the younger generation. I'm not saying it's their fault because it's usually the parents that want to make it easy on their kids so they don't put any pressure on them. They don't give them a work ethic. They give them everything. And so I'm not blaming the kids, but I don't want to deal with them. So it scares off all the losers and then only good ones apply. And I've had some here 12, 13 years, so I'm still here. All right. So so that's how I do Craigslist and certain cities. You do have to pay for employment ads, but most of the country you don't. So that's how we do it with recruiting people. All right, next question, Tom, How soon is your crowdfunding book coming out? I need money to print my next book. Well, it's it's should be out within about a week because I just did a prepublication sale on it and you're obligated to put it out when you say you're going to put it out. So I told them about a week. It should be about a week. Now, here's the thing you can do in the meantime, well, let me tell you about the prepublication sale, because everybody that contributes to my crowdfunding campaign, all the money is going to the scholarships for the disabled people, gets a copy of the book if you contribute 20 bucks or more.

[00:25:40] So that's something you can do at IMTCVA.org/disabilities, click through to the Go Fund Me campaign and contribute at least 20 bucks. Of course I love it if you do more. A lot of the high so far is three thousand. We've had a couple of thousands and lots of hundreds, but anyway, at least 20 bucks and you'll you'll automatically get notified where you can download the crowdfunding book when it comes out. But we also have a bunch of other deals and all the money is going towards the scholarship program. So we have a deal where for 100 bucks you get a 30 minute consultation plus the e-book. For 300 bucks, you get the consultation ebook. Plus you get a feature interview on this podcast in front of thousands of people. So now we only have five of those available for four hundred ninety seven bucks. You get a full website, critique and consultation. And I've never critiqued a website in the last 20 years, and it's over 10000 of them folks that didn't have major problems that are hurting the owners. They just don't know any better. And a lot of times the people doing your website was just an out of work graphic designer and they don't know these things either.

[00:26:58] Now we only have three of those available and you save like 500 bucks off of retail. And that on the thing. The other thing is. So save 200 bucks. All right. For nine ninety seven, you get a one on one full day consultation that can be broken up into smaller chunks, could be eight one hour consultations or 16, 30 minutes or any combination. And you say four thousand bucks off of the price of that. And remember all the money going to the scholarship fund. And then for twelve hundred forty eight fifty, you get the one on one to day VIP, one on one video weekend. So you come in on a Friday, we put you in our studio, we shoot as many marketing videos as you. And I also prepare you before you get here. We had one couple shoot fifty three marketing videos here and then we teach you how to use them on YouTube properly. There's a million details on YouTube, most of you don't know. And then we teach you how to use them on social media. Then I do an evening session with you on equipment and lighting and all the stuff I've learned in the 40 plus years I've been doing video, even studied in Hollywood and had two Hollywood guys working for me, picked up all their tips. And then the second day, we take you out into the field and show you how to use marketing videos no matter where you are, make marketing videos no matter where you are, and make whatever you're doing, apply to the marketing video.

[00:28:33] There's so much more interesting than just plain talking head winds. Now, I want you to have a mixture of talking heads, maybe white board ones, but the ones in the field really get a lot of attention. So that's half price on that. You save 12 forty eight fifty and there's only two of those available. We just got got some one of those. And you never see discounts like this out of me. And, and all the contributions are going into the scholarship funds for the persons with disabilities. I'm not taking a nickel for myself. All right. In the meantime. All right, back to the question about the crowdfunding book in the meantime, this next week. You could be making a list of every possible person that you know who would contribute to your campaign. Even companies you do business with, they kind of owe you if you're spending money with them all the time, so frequently you can get them to contribute your email list. So start this now because you just can't possibly think of everyone, you know, just by sitting down one time that it takes a little while. In fact, the best campaigns take about a month to prepare for with all the little details and and follow up promotions and keeping momentum going and creating a launch team and all these little things.

[00:29:56] Because a great deal of these campaigns fail miserably because people didn't plan ahead. And you have to pick the right platform like I picked. Go fund me for certain reasons. You'll learn all that in the book and Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And there's a there's there's actually six hundred different ones. So so I don't put them all in the book, but. But you'll learn how to pick the that. So anyway, you can get started right away making a list of everybody you know. But get over there to IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on Go Fund Me please contribute anything you're comfortable with. Hey if you're really flush with cash for 15 grand, you can sponsor one person and pick help pick the person if you don't have somebody in mind and really give them a career where they're not on the welfare rolls and they're they're not depressed. I can't guarantee all this stuff. But the one of the reasons I did this is because people are with disabilities are three point seven times more likely to be depressed, four times more likely to commit suicide. And they have the highest unemployment rate in seven years. So really, you can help change somebody's life by participating in it.

[00:31:20] OK, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'll catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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