477 – More from Tom’s grab bag of questions: Tom talks Ask me a Question

Episode 477 – 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.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred and seventy seven of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm going to do another ask me a question. I mean, I'm going to do a lot of these because I get so many questions, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them that people just need to know about. And there's a potpourri. There's always something for everybody here. I know for a fact that people don't know all this stuff because they don't work at seven days a week like I do. So that's what we'll talk about today. Now, hope you didn't miss episode 476, that was Mike Stewart, he's the Internet audio guy. And he is oh, man. He's got so many great stories. He's touring with the box tops and he's got a gold record from PAC Man Fever he was involved in a long time ago. And also we're covering a lot of typical audio recording mistakes that people make. So make sure you listen to that any time you want to get to a back episode, which I'm going to mention several of them today. You want to go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number, his was 476. Now, how'd you like me to send you big checks? Well, I'd love to send you big checks. All you have to do is email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and ask about our affiliate programs so you can get referral commissions just for telling people about my products and services.

[00:01:50] So check that out now. Pick up a copy of our automation ebook. I'm actually going to go into some of those automation techniques today and you will thank me if you would just download the darn book and use some of the stuff. Are you crazy? You know, it just makes your work so much faster, takes your workload down with all and it's all cheap and free stuff to do it. So you're crazy not to do it. I get people crying all the time. I'm out it. I don't have enough time. I well use this stuff. You have to take a little time out to learn some of these automation techniques and then they save you thousands of hours into the future. Are you stupid for not doing it? I don't mean to be so blunt. Well, yeah, I do. It's one of those sorry not sorry. Things I'm trying to tell you. Do this, learn automation techniques and it'll save you enormous amounts of time. It'll make you more way more money because you're able to take care of more customers faster and you're able to get back to prospects faster. So your competition doesn't get the business. You get the business because you got back to people right away. So do that. Download the book and start implementing some of the stuff. It's at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And if you think I'm a little frustrated about this, yes, I get the same calls over and over and over again from people with the same things. I tell them what to do. They don't do it. All right. Kind of reminds me of that guy that said I'm a thousand dollars an hour consultant. No, no. He said I'm a five hundred dollar an hour consultant. I'm thinking about raising my feet a thousand dollars an hour and giving him a five hundred dollar an hour rebate. If they just do, what the heck I told them. OK, all right. So down that download that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. Before we get into the main event, ask me a question. Let's talk about this program that I'm working with my school to help get persons with disabilities trained and hired or start their own business. This is one of my legacy programs to really change people's lives, and this is the pilot program to prove the concept and then we're going to roll it out really big, but we need your help. So check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That's my school website. It's the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, probably the world and its license to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's distance learning. So and it's good quality distance learning, I might add. So check that out. And at the top of the page, the disabilities page, you can see the go fund me thing and take click that go over to go fund me. And you'll see some of the people in the program will give you updates on how things are going. We're going to use some of the money to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. You know, so it's really a great thing. It's it's something you can really be proud of supporting.

[00:05:31] All right. Let's get to the main event. Ask me a question. Well, first of all, the first part of this is not a question, it's the thing is, is when you don't work at this every day, you might be a highly accomplished business person. You might be very successful with your business and you're the credible person in your field. There's all kinds of good things could happen. But, here's the thing, that doesn't mean, you know crap about my field, it's like me going in, like to an engineer and saying, oh, I know your stuff. You know, I can do your stuff.

[00:06:13] I can, you know, write up some plans. You know, I don't know crap about engineering. And it's when people come to me and act like they know what they're talking about and then like, I don't know, 30 seconds or ten seconds, sometimes I can tell they're clueless. They're just arrogant, clueless people that think because they're good in one field, they know everybody's field and they go, oh, I know Internet stuff. I got a beautiful website. And I'm saying, well, how much money is it make and nothing. Well, OK, how beautiful it is. It still sucks. The bottom line is, does it make money for you? And if it doesn't, I don't care how pretty and fancy and all the bells and whistles it has. So there's a lot of just I mean, to this day, it just amazes me of the things people say to me that just prove that they are totally clueless. The people advising them are totally clueless and they don't know my field. Like, you know, I've been working this seven days a week for 24 years. Is it 24 years? No, it's 27 years. I had lost three years in there. So so a couple of those things I'm going to I'm going to talk about right now as examples of this. And I guarantee you some of you are doing these things and then don't come to me afterwards. Oh, I knew that. Well, I can look at your websites and stuff and tell you don't know that again.

[00:07:45] I don't mean to be arrogant about this, but, you know, I made a fortune being blunt with people because I can't help you if I pat on the back for doing stupid things or listening to stupid people. I'm sorry. All right. So here's the thing. I hear this all the time that people didn't listen to my episode one on key words in episode 130 on Voice Search. You know this you know, I'm a big proponent of keyword stuff. That's the biggest mistake everybody makes. And they're listening to our work graphic web graphic designers who all of a sudden are Web designers and doing things on their Web site that hurts them really bad. We'll get into some of that a little bit later. But here's one thing. I hear somebody. Types in what they believe is their key word phrase. And they come back and they tell me, oh, this is great, Tom, yeah, there's 200 billion searches for this. I said, Yeah, I know that they're crazy. I know they don't know what they're talking about. I know they're ignorant. And I'm not saying that in a mean fashion, ignorant means not knowing. So the problem is, is that when you type in a phrase into Google or any search engine. It brings up a number. That reflects the number of pages out there in its index and its database that have those words on the page, all of them are on the page, but it doesn't mean that they're they're lined up against each other with each other.

[00:09:36] Like your phrase was, you have to put quotation marks around it and then that 200 billion goes down to like 45000 or, you know, something reasonable. So people don't know that. So whenever you're trying to check out a phrase, put quotation marks around it, and then those words have to be in that order next to each other, for instance, just just a short term public speaking. Well. If you had the word public on a page and the word speaking on a page, it's going to bring up just enormous amounts of results. But if you put the quotation marks around it, public speaking has a whole different meaning, then let's say it was a recap of a board meeting or something or a school district. And and so. Somewhere on the page, it says this public meeting was held at so-and-so date and then later it said we had a one of the board members speaking about, well, it has nothing to do with the skill of public speaking, say, that's what I'm talking about. But if you put quotation marks around it, probably that site is not going to show up. It's going to be sites about the term public speaking, say so. So quotation marks. All right. The next thing I hear all the time, I'm just making this up. Let's see if Mr. Kosminsky is real sorry about this, buddy.

[00:11:17] But so somebody named Yoseph costs Wolinsky or something like that, some really obscure thing. Name types his name into one of the search engines and then comes and brags to me about how he's already coming up. Number one, I'm sorry to laugh at, but, you know, does it mean anything when you have some? You know, totally. I don't want to say weird. I mean, that's a that's the guy's name. But but it's it's totally unique. How many Yoseph Kozulin skis are there in the, you know, Google's database? That probably not many. So so that doesn't mean anything that your name came up first. If they knew your name, you don't need the search engine. They can just find you. All right. Yeah, the search engine would find you, too. But if you had Yoseph Cossalinsky.com and they knew your name, they'd type it in and come. Right. Do you say that's not what we're talking about here? We're talking about being found on the Internet for what you do. So you never see my name and my name Antion is pretty unique. There's a Antion somebody I think, in Hawaii that does music and I see the Antion all the time where it's a misspelling of action, which is kind of interesting because I'm a guy of action. So. So if you have some weird term, yeah. You might come up first, but it doesn't mean anything.

[00:12:53] All right. Next thing. And another thing that when people think that they're doing great in search and, you know, SEO search engine optimization is your browser remembers what sites you've go to all the time. So if you even start typing, you're the name of your site. It's going to come up instantly and you're going to say, oh, look at this site. I'm perfect. I don't need any help here. Oh, it doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean everybody else is going to see that. No. Heck no. So those are just some things. Well, here's another one that these dumb do doofus web people tell you to go check, you know, if you want to if you're talking about what domain name you want to get. So they tell you, oh, just go to GoDaddy or one of the other. And by the way, what a place that you can buy domains is called a registrar registrar. So GoDaddy. Oh, there's all kinds of places. Xenome loads of loads of places can sell you domains. So you're actually leasing it, by the way. You don't actually own it. That's another issue. But these dumb web people tell you to go to a registrar and check to see if the domain is available. No, no and no. That's the dumbest thing. It proves they're clueless. They don't know what they're doing and they just possibly hurt you. And here's why. There's a thing called front running. And, you know, these registrars, GoDaddy and all the other ones have thousands.

[00:14:39] Some of them have thousands of employees. What do you think they do background checks on all these people and all these people are perfectly high security people that, you know, have security clearances with the government. You know, high security, no top secret. No, there's just a lot of people. And when you have enormous numbers of people that have control of things, you got potential for fraud. So there somebody at the registrar sees you typing in a hot domain name. If you don't buy it that instant, they call their buddy outside of. Their registrar and say, hey, by this real quick and says somebody else buys it and then they try to sell it back to you for an enormous amount of money. So that's called frontrunning, do any of the registrars admit to this? Heck, no. It's another one of those things. If you've been around a while and you're on the inside, you know, these things happen. And so don't ever go check a domain name unless you're ready to buy it that moment. Now, you can type it into Google and see if there's a website there or not. If there is a website, then somebody actually owns it. Now, if there's no website, it doesn't mean that it's that it's available because I mean, I own lots of stuff just so you can have it. All right. I don't plan to develop it. I just keep it so somebody else can't have it on my major site.

[00:16:11] So anyway, that's called front running. So don't ever go to a registrar and check out a domain name unless you're ready to buy it that moment. OK, let's get to some questions. All right, first one, I get overwhelmed with the volume of email questions that I get. Help, help Tom. While this goes back to the book I told you to download that I'm giving you for free the autumn how to automate your business book. So the first thing is, is you. Should have a macro program, a macro program allows you to type a little key combination like Q1 or something or, you know, D2, and it'll type in war and peace if you want, automatically boom in any program that's called shortkeys.com. And there's one on Mac that's called keyboard maestro. It's a little more complicated, but if you took a day just to learn either one of these, this is the program that you've heard me say on other episodes has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. And that's as of two years ago when we really tried to estimate it. So it's way more than that now because I use it every day, every second of every day. I'm using that thing all day long. So you're crazy if you don't do it, you're crazy if you don't make your employees use it, because why should you pay them so much money to make errors and and type the same stuff over and over again? That's lousy productivity.

[00:17:51] So keyboard maestro or short kids, and that'll knock down loads and loads of your your problems with the email because typically people get the same questions all the time. And so my rule of thumb is, if I get a question that I haven't heard of more than once, the answer is made into an automated answer so that I can just hit a keystroke and type in, you know, ten paragraphs worth of stuff if I wanted to. And that's and once you start getting the same questions, you start remembering the key combinations and I'll just let you go lightning fast. So that's shortcakes. Another one is called Signature Files. See if you have a good email program, you have unlimited numbers of signature files. These are the files that usually people use them to just put their website in their name and their phone number. Well, a good email program like Outlook has unlimited signature files. So that's another way you can just put the answers as a signature file and you go insert signature and pick the answer that you want and it types in, as you know, it could again, it could be 20 paragraphs or this stuff. And you can still customize the answer if you need to, you know, but it just saves you all that typing, you know, and thinking up and where did I save it and cut and paste and all that crap.

[00:19:16] No wonder I make money. All right, because I don't fight with the computer all day long and just waste time typing the same stuff over and over and over again. Now, I've been using that since 1997. All right. So you wonder how I have time to do all the stuff I do, because these types of tools, I think it cost twenty bucks one time for the program. Another thing you could do is, is have a whole frequently asked question thing on your website. Now that'll that'll knock down a lot. But between those three things and get the automation book, you'll you won't be overwhelmed if you take the time to do something about it instead of just whining about, OK, let's see. Next question. I get reports that there is weird formatting and mistakes on my website, but it looks fine to me. What can I do? Well, this is a topic called cross browser testing, you'll want to Google that. And there are plenty of websites that will. You can open your your website up in lots of different browsers and cell phones and tablets and different tablets and different cell phones and different browsers and all kinds of stuff. So it's up to you to check your website in all these different things. And it's it's almost impossible to do. With your own equipment, because who has, you know, 15 different tablets and, you know, five different cell phones and all this stuff. So if you Google Cross browser testing, you'll find, OK, all kinds of sites.

[00:21:01] Most of them are the good ones are paid. There used to be a lot of free ones out there that were pretty good. But now to get the most accurate results, you're probably going to pay a little bit. But you can just you know, you do it once and then, you know, by a month worth of service, check out all your stuff and then cancel, I don't know, like, for instance, browserstack.com is one. And I'm not endorsing them. I'm just saying it's one of the ones that does this kind of service. So it's up to you to check your stuff in all kinds of different browsers and cell phones and tablets and then make adjustments as necessary. Sometimes it's hard to get him to show up perfectly in all of those things unless you got a team of geeks that really know what they're doing. But you can usually compromise and get things looking pretty good if you take the time to do this. All right. Next is Tom, why do you always say no underlining or italics on websites and ebooks? Well, I'm going to give you another couple episodes to listen to that, you know, just have lots of little tips on your website. That would be Episode 312 on Readability and Episode 313 on useability. And so you go to screwthecommute.com, slash 312 and slash 313.

[00:22:23] Anybody has a website should should know these things. Even if you have a Web designer, it allows you to say, oh, they're making a mistake here on my Web site. I'm paying them. You know, you need to know about this stuff, you principles out there that just stick your head in the sand and oh, no, I'm too good to get my fingers dirty in this stuff. Well, you're going to get screwed. Simple is that you're going to get screwed by people that never made a nickel online doing all this stuff to your Web site and and, you know, and you're clueless. So if you want to be a clueless CEO, great. You're getting screwed. It's as simple as that. I mean, I could take the top CEO in the world and just make him look like an idiot because they don't even know. The simplest thing about this now doesn't mean they're not really good at what they do. But the more you know about it or hire people beneath you, that really, really. No, not people that just claim to know but have proven to know the better off you're going to be in your business. So anyway, underlining it's about the simplest thing on earth is that underlying means something is clickable. And if you underline just to emphasize something and it's not clickable, people get the impression something's wrong with your Web site and you don't want that impression. You want them concentrating on your content and buying your stuff, not thinking they don't really take care of their website.

[00:23:52] So no underlining that same thing in ebooks. And italics, yeah, italics won't technically hurt your website, but. See, the screens are made up of vertical and horizontal dots called pixels, it's not the same kind of pixel as as when you're advertising pixel. That's a whole different thing. But as soon as you start cutting at an angle across these pixels with italics, your website starts looking funny. It starts the italics, get a little fuzzy on the edges. Now, if they're real big, you can get away with it. If they're embedded in graphics, that's that doesn't matter. That's fine. But if it's small, relatively small, I just avoid I a lot of times people think, oh, I'm going to make all my testimonials, italics, and then it's just terrible looking. So don't don't do that. So that's italics and underlining. All right, next thing is Tom, you say people can leave a voicemail right on your website. How does that work? Well, there's a very inexpensive program called Speak Pipe and they'll give you a widget. They'll give you. Now, the new version just came out. I just got notice yesterday that there's all kinds of things. You can send a person a link and they can click on it and start talking and you get a voicemail. But I usually have the widget on the edge of my website. If you go to screw the commuter com and you look down on the edge, there's a little blue thing that says leave voicemail.

[00:25:38] You click it, it opens up a box, and then you have to allow speaker pipe to access your microphone. And then you just talk to it and then it sends it to me as an audio file. So I actually hear you talking and it'll send me an email or I can just check a website where all these voicemails are recorded and saved for me and then I can click a button and send you a voicemail back the same way. It's amazing and it's super cheap. I think it was it was another 20 bucks or something. So that's called Speak Pipe and it's really great. We also use it to have people leave testimonials for screw the commute and then I can take the audio file and edit it in to the podcast. So all kinds of cool things. And actually some of the guests we have that do a short two or three minute segment on their expertise, do it on speaker pipe, just Tom click the link. Give me about two or three minutes on insurance or whatever your expertise in and then I can edit it in. All right. So that's how we do it. All right, this next one is a little bit sarcastic, but there's Tom thanks for tearing me to pieces on my website critique. I only spent three thousand dollars to buy all those mistakes.

[00:27:10] Sorry, I can't help you if I just patch on the back, I don't care how much is spent. Please tell me again about title tags. All right, so again, folks, you might want to listen to Episode 469, screwthecommute.com/469 on basic SEO. Now I'm not. You know, I gave up I was taught by the best of the best on SEO, I was the top of Google for 12 years, straight top three with major keywords for my sites, made a fortune because of it. But five or six years ago, I just gave up on it. Just too much trouble for full blown SEO shooting for the first page of Google. So I switched to paid traffic. But that doesn't mean I don't want you to do the simple things correctly so that you don't shoot yourself in the foot and have the search engines looking at you like an idiot. Well, that's what happened to this person. I don't want to say guy or girl or reveal who it is, but the title tag. Well, first of all, let me give you a background. See, Google and the other search engines hate you. You are a necessary evil. They are using you and your website to suck in people so they can sell ads. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. All the stuff Google does, Google Earth, Google this, Google that, you know, rocketships they're making, I don't know is all based on that premise.

[00:28:42] Keep the visitor happy so and get more of them and have them stay longer so we can sell more ads and for more money. That's how it works. See, back in the old days, we had AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and all these crazy things, you'd have to sift through 20 pages of garbage to find anything you were really looking for. Well, when Google came along, they said, you know what, that's not acceptable. We want people to find what they're looking for on the first page. And they did it. And boom, look what happened. They just dominated the world pretty much. So that's the thing. So it's your job to make it easy for them to think you're one of the best results in your field. And again, it's it's a lot of work. I don't want you spending a fortune on SEO, but but definitely listen to that episode for sixty nine. Yep. For sixty nine. But I'll tell you about title tags because that's what the question was about. See so when somebody searches for something on Google. They send out what they call spiders. All right, that's just an electronic name for going out and looking for Web pages that are in their index and they start at the top of the page and work down while the top of the page is actually called your title tag. It doesn't even look like it's the top of your page. If you pull your website up in a browser, it's way up near the top of the screen where the tab of the browser is.

[00:30:19] That's your title tag. If you hold your mouse over it and move your mouse a little bit, it'll be a little box will pop up with what words are in your title tag. Well, if you don't. Take a really extreme effort to put the proper words there. Google just you know, if somebody's searching for archery and you say this is Joe's Enterprises up there, Google says I'm in a hurry, I'm not going to look at the rest of your site if you're not about archery, that's 70 to 90 percent of whether you're found or not is in that title tag. And that's the first place I look when somebody asked me to do a website critique because I can instantly tell that the people involved don't know what they're doing instantly or they would not have done, you know, the things that happened or basically they did nothing. And then the same thing shows up on every title tag or it says about, well, who's who's out there sitting at the their computer saying, you know what, I think I'd like to find an about page right now. I'm going to type the word about. That's just ridiculous. So you have every page of your website should have a unique title tag that has key words about what the page is about. See if you don't do anything.

[00:31:47] Almost virtually the same thing shows up on every title tag of your page, every page of your site, and Google comes and looks at your site because, you know, Google knows all sees all like the Wizard of Oz. And they say, what the heck? Why would we ever give this person a high ranking when every page of their site is identical? All right. And if you don't do anything about it, pretty much everything, every page of your site looks identical. So you are doing damage to your site. I had a guy the other day. I said, how long's your site been up? Oh, three years. So three years. Google has seen this guy and thinking this guy's a doofus, doesn't know what he's doing. They'll never he'll never see the light of day with his website just because his web people are idiots. Didn't tell him about this so that he could do something about it. And you can it's way easier to do something about it now, especially if you're on WordPress, because there's plug ins, there's Yoast and there's another plug in called the All in one SEO PIAC. And it means that a mere mortal like you doesn't have to go into the code where they could screw up the site to put in their title tags. Each page you can just say, OK, what's the keywords for this page? What should I put on this page? And you just type them in and hit save and boom, you did your job.

[00:33:13] But if you ignore this, you're never going to see the light of day on a search result. You'll be buried so deep you need a fire truck ladder to get out of it, say so. These are kind of things you need to know about. And again, a bunch of them like this that are so simple. But the web designers, like I said, they're out of work, graphic artists and then claiming to be web designers. Well, they don't know what they're doing when they can make it look nice. Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything if nobody sees it, does it? No. All right. So watch that and. And there you go. So, all right, so one thing before we go, I just really want you to help me out with this crowdfunding campaign for the persons with disabilities. So please visit IMTCVA.org/disabilities and click on the crowdfunding at the top and then go over and see these people. And hey, if you're really flush, you could sponsor a person yourself, but any little bit helps. And also if you if you do at least 47 dollars, you get a copy of my new crowdfunding book that just came out last week. And it's how to get money to finance your dreams and your projects and your medical things and all kinds of things. And you don't have to pay it back. It's all legitimate. All right. So that's the story. I'm sticking to it. Catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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