529 – Brick and mortar is not the only way: Tom talks Adding Digital Products To Your Business

Episode 529 – Digital Products
[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 five hundred and twenty nine of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about why you should either add digital products to your existing business or if you want to start a business, you should start an information business with digital products. That way, the risk is low and the returns are really high and gives you the much greater chance of success in any business you start. That's what this episode is about. Hope you didn't miss episode 528. That was some more cell phone tips. I do that regularly with all the cool things your cell phone will do to automate your business. And that was episode 528. Any time you want to hear a back episode, not a bad episode. I try not to have any of those. So you go screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number that was 528. But also you might want to check the show notes or jot this down. It's 367, 415, 508, 528 I did on cell phone tips so that all of them will apply to you, whether Android or iPhone.

[00:01:46] I'm on iPhone, but I want the Android people to get the idea and then go figure out how to do it on Android. All right. How'd you like to make big money from referring my products and services? Well, I never get any complaints, so people will be happy with you and I'll send you money. So check that out by just emailing me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and we'll give you details on how best to use the program for you and how you want to make money. Now, pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It's saved me millions of keystrokes, literally. It helps me ethically steal customers from other schmucks that are too slow to get back to prospects. All kinds of things. I mean, it'll save your workload like crazy. You're I mean, you're crazy if you don't use some of these techniques as they're free and cheap. So check that out. Grab that book. We sell it for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours. Free for listening to the show at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right, we're still going strong with our pilot program to help persons with disabilities.

[00:03:07] Love for you, especially in this holiday season, to help these folks out. We have a scholarship program we're putting. We're going to put five people through. We have three people making great progress right now through our school. We have a Go Fund Me campaign. Oh, I should mention two of them are blind and they're making progress and making videos. And you just can't believe these folks. They're just awesome. So we'd love to have your help on the Go Fund Me program to help fund the scholarships. Just go to IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You can see there. Videos and updates and, you know, kick in whatever you can, and hey, if you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor an entire person yourself. Also. I can structure things if you don't if you come directly to me so that you can probably get a great big tax deduction out of this, so I call it a triple whammy. You can actually go to triple whammy, screw the triple whammy and you get a tax deduction, you get great training and you help these people all in one shot. How do you like that? All right, so check it out.

[00:04:33] All right, let's get to the main event. Digital products and adding them to your business or starting a business with them. So I'm talking about ebooks, online courses and to a lesser extent, software and apps, which I have never developed any software. I have an app that I use for screwthecommute.com/app, but I never developed it and don't know anything about that stuff other than it's complicated. So if you're technically inclined or a programmer, yeah, awesome for you. But for most of us, that's not the big thing. The big thing are online courses and ebooks. Now, basically, it's anything you can create for almost nothing and distribute for almost nothing. So basically, you're just selling electrons or giving away electrons. I love that. So so why do I say giving away? Well, how do you make money given your product away? Well, I'm going to talk to you about that, too. A little later with just one e-book of mine bringing in over three and a half million dollars and it's a free e-book. All right, I give it away and you'll see exactly how that works. So I understand some of you already have an existing business, so it could be a professional speaking or coaching business. Maybe you're a consultant, or maybe you have physical products like, Hey, some of my veteran friends, you know, September's Veterans Month at screw the commute and they have woodworking and decorative concrete kind of products.

[00:06:05] What I'm suggesting today will work for any business. You can't come to me with a business that I can't tell you how to make a digital product to enhance it. And it could just save a business that's struggling. All right. So let's talk about the benefits of digital products. Well, they're very low risk. See, a lot of businesses fail because they cost a fortune to start with no proven track record and no sales ready to go. And then they owe all this money. If they if they borrowed it or they took their savings. So all of that's wiped out on digital products. It's low risk. I mean, you already have a computer and I'm sure a word processor and there's free PDF generators all over the place. You can turn it into Amazon Kindle e-book for free with their software that they give you for free and you get access to all their customers. You could get some video software to record your screen. I happen to use Camtasia and have made a fortune with that over now, almost 22 years. You can make video products and online courses with that, and you can use your webcam, your cell phone. So this is low risk. You already have the stuff, except for maybe a tiny bit of software. And you can be anywhere you can be a digital nomad, I mean, I've got friends that travel the world and stay in a different country every three months.

[00:07:27] Now it has been a little bit crazy because of COVID, but they still been doing this continuously, making a fortune, saving a fortune because they have no car. They even have a course on how to save money. The guy saved like in three months thousand on Airbnbs because he hasn't. He knows how to negotiate, and he started a course for that. I think we'll put the link to that in the show notes. I'm an affiliate for it. It's awesome. But you can be on vacation. Hey, listen to this, you could be traveling for work if you still have the dreaded job and you, you can start this on the side. So let me tell you a couple a couple of things about work, so I have a student that's a security guard on a night shift on a building where he doesn't see anybody the whole night. He just sits there and guards the door. Ok. It's locked and he's just sitting there. He's working on several e-books on different stuff, and nobody cares. He's doing his job and that's it, you know? So there are some jobs where you have dead space, where you can just do this now, let's say you have to travel for work. I wrote one of my classic e-books that dominated my industry for 10 years while on layovers in airports and while fly it.

[00:08:52] Now, the big money e-book I mentioned a little bit earlier was written in a four hour layover at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, I remember it vividly. I'll tell you a little bit more exactly how much that made later. Now, another thing is you can sell these anywhere, see, this is one of the biggest benefits for what would be considered a local business by by definition, they can only bring in money from a certain small area of the Earth. Maybe a landscaper can handle a 20 mile radius around where he's based or if she's based. Maybe the same for a brick and mortar ice cream or some other specialty shop or a dentist. But let's say the ice cream shop and and by the way, one of them just closed in a fancy area near me. Apparently, people just could not see paying 10 bucks for a little tiny bowl of ice cream. But anyway, the ice cream shop could make a gorgeous instructional book on how to make and decorate ice cream cakes. They do it all day long anyway, so they just start taking pictures and put it together in an e-book. And this could sell for, I don't know, anywhere from twelve point ninety five to seventeen dollars in the Cookbook range, you know, whatever cookbooks go for now, it could have supplemental videos linked to the book and listen to this house for free on YouTube just by making them what's called unlisted.

[00:10:23] Unlisted means only the people that have the link to it can see the videos. They don't show up in YouTube unless you have the link. So you hook that to the book now at ninety seven percent profit, they would clear anywhere from twelve dollars and fifty six cents to sixteen point forty nine cents each. That's clear profit. The ice cream store itself probably only realizes five to 10 percent profit, and we're looking at 97 percent profit for these digital items and and the store can only sell in a very tiny, limited area. Now, I guarantee the ice cream shop owners would start questioning keeping the store open if they had hundreds of e-book sales coming in per week with no building, no big utility bill, no Labor cost, no rent, no freezer and store maintenance, no spoilage, no big investment in all the equipment or maybe a franchise, no cleaning service fees, no employee theft and no insurance, and the myriad other expenses connected to a brick and mortar store. None of that. Now, this PDF book could sell anywhere in the world that speaks English, but they can also have it translated to other languages. All right, so they probably already have a website that they overpaid for, and it's no big deal to advertise the book on the website for do it yourselfers.

[00:11:59] But here's the big mistake that a lot of people make, and it's they believe telling their secrets means people won't use their services anymore. This could not be further from the truth. And it's the hardest thing I have to convince people of when they're in my programs. I remember seeing a plumber doing a presentation telling people how to remodel their bathroom themselves. And I know a good bit about plumbing, and he was really giving them all the secrets and the tips and the tricks. Well, I'm an audience watcher. I could see the people in the crowd, mostly couples looking at each other whenever the guy would give them a real gem of a technique. But he also told them the downside if they messed it up. And or that that particular technique and then and then he told him about the special tool that they would need just to do that one thing in their bathroom, OK, that they'd never use ever again in their life. By the end of the presentation, most of the people there were asking him for his card, and I talked to him afterwards and he told me, Yeah, I'll get six or seven five thousand jobs out of this, because now that they see how complicated it is to do a good job, there's not going to leak all over the place.

[00:13:26] They know they don't have the skill and so they hire me. So don't hold back with your supposed secrets, you know? All right, well, let's get back to the book. Let's take it a step further and make a how to start an ice cream shop business start up manual, all digital and now you're talking forty seven dollars to ninety seven dollars or more. Maybe in the manual you upsell them to a five hundred dollar remote consultation package for a couple hours on Zoom, telling the stuff you already know because you did it. Now, if you get really good at something, you can make much more money telling people how to do it, then you can do doing it. I mean, it's just a fact of life now. I'm not in favor of you holding yourself out as an expert when you haven't really done what you're teaching. But guess what? That doesn't mean you can't sell a well-researched book on the subject. Just don't claim to be an expert. What you would do is you're the publisher and owner of the e-book, and you could know nothing about the topic and still sell a quality e-book. Now, how do you do that? Well, you interview other experts who love to see their name in lights, but you get all their expertise for free. They don't charge you for these interviews.

[00:14:52] Now, you can take things even a step further with an online course where you can generally sell it for way more money than an e-book. Now, whenever you're doing an online course, here's a tip. Multimedia is the key to more sales and less refunds. You want video, audio and PDF files. Now it can be the same exact information. You just put out different formats. So it's not that much extra work for you, but you can please a greater variety of people see. So let's say you have some training for real estate agents. If it's all video, they're going to be reluctant to purchase it in the first place because they're in their car driving around all day. And even if they do purchase it, they won't use it and they'll likely ask for a refund. But if you took the audio track off the video and they could listen on their cell phone while they're driving around now, they're happy. Then when they get back home or to the office, maybe they're so excited to watch some of the video because of what they heard on the audio. Or maybe you made a certain point and they don't want to listen again to find that point so they can just skim through the PDF file, see you made your course very user friendly and if your info is good, you'll have almost zero returns. All right, let's switch gears here and see why free can make you a fortune.

[00:16:29] Well, there are two ways free has made me a fortune. With regard to e-books, anyway. One is my e-book or online video shows all the benefits and how to use some product that I don't own. In other words, it's an affiliate product, but the people can't get all those benefits or use the product at all unless they buy it through my affiliate link. Now, my best efforts so far is one e-book. I thought I mentioned this a couple of times earlier. Here's the details My best effort so far is one e-book that as of this morning. As I'm working on this podcast, I checked out, the figures has brought in three point sixty eight million dollars anywhere from four to fifteen thousand dollars a month. For a long time, and it's still into the future, and this is called a residual affiliate program, this means that the people don't actually buy the product. It's a service that they purchase either yearly or monthly, and I get a commission on it, say so it's kind of like an insurance policy, I call it. If you got if I got sick or hurt and I was, I was injured. I was in intensive care. I was in an accident one time and money kept coming in for this kind of residual affiliate program. So it's a really great thing because if you're at any other kind of work where you have to go to work or or go to your business or do your business and you get sick or injured, then the money stops coming in.

[00:18:08] So this is an insurance policy against that's another big reason why you should get into digital products, OK? The other way free can make your fortune is that it stimulates the sales of your regular products and makes you the expert that people want to go to. They've got hired lots of times for speaking engagements after someone saw my how to be a pro speaker materials and they said, Wow, you really take this seriously. We need to get you in here to talk to our people. Yeah, I became the expert in professional speaking. Now, when you wrote the book on something, you become the expert that people want, then your fees rise and you have less trouble fighting it out for jobs because you're the expert. So don't be afraid to put something out for free that shows what you do. And let's go back to the ice cream shop. They could give an edited copy of their e-book to every person visiting their store. They could have a QR code. And by the way, QR codes are covered in episode two forty one, so you want to go back and listen to that. So anyway, QR code, somebody can just put their phone up to a little sign at checkout and grab an edited copy of the book.

[00:19:30] This right at the register and they could see all the designs minus the how to make them part, because these are local people that you want to buy the cakes from you. Right. So so just give them all the pictures and designs. They can look at it on their computer and or their cell phone. And then, of course, who are they going to buy it from if they have a party? It's going to be you because you gave them the digital product and had their whet their whistle with all these beautiful ice cream cake designs. And you can do that for any, you know, any kind of business, the woodworking people I was talking about and the concrete, decorative concrete people and you know, the dentists for the before and after pictures, you know, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, you can do this all over the place. So I'd love to help you do it. Hey, jump into my mentor program. We give you all the training on this and the thousand other things you need to know to be really successful online so you don't have to go to that dreaded job anymore. Or if you want to, you can do this stuff on the side and still make a fortune. I like to make people be in a situation where it's too expensive for them to go to work anymore because the time they would spend on their own stuff brings in more money than going to work and fighting it out and commuting.

[00:20:55] Screw the commute, right? So get in the mentor program. Check it out. A great internet marketing training, and I'll be with you and my whole staff for a year one on one. Nobody at my level will even talk to you anymore. That'll help you out. And then also, don't forget about our our program to help persons with disabilities on the mentor program. We do give a percentage of the income from that to the program to help fund the scholarship. So anything you spend with me is going to help you. It's going to probably get you a tax deduction and help the people that are disabled that are going through the school so I can get them hired and get them in their own business and then and really change their lives. All right. So happy holidays. And hey, think digital sell those electrons. The only thing about it is it's hard to really put electrons under the Christmas tree. So I really love these people that kill themselves to make physical products. But I don't want to teach you that. I want to teach it to have a low risk, high return business. All right. Catch you later.
 
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