540 – This is a powerful way to get customers: Tom talks Graphics

Episode 540 - Graphics
[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 forty of Screw the Commute podcast, I'm going to talk about graphics today, and I was reading search engine news. And finally, someone had the guts to say what I've been preaching for years. Your graphic artist is your enemy. Ok, now you graphic artists out there instead of getting all insulted. Why not open your creative mind a little her minds and I can assure you you will become way more valuable to the marketplace and make more money? If you listen to what I have to say in this episode, if you just get all insulted and say, Oh yeah, this guy's a jerk insulting us artists. Well, I made a lot of money. All right. Teaching this to people, and they've made a lot of money because of it. So open your mind a little bit and listen up. Hope you didn't miss episode five? Thirty nine! That was Steven Green. He's got the Make the Grade podcast, and he's the best selling author of Maximum Education. So we had a good little rap session. I kind of put him on the spot because he's got to keep colleges happy and vocational schools and everybody. But I kind of ragged on higher education the way it's going now.

[00:01:49] So it was a fun episode. He's a good guy. Now how would you like me to send you big affiliate commissions? Well, just email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com, and I'll give you all the details of what products make sense for your particular audience and how to best promote the product so you can get big commissions. And make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. This is save me millions and millions of keystrokes and allowed me to handle customers and prospects way faster and made me tons of money and the techniques are free or cheap. You just nobody taught them to you. So grab a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. It does all kinds of cool stuff, and 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 on our pilot program to help persons with disabilities get educated and get hired or start their own business, and we'd love to have your help on this. We're, I think, a little over twenty five percent to our goal and our Go Fund Me campaign to finance this whole deal.

[00:03:08] And I would love to have your help. And hey, if you're flush with cash and you got all the Christmas paid off, well, hey, come on, you could. You could possibly schedule a person yourself or get a scholarship for a person. And while would it be something you could be proud of the rest of your life, but any little bit helps. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Of course, it'll be in the show notes and and check out the videos of these people that made two of them are blind. All right, so, so very inspiring.

[00:03:49] All right, let's get to the main event. Graphics. I'll bet you, I have said the following at least a thousand times in my speeches and to my mentees. Here it is. Your website needs to look just good enough to represent you well, professionally. Let me repeat that. Your website needs to look just good enough to represent you well, professionally in some cases. I've used what are known as ugly websites and ugly videos to make a ton of money. And of course, any video with my face on it could be considered ugly. So don't worry about that.

[00:03:49] Now, many business people get all involved in the aesthetic of their stuff, even before it was called aesthetic. Before that, I would run into people that would demand their website colors, match their fancy print materials that some agency or graphics person overcharged them for. I would tell them, Hey, look. Go down to Best Buy. Pull up your website on 10 different laptops, and it probably looks a different color on each one. And then they'd get pissed off at me. All right. Well, hey, I didn't tell them to spend ten thousand bucks on a completely worthless press kit. It wasn't me. Anyway, if you want to actually make money. And I fully understand there are some people that just want the coolness of being in business, I mean, I ran into one in my mentor program. This person had a rich spouse, had nothing of substance to say, refused to do the work and is still in business today, making no money but acting the part of a successful business person. Well, all right, I digress here, OK, so anyway, I run into that all the time back to making money. You have to understand that when someone visits your website, chances are they have a problem that needs solved. They don't care about you or your fancy website that'll come out and do your dishes and wash your car for you. These fancy websites nowadays. They care about a solution to whatever problems they have. They want to be able to find and evaluate that solution easily and trust that your solution is credible and real.

[00:06:26] That's all. One of my plain Jane websites, and sorry to anybody named Jane. All right, but but it was a plain Jane site and it won Best of the Web in Inc magazine, and it beat out three other million dollar websites. The judging panel of CEOs was asked why my site want. They said it was simple to navigate and they could find what they wanted fast. That's all these CEOs cared about at the time. The site cost six hundred and fifty dollars compared to those other million dollar sites. Now I teach my mentees to create similar world class sites for one hundred and fifty dollars. Now, the article I was reading about this brought out a good point about the competing goals of the three individuals involved. All right, number one, is you. You want to make a profit by selling your product or service. This is all simple stuff, folks, if you take time to think about it. Number two, your customer wants to solve a problem by purchasing your service or product. But here's where it gets messy. Number three, the graphic artist wants to hear how wonderful their art is and possibly even win some kind of award for their brilliance. That was from search engine is now. Do you really want to pay for number three? The graphic artists ego bump, especially when most of the time that ego bump hurts you and your potential customer.

[00:08:11] Well, if you do want to pay for that, you shouldn't you shouldn't be allowed to handle your own finances. Maybe, maybe you need someone with some sense with the power attorney over your bank account. There was a study of thirty six thousand nine hundred and twenty eight landing pages done by a firm called UN Bounce. They really dug in and evaluated every aspect of the landing pages. They found that copy advertising copy had twice the impact on conversion rate than design. Maybe that's why I beg. I've been begging you to buy my copywriting course so much. Copywriting901.com. I was fortunate enough to realize this early on. Copywriting is the number one skill I've acquired in the forty five plus years I've been in business. You use it everywhere. Check out that course, and I'm pretty sure you'll thank me for it, because like the study I just mentioned, it's twice as important to you making money with your stuff and then your design is. No, don't think that I'm totally against graphics. I'm actually totally for graphics, so long as they help you get sales and don't hinder that effort. Here's another thing I see all the time and and I've personally critiqued over 10000 websites in the past.

[00:09:46] I'd say twenty six years, something like that. I see a site and their giant main graphic is an enormous landscape meadow with one lone tree in it. And when I asked the website owner if this was a stock photo that just came with their theme, they get all insulted and and think, I'm some kind of rude dummy for asking such a question. They go on to tell me how the meadow represents the vast sea of opportunity, and that sometimes you feel alone seeking for the right solution and then they go on for ten minutes with some esoteric philosophical idea about this picture. The problem is they're selling sheet metal screws or something like that, right? Or bingo supplies? I don't know. See, people looking for a thousand sheet metal screws pretty much care about the following tensile strength yield strength proof, load hardness, duct A. Toughness, shear strength, torsional strength, fatigue, strength. Is it slotted? Does it have a one way slot or a Phillips Type 1A? Is it a Phillips slot combo? Is it a hex or square drive? Is it a pinhead trimmed hex head hex flange head? Does it have a beat or a twenty five self tap designation? And and there's no extra charge for this fastener education I'm giving you right. I got this info from a 28 page tech guide on fasteners, but do you know what word was not in this tech guide? It was the word tree.

[00:11:39] That was just some wild idea in the head of the site owner, and as soon as someone hits that site wanting to buy a thousand or even a million screws, they're going to bounce faster than this. I don't know. The CDC changes its COVID guidelines. I don't know. So I don't want stupid graphics that don't lead people to the solution they came to your site for. I'm highly in favor of graphics that do lead to solutions, and they are super important to have on your site. Now, here's another blunt premise that will probably piss off everyone. See, I don't want to limit my graphic related insult to just graphic artists. I mean, so here's here's another principle that I live by. Are you ready for this? People are morons. They can barely read and it's getting worse. Did you see in the news that the governor of Oregon said that no longer to kids have to pass tests on reading and math to get a high school diploma? What? WTF but I better stick to my discussion or graphics before I go off on a rant about this, but you got to you have to keep this in mind. People don't read very well and it's getting worse. So retinal studies have shown or have been done where they put some kind of super camera on people's eyes while they're looking at web pages.

[00:13:22] The first place they look is the graphics. Then I teach people to put an interesting caption on most graphics, that's what people look at next. And that makes them want to read the text. And that text better be darn easy to read. Now I covered readability of websites in episode 312. And if you really want success with your website, you may as well listen to episode 313. Also on usability, which is a completely different topic. One of the things you would learn on episode 312 on readability is that the width of a line of text makes it more or less readable. The rule of thumb is that the smaller the font and the wider the line, the less readable it is. Wide lines of text are like watching a tennis match where your head and eyes have to move left and right and you get lost this terrible. Graphic artists and Web designers seem to be oblivious to this and and how it's hurting their clients. Graphics can be used to reduce the width of the text that's next to it, making it more easy to read. That's why I like graphics that helps with that problem. So I'm in favor of graphics, but here's another thing you probably haven't thought about over the past five years or so, there's been a big backlash against stock photos.

[00:14:59] You know, the the ones where there's an obligatory Asian, black, white and Muslim person sitting at a boardroom table. This screams out of touch, boring and impersonal. Now, apparently, this message hasn't gotten to the idiot marketing directors of big companies who continue to use such garbage. You're much better off with real videos and real pictures of you working with your clients or your clients using your product. See, people can relate to this so. Use graphics to your advantage not to win awards for your graphic artist. And if you want help with this, I'm always here, we've got the Great Internet Marketing Training Mentor program that's the most unique, most successful ever in the past, I'd say twenty four years now since it's the new year. And you just won't. Nobody will put their program up against mine, because if you go line for line, it just blows away people that'll charge you way more money and give you less service. And a lot of them never actually did this stuff like like we have here. So anyway, check it out a great internet marketing training, and if you can give us a hand on the Go Fund Me campaign for the persons with disabilities at the school website IMTCVA.org/disability. All right, we'll catch y'all on the next episode. See you later.

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