672 – Keep trying to get better: Tom talks Second Week on TikTok

Episode 672 – Second Week on TikTok
[00:00:08] 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 672 Screw the Commute Podcast. I'm here in the second week of my efforts on TikTok. And again, I'm not going to get into any of the controversy over whether they're going to kidnap my whole family and put us in slavery. I know everything they say about TikTok, but I've got to use it to my advantage. And I'm learning a lot this week. I mean, you get better and better as you work it. And I'm turning out good videos faster. And as of this morning, I have 65 videos. And remember, they're really short. So that's not as big a deal as it might sound. But in this episode, I'm going to give you an update on how it's going, and I'm going to give you a variety of the types of videos I'm shooting. And then again, I'm not an expert, but I thought you'd like to go along on this journey to see if this might be right for you. I'll tell you how you can make faster progress on this than any other social media that I've ever been involved in. I can tell you that when you hear the numbers for this week, and if you'd like to go back to the first part of the journey, my first week was episode 669. Of course, when you want to get to it back episode, you go screwthecommute.com, slash and the episode number.

[00:01:43] The first week last Monday was 669, so screwthecommute.com/669, and then this episode is 672. And then next week I'm going to give you an update on the the types of things and the techniques that you want to incorporate in your videos. So we'll get to that next week, but I'll get to the the updates here in a minute. All right. So just want to thank everybody that is contributing to the Patreon account to help persons with disabilities. It starts as little as $3 a week and has a bunch of perks. So please kick in a little bit there and you'll be doing some real good for these people in the the program to get either trained in internet marketing for their own business or to be hired. So I'm really proud of the people in the program. So check it out. It's screwthecommute.com/Patreon.

[00:02:40] All right. Let's get to the main event. It's going to be a quick episode here. So this is my result so far in two weeks on Tick Tock. The sales did not increase this week. $300 in sales came in the first week. And so that did not increase that, I can tell. You know, I can't always track it exactly where sales are coming from. All right. Number of followers. As of this morning, it was 196, which is 116 more than last week.

[00:03:13] I have 65 videos now, which is 40 more, and that's basically because I have plenty of content and you can break it down in little chunks, but I just am more handy using their the editor inside of TikTok, the video editor with my fat fingers and knowing where to click and what I'm getting real used to it now so I don't have to think for 10 minutes on Oh, what am I supposed to click next? So I'm able to crank out videos faster. All right. This is the figure that gets me 21,414 video views as of this morning, which is an increase of 12,519 from last week. You know, to get on any other social media, unless you're a big celebrity and get that many views in a week, I mean, it's unbelievable. Again, remember, they're really short. The next thing is profile views. This is people that saw a video of mine and clicked over to look at see who I am. There was 502 profile views and that's 305 additional ones since last week. Now, let me talk to you about that. The reason and I want your help on this, too. Whoever is listening. The reason that's not as big a deal that know they checked me out. But here's one thing you got to know. Your profile does not get to have a clickable link to your stuff until you get 1000 followers. They kind of make you earn your way into the better features.

[00:04:53] So I only have 195, 196 followers, so I got to get 800 more followers to be able to take advantage of a clickable link. See, on on the platform. People probably are not unless they're super fans of mine. Going to go over to my link and see all my stuff. They'd have to type it in on their cell phone or or desktop. You really want to get to that thousand follower mark so that you can get that clickable link in your bio. So those 500 people, only a few of them bothered to actually go over to my link. I can track that. And that's not good enough. I mean, if it was clickable, I might have got a couple of hundred of those people clicking through. So I'm really driving towards the thousand follower mark. And also when you have 1000 followers, it kicks in a feature where you can go live. So that's pretty cool. All right. So anyway, help me out. If you're on TikTok, go over and follow me and it's TikTok.com/@DigitalMultiMillionaire and follow me. And if you decide to start TikTok, I'll be one of your first followers, hopefully. All right. Now the next thing is I had 1362 likes, which is 1282 more than last week the just amazing 119 comments and that's 67 more than last. It's harder to get people to comment. So there's some techniques that I'll be working on this week and trying to get more comments.

[00:06:31] And let's see. And that's all called engagement. So the more engagement you have, the more TikTok likes you and the more your videos are shown to other people. And then 114 shares, which is 94 more than last week. So that's really good. In other words, people thought my videos were good enough to share it with other people. So that's that's the response on the second week and next week. Like I said, I'm going to give you a bunch of techniques, but in this for this week, I'm going to tell you the types of videos I've been shooting. And here's the thing. You're probably going to have to try all these types yourself when you get started. If you're getting started on TikTok and the whole idea in the first month or two is to find out what is working best for your market with your niche and you know, all your stuff. You can't nobody, no expert can predict it. Off the bat, you have to try these things and then you watch to see what got you the most response. And then you do more of that. Simple as that. Now, it is a good idea to study other creators that are small creators. Don't try to figure out what the person with 10 million followers is doing because they can get away with murder. You need smaller creators that are getting viral videos, going out and do what they do, but you still have to figure out what's going on with your people and your niche and your videos.

[00:08:05] All right. But anyway, so here's the types of videos. And by the way, the length of your video can make a difference. And so the longest you can do is 3 minutes. And the longest one I have is 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Most of them are 15 to 30 seconds long. The shortest is only 5 seconds. So and when you go see it, you'll see it's it's to promote my podcast. It's a little animated screwy guy for screw the commute. Just saying, hey, I'm screwy, how can I help you? So so you can have really, really short ones. That's why it's not that big a deal that I turned out 65 videos so far and 40 last week. Okay, so here's the first type or this. These aren't in any order, by the way. It's just a story where I just tell a story where people have to listen to hear the ending. What happened in the story. The reason this is important is because one of the things in TikTok's algorithm is completion rate. How many people actually get to the end of your video. And the more people that do, then the more they like you say. So then they show your video to more people. That's kind of how that works. Then it's just a talking head video where I just talk to the camera and teach something. Then there's a walking head instead of a talking head.

[00:09:32] This is where I put the camera on a selfie stick. Maybe go outside and walk through the retreat center parking lot. Not really parking lot driveway and, you know, do something outside with the dogs, maybe something like that. So that's a walking head. Then the next type is a talking head and computer screen. So this is where I intro the topic, where I'm talking to the camera, just my cell phone. And then I cut to taking a picture of my computer screen and I switch the camera and I show the computer screen and teach something basically on this on the screen or show them something. The next one and this one's got twice as many views as my average is a rant. So I take a controversial position on something and one that I've been harping on for years, is people that tell you to delegate stuff, delegate everything, only do what you're good at. And those people can't make their car payment or renting an apartment and sharing a lot of, you know, they're telling you this, but it doesn't have any basis in reality. You need to increase your skills. And so I made a big deal about this, but it's just stupid to do that. And I said, delegate my butt and, you know, just try to get people's attention. And it did. So it got twice the views as my normal one. All right. So that's a rant. The next thing is and you may have heard me rail against doing greenscreen video, people look stupid on Zoom with the stupid green screen backgrounds and they they try to put a green screen in their house and shoot videos and it just looks stupid.

[00:11:19] I mean, I took training in Hollywood and you have to really know what you're doing. You have to be far away from the green screen, light the green screen separately and light yourself separately. And I mean, it's just it's not worth it. Just it's better on regular stuff to just set up a nice background. So you've heard me rail against that, right? Well, this is a different deal. Tick tock has a function called green screen an effect. They have all these crazy effects. You can put bunny ears on your head and crazy stuff like that. But this green screen effect is really nice. It looks really good and you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it. For instance, they have a dual camera green screen effect. This means that your they can take control of the front and back cameras of your cell phone and put you in picture and picture basically simultaneously. You don't have to do it in extra editing after the fact. You can, but why would you want to? So I was out front with the picture on me playing with the dogs and the other camera shooting the dogs. So that's green screen. And see, all of these social media is like and give you extra views whenever you're using all their fancy functions.

[00:12:44] So they like it when especially if it's a new effect or something, then they and you use it, they give you a priority for trying out all the new stuff. So another is a green screen background, same kind of effect. But it's in this case, like I put my book cover as the background of the video and then my talking head is on top of this background, which is my book cover. And I can point to different parts of it and all kinds of stuff like that. There's just tons of these types of effects. You can have a video playing behind you as the background and all of these things. And then the last one so far that I've learned to use is humor, where I show funny domain names and the text that allows the show you're allowed to put on top of your video. After you shoot the video, you can type in text and put it all over the place. And so I have it pointing towards my laptop or my iMac here with screw the commute as my background, you know. So there always see and Screw the Commute podcast all the time when I'm doing these things. So it doesn't have to be humor. I could, I could tell them the top five tools that I use in Internet marketing and that's text on top of a background and the background, if it can be your website and it's clearly in the video, that's more branding for you for there.

[00:14:07] So those are the types that I use. And next week I'm going to give you another update and an outline, some specific techniques to incorporate to grow your channel. I talked about one in the first episode. You want to go back and listen to episode 669 and called Looping. This is where I get to the end of the video and it leads right into the beginning of what I'm saying in the next video. So people don't even notice that they're watching the video again. So this increases your number of views. All right. So so that's a cool technique, but there's loads of things like this that I'll be covering and telling you about next week. And again, I'm incorporating and using them myself to see which ones are the best, which for me. And I'm just going to give you a potpourri of the things I've been learning from all the advanced training that I'm taking. So check that out and please go to TikTok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and then please follow me and just look at some of my videos and you'll see I'm using these techniques of what I'm learning. So you're going along with me for the ride. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.