693 – Latest updates on the TikTok Experiment: Tom talks 2 Months on TikTok

Episode 693 – 2 Months 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 693 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, I'm going to give you a report on my second full month on TikTok. And most people say the second month is when you take off. Well, it's kind of what you're going to see here. Now, I highly suggest if you're going to jump into TikTok, you listen to my other episodes and they are going to be listed in the show notes. What happened after one month? Techniques that I learned by watching lots of videos and taking advanced courses, so I recapped all that in previous episodes. But today we're going to talk about where we are now after two months on TikTok. Now, I hope you didn't miss episode 692. That was a very short copywriting X episode on a very important thing of copywriting called Features and Benefits. So check that out. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 692 and this one is 693. Now if you really want to see what's going on, on TikTok on my channel, go to tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire.

[00:01:40] A lot of people are not familiar with having an ad sign, like the sign that's in an email address in a domain or a URL but you can do that. So tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and please if you go over there, start liking stuff, sharing it and all this, you know, saving everything else that helps the whole thing out. Now, also, I want to thank the people helping us out on Patreon to fund our scholarship program for persons with disabilities. You can go to screwthecommute.com/patreon and it starts as little as $3 a month. So it's really helpful for those folks and they're doing great things in the program.

[00:02:25] All right. Let's get to the main event. All right. This is my results after two months on tech talk. And I'll have also financial figures at the end to. All right. So I've put out a total of 177 videos. The shortest being 5 seconds and the longest 3 minutes. And again, this is going to kind of tell you how things take off in the second month. If you are consistent, I have not missed a day of putting a video up. Now the totals. All right. So I'm following 58 people in the second month. After the first month, it was only eight people. I have followers now. 7228 where one month ago I only had 407.

[00:03:17] Video views. I have 515,492 and that number changes. It's changing so fast that by the time I started writing this, this morning, it's gone up 1000. All right. So now at the end of last month, I had 76,007 62. Now these figures have gone up anywhere from 5 to 20 times what they were last month. That's what I say. Second month. You can really go if you're you know, what you're doing is you're convincing TikTok that you're real and consistent and you're just not a fly by night air. All right. I've reached an audience of 343,136 people who have now heard of me that hadn't before. I don't remember what last month was. I've had 6963 profile views. Last month was 1282. So I'm going to address what that means in a minute. But people checked me out, in other words. I had 23,000 likes. Last month was 7131. I had 1392 comments. Last month was 336. And I had 5719 shares last month was only 537. All right. So those are the overall totals. Now, I have one super viral video that since I sat down and started writing this and then right beforehand, I checked it and it went up 1000 views. But it's so far. And since I sat down at the computer, it's probably gone up in 1000. Anyway, the last I actually saw on my cell phone was 366,500 views on a serious video that helps my business out.

[00:05:19] Now, that was the highest. My second highest is 45,100. That was a funny video. And those are organic, not paid. And by the way, the super viral was organic. I'm not paying for any views on that. The second highest was 45,141. The third highest was 33,700. And that's one that I was experimenting with TikTok ads. I was showing one of my videos to more people and paying for it to help get more followers and to get my name around. And I'll tell you about that later. The amount I spent. And the fourth highest was also 2500. But it was a funny one and organic. So the only one I've been paying on is that second highest. Now, the most videos I made in one day was nine. The least videos I made in one day was one. The longest was 2 minutes and 59 seconds. They are going to allowing up to ten minute videos now, but I like the short ones. The shortest was 5 seconds. All right. And I have not missed a day. Now let me talk about this profile view thing again. So you get one clickable link in your profile, and that's only after you either get 1000 subscribers or you verify your business by sending in all your corporate information or whatever. So that's what I did, is I sent that in and so I was able to get a clickable link in my profile with less than 1000 followers.

[00:06:52] But after 1000, you can get a clickable. And but you only get one. So we typically send it to a page that has links to all our other stuff. So in this case, the profile views were 6963. This is why you got it's really a numbers game here. And with TikTok you can grow really fast. So but the final results, you know, these people are just in such a hurry, just slamming through videos. The numbers and results take a lot of views and a lot of people before you get concrete results. So here's the results I got. From the profile views. Out of all those profile views, I got 95 new subscribers to opt in to get a free book. All right. Now that seems very small, but with 95 people on my email list, some of them are going to buy stuff over time. So I'm very optimistic about that. Now another really big one was my marketing school, the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. Got 39 people to click through. Well, that's a potentially $19,000 tuition for the school. I mean, it's half of that if you're a first responder, law enforcement, military nurses. So out of those 39 people, I don't know if one of them joins a school, that's a pretty darn good day. All right.

[00:08:32] And they didn't hear about me anywhere else. Now. The mentor program. 21 people. Checked over to look at details on my mentor program. And that is a 9000 up front. Or of course we finance the entry fee if you need it, and a potential 50,000 on the back end out of your profits. So that's a potential 59,000. Just one of those people come through. This is why I tell people, even on my podcast, is be your own sponsor. Have your own stuff to sell. Mentor programs, coaching programs, membership sites and all that. So that when somebody does come from one of these sources like Tech Talk. They have a chance to give you money. And then we had 15, 16 people check out this podcast. So we love that. So. So the profile, you got to get a lot of people looking at your profile to get them off of their on to something else. And that's what we're doing. Okay, Now let's look at the followers. The this is the age breakdown of my followers. 13 to 17 years old was 0.9%. And you'd say, well, good, you know, those kids don't spend their money anyway. Well, here's the thing. I need to up that because those are the kind of kids that I want to go to my school instead of wasting their money and time on a four year college. So getting their ear and having them get their parents involved in the decision can mean a lot of money to me, and it helps them out.

[00:10:12] It's going to save them The craziness of the four year rip offs. Oc 18 to 24 was 16.9%. 25 to 34 was 20.6%, 35 to 44 was 29.7%. 45 to 54 is 26.2%. And look at this, 55 plus was 15.7. So if you just look at the market for me, for a lot of my stuff from 25 to 55, that's 20, 49, 69, 75, that's almost 90% of my market or my followers are in my target market in some fashion with my product mix. So that's that's very, very exciting to me. Now gender is 61.7% male, 38.3% female. And I don't know what to make of that, but that's what it is. Country 64.7%, USA. And this next thing I had, I had to do a double take like there was a misprint under the country breakdown. It said non-binary. And I thought that had to do with transgender, those kind of terms. That must just mean they couldn't tell what country is non-binary is 16.6%. Canada 3.9. U.k. 3.9. Philippines 3%. Australia 2%. Nigeria. Oh, I love that. Being on their list. 1.6%. South Africa 1.4%. Malaysia 1%. Germany 1%. Romania 0.9. Top city, Chicago, 2.8%. Dallas 2.1. Houston 1.7. Hey, they like me in Texas. La 1.5. Brooklyn. They pulled Brooklyn out at 1.4.

[00:12:08] Maybe AOC is following me. I don't know. Vegas. 1.2. Philadelphia 1.2. Atlanta 1.1. Miami 1.1. Denver 1.1 and other. The rest of the cities around her. 84.8. All right. Now, this is an interesting thing to pay attention to. Everybody says you should. Almost everybody says you should. This is the time of day that most of the people are on. In your particular market. It's not across the board, it's with your market. So I took a week before Christmas because you can only go back so far. I wish I had done a more representative just general week. But anyway, this is what I got and it was very interesting. On December 18th, which is a Sunday. The peak. Number of people that follow me were on at 3 a.m. in the morning. Right. So that means Saturday night they were up really late. And on three, 3 a.m. in the morning on a Sunday there, the most people were on. Then we go to December 19th, which is Monday, which is the peak was at 10 a.m.. Tuesday it was 4 p.m.. Now I'm going to start watching this closer to see if these numbers hold up or these figures hold up over time. Because, see, the whole concept of micro tests means that when you put out a piece of content on any social media. In the first hour or so. They want to see if it gets traction, if with engagement with people, if it does, they show it to more people.

[00:13:54] So it's important. I mean, in the long run, especially on TikTok, your videos a year from now could go big that I did any time of the day. But in the short run, if you want the video to get more traction faster, it's best to release it when the most people are on. So in this case, the Monday was 10 a.m., Tuesday was 4 p.m. and Wednesday. This is very interesting to me. There was multiple peaks from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.. That's like hump day, right? Or people were just so sick of work. They're doing other stuff. I don't know. Then it Thursday it went back to 10 a.m. and Friday it went to 5 p.m., which I would have thought, Hey, everybody's just running home from work, but I don't know. And then on Saturday it was at 8 p.m.. So those are interesting and they don't tell the full story, especially since Saturday was Christmas Eve. That's not a representative day of the year for an average. But anyway, I'm going to start watching this closer and then releasing videos whenever the peaks are for my particular market. So you have to look at your analytics and find out when your marketing. Okay, So just a little. Some other stuff, let's say. First goal for my first month was 1000 subscribers, and I think I had 407.

[00:15:27] My new goal is 10,000. Now, when I said subscribers, I met following. My new goal was 10,000 followers. And that goal is for a couple of reasons. One is I get the playlist feature activated in my account. And what that means is I have a bunch of videos, 100 and what is it, 70 some seven videos on all kinds of different topics. There's mostly related to Internet marketing. Yeah. And copywriting and stuff, but. It's hard to find like a part two and a part three and all these different parts if people have to search around for them. So they get frustrated and they don't end up watching part two and part three and things like that. But when I get the playlist feature, I'll be able to lump things together that are on the same topic. And if I made an eight part series on copyrighting, all eight parts will be in that playlist and they can get and watch all of them in a row, which is going to increase, well, exponentially. My watch time and my number of videos watched say So 10,000 is my next goal. And then I just made my own kind of goal was I'm going to start going live once I hit 10,000 viewers or followers so that I'd have at least a chance to have people show up on a live.

[00:16:58] And I'm also studying how to do live very professionally. I mean, it's easy to do, but to do it really nicely and to understand all the features, it's just like when I'm Facebook originally went live, I had to learn how to do it. And then they had these shells like, Oh, I forget the name of the thing that I use for going live now on Facebook. And so you have to learn how to operate these things. So that's what I'm doing and make it look real professional when I do go live after 10,000. Now I am frustrated a little bit with their community violation algorithm. I've had several videos nabbed. Instantly for community violations when there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. And I appealed them. And I have never lost an appeal. They say, Oh yeah, it was a mess up. The algorithm caught it for no reason and then they make it go live again. Well, sometimes they the appeal is. In a matter of less than an hour. They've got the appeal done and the video's live. But I've had one now for two weeks that's never been addressed, and they really screwed me on Christmas Day because I had this really great funny one, Santa Clause one, based on the fact of my entertainment company. When I went to Santa School and all these funny lines, I would say. It got nabbed. And no, of course, nobody's going to be around on Christmas Day to handle the appeal.

[00:18:36] And again, it's a week later. It's never been released. And now it's kind of past its prime because it's Christmas is gone. So so I'm really frustrated with them not doing their job, put it that way. Of. Now, another interesting thing that I tried one time so far is I took a video that performed pretty good in the first month. And I took the raw video and I put it back up with with a different caption and some different hashtags. And it did three times better than it did originally. So that was and that's perfectly acceptable of putting the same stuff up. Now, you don't do it like every day. Put the same video up ten times in one day. But this had been, you know, four weeks ago, five, six weeks ago, and it was one of the better performing ones, and that's called reposting. But I do suggest you change the, you know, even to try to make it better, even change the caption, the hashtags and whatever, and then put it back up there. So that's called reposting. So so overall, I'm happy with the effort I'm putting into this. I can see great potential. I'm going to talk about money in a minute, even though it hasn't been spectacular by any means. Like you hear these people on YouTube telling you, Oh yeah, I made $60,000 the first month on TikTok.

[00:20:03] Yeah. Och, I don't believe you, but obviously anything is possible. I've been around long enough in this business to know that anything is possible. But I do know that a lot of these young people are not making 60,000 bucks in their first month. Know they're just bullshit. Okay, let's see. Now, there's people that you can follow in your particular niche or the people that teach TikTok that keep track of the trends. So in this one, this new thing that I reposted, I instead of using the music that you're supposed to use music trending music on these. So I some somebody came up in my feed that said, hey, here's here's a great trending song that doesn't have too much competition yet and it's on its uprise. So I said, okay, what the heck, I didn't care because I turned the volume down so low, it doesn't matter that much what the song was. As long as I try not to put anything that's got super dirty lyrics or anything in it. But I use that new trending song. That may have been why the video did better. I'm not sure. You don't know for sure, but you have to try these things. So. So you can subscribe to those people that that's all they do and they keep you up to date on what's going on so you can try it.

[00:21:21] All right, Income. All right. So I know for sure $600 has come in. From two sales. Now, I almost said, oh, there's like a. 50 $100 coming in because somebody that joined the mentor program plunked down 9000, but they said, Oh, we love your podcast and your tech talk. So wouldn't couldn't really attribute it to one or the other. So I took say half of that. And the reason I have to renege on that, because they quit after one day before there we have a thing called a right of rescission, which is, you know, any kind of thing. You have three days to change your mind. And they were all excited and then they changed their mind. So so I can't attribute that. But it did attract somebody that was willing to plunk down 9000, at least for a day. All right. So so anyway, it's brought in 600 bucks. And I mentioned that some of the traffic was paid. And so I've spent about $600 on paid traffic. So, so far I'm at break even. But I have had enormous numbers of people learn about me. Subscribe to my email list, which is my big goal anyway. Be exposed to my school, be exposed to my mentor program, and I got a viral video that's just going crazy. Like I said, when I get off of here, it probably went up a couple thousand more views.

[00:22:58] And so I'm very happy with the results of this so far. But the bottom line is you have to be persistent and consistent with things. And I was listening to another guy who said he he didn't go really, really crazy until six months end of consistent posting at least once a day. And most people say if you can bang out more than one a day, then you really take off. Some people say ten a day and you'll just take an a massive jump right away as I'm doing this and learn how to do it better. I'm not as interested in just jamming out things just to jam stuff out. I want everyone to be really helpful to people rather So it's quality to me more than quantity. However, I do put something out every day. I haven't missed a day ever in the whole time I've been doing it. So anyway, that's my update on TikTok. Jump in if you want to give it a try and please check out mine at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. And hey, if you want to bypass all that crap and have me help you personally, well that's the mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. I'd be glad to help you out, but don't join and quit the next day right before I get a chance to help you. Okay. We'll get you on the next episode. See you later.