783 – More Questions More Answers: Tom talks Q & A

Episode 783 – Q & A
[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 783 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to do one of my Question and Answer sessions. I do these periodically when questions start building up. So that's what we'll do today. Hope you didn't miss Episode 782. That was Brigitta Hoeferle. She is an NLP expert and a just a Dynamo woman from Germany, and that was a hoot of an episode. So any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then any episode number. Brigitta was 782 and today is 783. Pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You will thank me for it. I'm telling you, it'll save you hundreds and hundreds of hours of fighting with your computer. You can use that extra time to make money with customers and prospects and creating products and services or else just screw off if you want to. But don't fight with your computer. Follow me at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire on TikTok and grab a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app.

[00:01:34] All right, let's get into the questions and answers. So here we go. Tom You talk a lot about buying used stuff. What are your latest purchases? So I got I got a bunch of, I don't know when I was how long back I should go, but I've been doing this for years and years and years. So this is just, I don't know, in the past few months and I'll give you the total savings.

[00:01:57] I'll tell you that now, the total savings was $33,804. Okay. I don't want you blowing money on stuff now. Some stuff you should buy new, but lots of stuff you can buy used. And especially if you're a little bit handy, you can save a fortune on things. So here. Here's some of the example I got. One, two. About eight of them here for you. So I bought a commercial slicer. To make jerky treats for my guests here at the retreat center. And the one I got. The retail price is $1,344 plus tax. It would be $6,321. I paid 200 bucks for it. I saved $1,421. I just bought a husky ladder that retails for $149 plus tax. That's about $156, and I paid 20 bucks for it. It's virtually brand new from some yuppie neighborhood where they probably bought it to hang one picture and then, oh it's too it's it's clogging up the the garage let's get rid of it and and I've got so much stuff from yuppie neighborhoods I got it. I guess mine would be a yuppie neighborhood, but. But I ain't a yuppie. And I got. Oh, I forgot about this. I got this washer and dryer, this $1,200 washer and dryer set for like 200 bucks because the lady didn't like the color of them. And they're still running today. This is years later. All right. Back to my list here. All right. I just yesterday came back from New York where I picked up a Rokon ATV, which new would have been about 13,000 bucks with freight and destination charges and all this stuff.

[00:03:49] I paid 3900 bucks, so I saved 9100 bucks. This is used on our farm. You know, they're doing easements up there, and we got tree work to do and all kinds of stuff to to work the farm. And let's see, next, I got a 50 quart stainless steel pot for cooking stuff. And this one, I was expecting it to be beat up. It was brand new, had never been used. Still inside the pot was the paper the instruction manual for it. I don't know why you need an instruction manual for pot, but. But 189 bucks on Amazon I paid $30 for it's brand spanking new stainless steel seven by 12 Heavy duty trailer. And this is to carry my quad which is on the list here later and the the other ATV and all the stuff my chainsaws and weed eaters and all the stuff to go up to this property which we rent out, by the way. Let's see. So the trailer would have been about 7000 bucks. It has two ramps. It's, you know, pretty heavy duty because it's not new. The newer ones the same size would be 7000 bucks, but the steel was not as tough. So I say 5000 bucks on that. The quad I got, they're selling they're selling for about 20,000 bucks. Now, these these four wheel all terrain vehicles.

[00:05:15] I paid $2,600 for a used one. Now, I did have to do a little bit of work on the carburetor, but I saved $17,400 from buying a new one. I bought a dog pens the $159 used or new. I paid 20 bucks for it. They just wanted to haul it away. Saved $139. Then I got a commercial portable air conditioning unit. It sells for about 714 plus tax, about $750 on Amazon. I paid 300, saved $449 and it works like a charm. Oh, it's awesome. So the total of all those savings is 33,804. So here's the thing, folks. You can either keep up with the Joneses, buy everything brand new and either have less stuff or be in great debt or spend overspend that could have been money either saved or spent on other things. See, I grew up very frugal. It's one of the great tips my dad gave me as I grew up, and it's helped make me where I am today for sure. All right. Next question here. So anyway, those are used things. So if you're especially if you're handy, buy used. But I don't buy used computers or anything that I don't wouldn't know how to fix and stuff like that. But for a lot of this stuff like the 50 quart stainless steel pot. All right. Come on. Saved $159 on the darn thing. And I got this great big pot now. All right. Next question. Tom, what are you doing about AI? The answer is pretty much nothing.

[00:06:52] All right. Artificial intelligence. I see. I always wait until the geeks figure things out before I jump in. I call it dull edge technology because the reason they call being right on the front end the bleeding edge is because you bleed money. It never works, right? There's glitches and it's the most expensive. It's going to cause you the most hassle with people, you know, especially if you're doing business. So I don't do anything until people figure it out. Now, Larry, one of my contractors is all over it and he loves it. So I had him doing some research for me to promote my school. And I'm sure this is a low level description compared to all the fancy AI commentaries out there nowadays. But I see it as a, you know, an advanced research tool, and that's what I use it for. I just got him to find out a lot of places that have been ragging on the overpriced indoctrination for your education. That used to be good but now is terrible. So that's what we're using for not much. Okay, here's one Tom. Who are you voting for in the next presidential election? Well, guess what? I don't really talk much, if any, about politics on this show. But let me just say this. All right. Many of the people currently running the country will most likely be featured in my upcoming book, which you have heard of, probably called Highly Educated Idiots. So that's all I'm going to say about it.

[00:08:32] All right. Tom. I got an email guaranteeing me a first page Google ranking for cost me a couple hundred bucks. Is this legit? All right. Well, it's a yes and no, but the yes is a tiny bit. And the no is a giant 99.9% bit. All right. It's not legit. So here's the yes. If some super obscure keyword you're using, then it's easy to get a first page ranking with no help from anybody. All right. But if it's based on any normal keyword, it's impossible to guarantee a first page listing unless you are paying for a sponsored ad, And again, you don't need to pay them for that unless you don't know how to do sponsored ads. Then, you know, if you do pay, you can pretty much guarantee a first page ranking. If you're willing to make a high enough pay per click bid. And you aren't advertising something illegal or banned from Google. So this is an old scam. Don't fall for it. You know, you see these? These are dime a dozen scams where they're going to get your money and you'll never get it back, even if they stay in business. Or they'll just go and close and open up under another name if you try to sue them. So, no, it's a scam. Oh, this next one I like. I'm really handy with tools. So am I. And building stuff up I'm pretty good at. What's the best way to make money with this skill online? I love this idea of making plans to build stuff.

[00:10:11] And there's a girl on line where I got a set of plans to build some Adirondack outdoor chairs around my fire pit area, which, by the way, I built half of it in my buddy, built the other half. And the chairs are gorgeous. They were easy because of the plans and. Those plans were for free. So I was so happy with them. I was going to buy or I'm going to buy a set of this lady's plans for building a greenhouse. Everybody's bugging me to build a greenhouse, so I'm going to build a greenhouse. Well, the last time I looked. I think she sold about 3900 copies of these plans for $19.95. That's almost $78,000 for one set of plans. I think that's a pretty good return on our investment. And she's going to be selling those plans till she's old and gray. All right. So she'll probably make hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for that one set of plans. And she has her own greenhouse. She could probably sell the greenhouse if she didn't want the greenhouse anymore. I would say one of the best things is to build something and carefully document what you're doing and make a final set of plans with a tools list, materials list where to find the stuff. And you could do this over and over again. And there's, you know, you keep the price cheap and you sell thousands of them.

[00:11:48] So that would be my suggestion there. All right. Next question. Tom Would you still sell a printed product? Well, again, this is a qualified yes, but it depends. Now, let me give you an example. I recently bought a spiral bound book with glossy pages. About fixing my home air conditioning units. I think I paid over $100 for it. And it's it's created so I can have it with me outside when I'm working on the air conditioning and it won't get all messed up If it gets dirty or wet or something, I can clean it off and the spiral means I can flip it over so it lays flat. I don't have to try to hold it open while I'm looking and working at the same time. So there's one example of a printed product that's perfect for its application. It's high priced and it's still creating great value to me, saving me thousands of dollars on air conditioning repair. Now on regular topics, I would have to know if I could move a lot of copies before I would have it printed. Now you can always do print on demand for smaller quantities, but the profit margins aren't great compared to printing large quantities at a commercial printer. For instance, My Wake Him Up book Beautiful 336 pages I think Color full color beautiful color cost me $2.10 to print in large quantities at print on demand. It wouldn't look as nice and it would cost me $10 or more to print say so yes, I would still do printed products if I knew I could do a lot of them.

[00:13:32] And no, other than that, I wouldn't. All right. Okay. Next question. I've got several unrelated businesses. Should I have a website for each or combine them into one? Well, the quick answer would be every unrelated business should have its own website and social media. But that only applies if you don't have other ways to drive traffic to the site or the page in the site where people are already pre-sold. So let's say you eventually want to get free traffic from Google. Then you should separate the sites because Google and the other search engines don't really take kindly to small websites that are like jack of all trades. Now, if you're driving paid traffic or have a successful podcast, radio or TV show or a YouTube channel with lots of viewers and listeners and you're driving traffic from those sources that already know and love you, then you could combine the sites and just have separate landing pages all over the place and drive people directly to them. Or maybe you even have a sales webinar that other people are promoting for you and it drives pre-sold traffic. That's where you've already been on them with an hour and they know you and they hear what your deal is. And then you only need a landing page that you can put anywhere on a site and drive The webinar drives them specifically to it.

[00:15:05] It doesn't matter if it's a sub page on your main site. Now, the only caution I would have if you're doing one site is that the domain name? You should. It should be generic enough so people don't get confused. For instance, if I send people to my FatsoTennis.com site to a page, I'm just making this up. Fatsotennis.com/protectiondogs. Right. Which is another, you know, business of mine. It just wouldn't make sense to them and would make you look kind of shaky. See? So if I was going to just have one website, I'd have some generic name to it. But again, it's not the best practice overall. It's best to have a domain name that tells exactly what you do. And the whole site is about that one topic that's going to serve you better in the future. All right. So there's a few of the questions I got in the last couple of weeks. Hey, if you need help with that stuff and like the billion other things, you need to be successful online, let me know. Be glad to help you out at my mentor program. The longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. And I triple dog dare people to to challenge me on that because they'd be embarrassed because of all the things that this provides. So check it out at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and I'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.