160 – The tools I use to run my business: Tom talks My Resources

Episode 160 – My Resources
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.

Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode 160 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I want to talk about my resources and I'm going to tell you about a ton of resources that I either use, I sell them or give them away. And there's an ever changing list. But I guarantee there's something for everyone here. And I can assure you you will want to visit the show notes as soon as you can, because there's no way you're gonna remember all the resources I'm going to lay on you in this episode and as I was looking through my roboform, which is one of the resources for a password generator and password repository that keeps track of all my stuff, it also has safe notes where I can keep safe combinations and all kinds of stuff, all highly encrypted. But as I was looking through over the years, the hundreds and hundreds of resources that I've either tried and discarded or tried and and used, but they're obsolete now. So I eliminated them. But but there's just tons of stuff in here for you. All right. So we'll get to that in a minute. Now, episode 159 was Mary Agnes Antonopoulos. She was a secretary for 20 years. And then she just decided one day she was going to change her life. So she quit and since she was a good writer. She immediately started making six hundred dollars a week writing from home and has turned that into a half a million dollar a year business. So check her episode out 159 if you missed it. And also, please tell your friends about the podcast. The more successful it is, the more freebies I'll be able to give our faithful listeners. And they will thank you for it. If they're starting a business or want to take the business, they have to the next level. This is the place to be. Now grab a copy of our podcast app in the iTunes store. You can check out Screwthecommute.com/app where we have complete instructions to show you how to use all the fancy features so you can take us with you on the road. And also make sure you grab a copy of our freebie for listening to the podcast. It's my twenty seven dollar e-book, How to Automate Your Business. It's just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes, so grab that. And there's also a special little extra gift over for you at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Also, one of the reasons I do this podcast is to give you a lot of this stuff you need to know. But there's so much more. And so everything I mention on one of these episodes, you could go in-depth for a week and not learn all the details of it. That's why I developed the Great Internet Marketing Retreat and Joint Venture program 20 years ago, where I've been helping small business people really maximize their online portion of their business. And some are completely online. In fact most are completely online because the risk is so low. So we have a year long program, but you don't have to take a year to start making money. Let me tell you, because we had one woman in the first month, she started make an eleven hundred dollars a month. And then after two months, she quit her job and is making a full time living and she's only been in two months. So very, very powerful program. Lot of unique features. I'll tell you a little bit about more about them later. But you can check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and it'll also be in the show notes, which I'm guaranteeing you will want to visit because there's so many resources I'm going to tell you about on this episode.

Okey doke. Let's get to the main event. I'm going to tell you about the myriad of resources, both services and products I use to run my business and full transparency here. I may get an affiliate commission on some of these things, but you can be darn sure I won't recommend anything that sucks just to get a commission not going to ruin my reputation for a few bucks. All right. I mean, maybe I would for a lot of them. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Ok, so I get commissions on things that don't belong to me, but I'm also going to tell you about a bunch of free and paid resources that I've created. First one you want to jot down is Tom Antion Webinars, where I have tons of free webinars that you can learn a lot of stuff about Internet marketing, copywriting, professional speaking, outsourcing, webinars, all kinds of stuff. So check that out at tomantionwebinars.com.

Now, one warning here, folks, you've got to remember, I've been in formal business over 42 years and selling online since the commercial Internet started way back in 1994, about twenty five years ago. All right. This episode could be extremely overwhelming. If you think you could do all the things that once they're talking about here.

I've done all these things over many, many years, so the warning is just pick a couple things and get good at them or learn to use them before you move on to something else. Here's an example. Roboform, which I mentioned earlier, this is the password manager that does all kinds of cool things to keep all your most private information safe. There's also one called 1Password. Now, if you got either one of these resources and maybe took like three days to load it up with all your stuff and learn how to use it, it would save you literally months, months of frustration and forgotten passwords for the rest of your career. I can't tell you how many times somebody paid me a lot of money to get on a call with me. And then 20 minutes after the call started, they still couldn't get into what they wanted to show me. Now, luckily for me, I always have something to work on while they're wasting time looking for their password. It's not so lucky for them, though, because their time with me is just ticking away and I most likely have another call booked just after theirs. I just can't understand why some people won't take the time to use utilities like this and there's a bunch of them in in the automation book. I gave you at the beginning of this episode.

Each one of them has a little bit of a learning curve, but I've been using roboform and another password manager before roboform was invented for probably 15 years. In other words, the payoff and the ultra speed I get from having all my passwords stored in a highly encrypted program has paid off for me for 15 years and I probably only spend a day or day and a half about 15 years ago loading up my passwords and learning how to use the program. I mean, what an enormous return on investment. And I'll just be blunt about it. I think it's stupid not to take advantage of these kinds of inexpensive yet really powerful tools.

All right. Let's get into my resources and I'm not even going to bother with the ones that are in that free e-book. I'm giving you at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. You can download the e-book and you got a whole bunch and explanations of all the ones that are in there. So they're not going to be in this episode. You got to go get him out of the book.

All right. Here we go. Lots. Lots of stuff. There'll be miscellaneous stuff. I'll try to categorize it as closely as I can so that they'll be the things that, for instance, have to do with Web sites are lumped together email stuff is lumped together. All right. Here we go. So for my regular e-mail and correspondence and I'm not talking about my broadcast e-mail and my auto responders, I use a thing called an exchange server through Rackspace.com. An exchange server means that Antion.com email is synchronized in all my devices desktop, laptop, tablet and cell phone. In the old days, I would synchronize everything and then go on the road on my laptop and answer emails and then they weren't synchronized with my desktop. When I got home. And so I took hours to do that. And then I'd be scared to death to answer e-mail on my laptop because it would on synchronize everything. So exchange servers get rid of this. They're dirt cheap. Very high quality. Rackspace has been perfect for years for me.

And you might say, well, I don't need that. I have Gmail, while Gmail is not promoting your website. With every e-mail you send. If someone sees orders@antion.com, they know instantly my domain name is Antion.com. If it's Tom@screwthecommute.com. It's the same thing. They know it's screwthecommute.com. You're just making Google richer by using Gmail. And I use Gmail a lot for throwaway accounts and miscellaneous stuff. But your main correspondence should promote your Website.

All right, so here's some Web site stuff I have hosting accounts and dedicated servers, a dedicated server means I'm the only Web sites on that specific computer in the hosting service. This is not in somebody's basement. All right. This is you want 24/7 tech support battery backup in case of floods and hurricanes. And some of them are buried deep underground to protect them from stuff. So this you know, this is important. It's not necessarily expensive, but it's very important. So I use a variety of them because I don't want everything on one server if it's all on one server, if that serving company gets hacked. I disappear off the face of the earth. So I have stuff spread around all around the country, even if a backbone of the Internet goes down in part of the country. I got stuff going on, other parts of the country. So as you build your online presence, you don't want to have it all in one basket. So some of the ones I use, not so much hostgator anymore. They've gone through ups and downs Verio, I've been using it for 20 plus years or more. Hostek. But the latest one is called Liquid Web. They have the best service I've seen so far where they guarantee to answer the phone in 60 seconds or less. Which they have done. Of course then they put you on hold for an hour. Kidding. Liquid web has been at the time of this writing. See, they go up and down frequently, these hosting services in their quality. So that's the ones I'm using now.

Now, membership sites. I have some very expensive ones that have been perfect at Membergate. But nowadays, I teach all my students to use a plugin for WordPress called WishList Member. And then we put two other little plug ins to go along to automate everything and they're found at happyplugins.com one's called auto registration core, and the other one is auto registration specifically for my shopping cart kickstartcart.com, which we covered shopping carts. I'm pretty sure it's episode 10. So those are membership plug in, wishlist member and two little plug ins from happy plugins called auto registration.

All right. Now I use thrive themes and thrive architect to build WordPress Web sites and all my students do. It's dirt cheap and high quality as opposed to some of these crappy builders that your web host gives you. This Thrive Themes is the best I've seen in my whole career on value.

All right. There's various plugins we use for WordPress and by the way, if you're getting sucked in by any of these other crazy things you see on TV to make Web sites, you're just using non-standard stuff. Nobody's gonna be able to help you with it. They can't do all the things that you really need to do if you want high success. But they're dummyfied and they're specifically designed to go after people that do not know any better. You see it all the time on TV and all those things. So WordPress is the gold standard of the world, period. If you want to mess with something else at your own peril and you probably don't know any better. If you if you bothered to do something else. Now, if you're a super geek and tell me what a Drupal is better. Well, Drupal lost the marketing war. I'm sorry. Whether it's better or not doesn't matter. It's kind of like beta and VHS tape. Years ago, when, you know, most people said beta was actually a higher quality thing, but VHS won the war and Beta just fell off into oblivion. So that's the same thing with WordPress. I'm not going to get into an argument with some geek telling me some intricate thing of why it's better with WordPress You can go down to some pre-school and get a wake a kid up from his nap and get him to help you with it. I mean, it's just massive and everybody develops for WordPress, not all these other things. So. So WordPress is the gold standard if you don't use it. Well, shame on you. You don't know what you're doing.

OK. So here's some plugins. One is included with WordPress called Akismet. It kind of gathers, grabs, spam things that come into your WordPress blog catches them. It's only a few dollars a month. I think to activate it, we use both all in one SEO pack. Now, not on the same site, but these are the two major things for search engine optimization for WordPress, all in one SEO pack and Yoast SEO. That's for search engines. We have a broken link checker. It scans all the sites for validity on a schedule and let's us know if there's any broken links. That's nice because you don't want your site to have broken links. It looks bad when people are clicking on stuff. Google Analytics pretty obvious keeps track of how many visitors and all the stuff, how long people are on the site. Bounce rate, all those things. Pretty links. This allows you to create custom really nice, easy to say web links because a lot of the links you get are massively goofy looking and you can't put them in plain text e-mails. You wouldn't want to put them on a web site. You wouldn't want to say them on a podcast because it's impossible to get somebody that listen to question marks. You know this. That plus 4 7, 6, 5, 8. You know, all these crazy links you get. So pretty links, wipes that problem out. Really simple SSL. This is the secure socket layer. This is why the thing that makes your Web site secure and it was demanded by Google several years ago that if you don't have an SSL and so you have an HTTPS Web site, you won't see the light of day in search results. I mean, they won't ban you, but they're never gonna give you a high ranking. And then people are worried now. And also the browsers, if you don't have your SSL installed, the browsers are starting to make these massive scary warnings to people. So you're losing. Now, you may not see it, but all your other visitors are seeing it and going and leaving your site immediately because they're scared. So it's your fault if that happens, if you don't put SSL in.

Now, this isn't really a plug ins. I think it's more called a widget, but it's a service called Speak Pipe, and it allows the Web site visitor to leave you a voice message. And I encourage everybody on here to go to screwthecommute.com. You'll see a little thing on the side of the page when you click it. It opens up, you click it again and you can talk to me and leave me a message. I'll get an email that says, Hey, somebody just left you a message. I can listen to it there in my email. And then I can reply right back to you and you'll get an email with my reply. Very cool. Speak pipe, very cheap. Used to be free, but now it's really cheap. Thrive architect I mentioned thrive a minute ago. That's it's a plug in thrive themes that makes it really easy to make gorgeous world class looking Web sites. I mean, anybody can do it with about 15 minutes of tutoring. Okay, updraft plus it just happens to be a backup plug in that backs up our websites to a variety of storage services. So you want to have a backup of your site outside of your hosting service. Because the hosting service tells you, oh, yeah, we make backups for you. Well, if that hosting service gets whacked, you lost the backups, too. So you always want to have offsite off hosting service backups. And it's a good idea to have a local copy, you know, somewhere and you're on your own computer. I learned that lesson the hard way. I got sucked in. This is way in the early days. I didn't know any better. And they said, yeah, we got backups. My site went down every I mean, millions of sites went down at this hosting service and then they said, yeah, we got backups. It was 10 days before they could get everybody restored with millions of sites. So if I had a local copy, I could have had my site back up in a matter of hours. So. So you always want to have backups of your site, but you're going to forget about it and you probably won't even do it correctly. So get a backup plug in.

All right. We use Wordfence security. This provides like malware protection catches things trying, people trying to hack your site and so forth.

And this isn't a plug in, but this is the shopping cart system we use kickstartcart.com. I've been using that. I don't know, 17 years and had, you know, fifteen hundred users. And that's just the most powerful yet cost effective shopping cart system. And I say system because it's your email broadcast it's your auto responding, it's your split testing, it's your upselling, it's your affiliate program, it's your bundling, it's your coupons. It's all included in one for very low price, three, four times cheaper than the competition and very well tested over many, many, many years. Lot of this new stuff coming out sounds all great on the surface, but there's no big company behind it. You know, you're just at risk. So get kickstartcart.com and we give unlimited. Even if you're not in one of my programs, we give unlimited one on one tutoring to teach you how to use it, help you get it all going, take advantage of the features. So I guess that I'm pretty sure that was episode 10 where I talked about shopping carts. All right. Our e-mail now. This is broadcast e-mail. So again, kickstartcart.com is our broadcast e-mail and our auto responders.

Now, I'm going to name off some other places we happen to use now. Am I suggesting that you use them? Absolutely not. There are a lot of times hits like Do As I Say, not as I do. The reason is, is because I had one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers before Kickstart Cart was even invented. So here's some other places I use Aweber, membergate. But again, that's part of a membership site that's very expensive. Savicom and ARPReach. So I had lists and stuff. All kinds of lists everywhere. Occasionally you'll get more than one e-mail from me because you might be on more than one list. So but you can do it all. If you're starting out or if you don't have these multiple things going on everywhere, you can get everything into kickstart cart. And then here's the thing that happens. You might have a list over somewhere else. And I don't know, mailchimp or one of those little cheepies. Then you sell something in your shopping cart. Well, now you got an email list over in your shopping cart and now you got one in mailchimp. And now what are you going to do? So when you send out a broadcast, if you send mailchimp out and you send the shopping cart went out, then you got people getting duplicate e-mails. Now, like I said, that happens to me out of necessity sometimes. But it doesn't have to happen to you if you do this right from the start. So, that's e-mail.

All right. Some podcast stuff that we use, podcast plugins, simple podcast press. And this is what integrates with our podcast hosting service like Libsyn. That's where we host our podcast and we use smart podcast player. So when you go to screwthecommute.com and you see the player there and the person's picture in the side and the topics and you can fast forward and rewind and all that stuff. That's a smart podcast player. Let's see. I told you Libsyn was how we used for hosting and I used Adobe Audition for editing and I pay 20 dollars a month. In other words, I didn't buy the program. I go to Adobe and I picked what services I want and I pay 20 dollars a month for Adobe Audition. And then the guy that kind of got me started in all my audio stuff. You got to know this guy. He's one of the best guys on the face of the earth. Mike Stewart. He's Mike@internetaudioguy.com. He's a great, great, great guy. He knows all kinds of stuff. He's got a platinum or gold record from a band. He was in and he has very inexpensive musics for openings and closings of your podcast and just a wealth of knowledge. And you can hire him to talk you through setting stuff up. And he'll even set up a whole WordPress podcast site for you. All right. So you got to check this guy out. Mike@internetaudioguy.com is his email.

All right, so search engine stuff, I use search engine news every month for as long as they have. I think they've been in business to report to me what's going on with search engines. Now, we don't put as much stock in search engine positioning anymore. It's just too much work with too iffy results and too much competition. Paid traffic is kind of the way we go now with Facebook, Google and YouTube, which is owned by Google. Is the best bargain on earth, in fact, soon as I get down here, I'm going to be putting up some those kind of ads that you can skip. They're called in stream ads. You don't pay anything. I don't know if you know this. If they hit the skip button. So you get lots of branding and name recognition and in front of thousands and thousands of people for nothing. Okay. So. And even when they do watch it, sometimes I get as little as four cents for a view. So that's really when the best deals out there.

OK. For keyword research. This is the number one episode of this podcast over a year plus ago because and the reason I made it the number one episode is because it's the biggest mistake people make on earth with regard to online stuff. They build stuff and they don't know the keywords people are typing in to find their stuff. And also, it's changed recently. I can't remember what episode it was, but recently I did an episode that changes keyword research somewhat because of voice search where people are on their cell phones. So dig out those episodes. Definitely number one. And I can't remember if it was episode. I don't remember 136 or so. I just can't remember. But check it out and listen to the first episode 1 first on keywords and then look for the voice search episode just is a couple months ago, you know. So hasn't been too long now.

Some of the tools I use, I don't use any paid tools for this for keyword research because you can do with just regular free tools. You can do more. That would keep you busy the rest of your career. The paid tools, yes, they're great, but they're really, really super high level geeks using them to go really deep. And they probably have a decent budget to do all this intricate work when most of the people listen to this. Never did any of this work. So there's no need for you to spend on fancy tools when you don't even know how to use the basic stuff yet. So one thing is called keywords everywhere. You can install that in your browser and every time you do any kind of search or put your key or a word in it, I'll tell you how many times per month it's being searched. It will also give you some other information. But the main thing I always want to see is how many times that is being searched and then it plasters your browser in the empty areas of your browser with related searches. So if somebody is looking for public speaking tips, like, as I said, public speaking stuff, well, they might say, how do I find public speaking tips or what are the best public speaking tips? These are all related searches. So that's one thing, keywords everywhere. Then, of course, the Google keyword planner is free. If you if you have a Google account now, it's not as accurate. If you don't if you're not advertising, it just gives you ranges of keywords. But again, it's fine to start with. If you've never done any research at all, then that's fine. It gets very accurate when you start advertising. That's Google keyword planner. And then a real quick one I use to compare keywords is called Google Trends. Don't you just go to Google Trends? You don't have to log in yet. I'll do anything. You just slap a couple keywords in it and it'll show you over time. Which one's better than the other one? So Google Trends. Those are the three main ones I used and it's made me millions of dollars. So there you go.

Ok, let's talk about photo manipulation and graphics I use ipiccy.com. I used to use fotoflexer, but it kind of disappeared off the face of the earth. So for quick photo stuff I use, ipiccy where I can make the pictures bigger, smaller, put text on, do all kinds of great stuff so totally free. Then for Facebook stories I use the buffer free story maker so you could just type in buffer free story maker and it'll layout and I'll make it very easy for you. Make a nice looking Facebook story. We use Canva. There's a free and a paid version. We happen to use the paid version, but the free version is freaking awesome. It has all kinds of templates and different sizes for book covers and e-book covers and and Facebook ads and banners and has all kinds of templates for you that you can use. And that's canva. And we also use Photoshop as part of my that Adobe thing with Adobe Audition. I buy I pay, I think ten dollars a month for Photoshop and all kinds of other little stuff that Adobe provides.

All right. Social media automation, I mentioned buffer, we these are paid buffer. Meet Edgar and Audience are ways that we can load them up. And every time I make a piece of content, Lackey unloads it into these things and then it distributes them over and over again randomly to different places. Twitter, you know, I think LinkedIn, but definitely Facebook and you know, all over the place and different. I have a bunch of different pages and groups and stuff. So these are just crazy things to help you automate your stuff and you just keep every time you do something new, you load it in there. And that's just your library is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it sticks them out there for you. Now for chat bots, we use many chat, which is one of the greatest bargains on earth. Many chat will put a chat bot my little chat bots cuts called screwy for screw the commute. So if you go to Facebook to the Antion and Associates page and you message me screwy, he's gonna answer you instantly. Hey, how you doing? You want internet marketing stuff, public speaking stuff, entrepreneur stuff. You click. He says, OK, here's all this entrepreneur stuff. And if it if it gets to a point where screwy doesn't know what to do. I get the message and then I can answer you as fast as humanly possible, as fast as I get to it. That's called chat bot marketing and messenger marketing. And they have the most fantastic training course there are at many chat that I swear with all the courses and programs I've seen and purchased it be worth two thousand dollars and it's free. So many chat is free to start. Now it's a little bit technical to hook it up, so you might get a geek to help you with that. I mean, if you follow directions, I mean, I did it myself. I'm not really that technical. And the pro version is only ten dollars a month. So it's really great. And when you broadcast to people and others rules, you got to stay. And when you're broadcast to people's messenger. But it's not filtered like email. You know, it's going to get there. And the open rates are just ungodly 50 to 75 percent average is what I get for open rates. I never saw that ever on e-mail even when the beginning back in the early days. OK. So that's the chat bots.

All right. Video research. Now, what I mean by that? Well, what I want to put one of these skip you ads or skipped ads in stream ads, they call them on YouTube. I can't put it on every every video because a lot of videos don't have what's called monetization turned on. So I'm just putting that in is I wish I could put my video there, but I can't. So it's just a waste of time. I use TubeSift and Vidrol. These are things that will go if I put a keyword like like podcast in, you know, go out and find up to 300 podcast related videos that allow you to advertise on. And I just copy the list and paste it into Google and there my video is gonna show up on 300 different podcasts things right now, there's one running. You don't have to do a video. You can do a banner. So right now there's 300 some podcasts where if you go to it. My banner would be one of the ads that would be shown to click to screw the commute. But if I just wasted my time trying to do this by hand, I mean it'd be weeks to try to just find one thing where in ten minutes this thing will find 300 videos for me to advertise on that are related to what I'm doing. So that's tubesift and vidrol tubesift is what I'm using currently, and it will also make these banners for you. It'll also make custom thumbnails for your videos. So it's very versatile. That's tubesift.

All right. So for video production stuff, we use final cut for the Mac. Now, I don't. That's what Marc the video guy does. He's the chief instructor at my school. And also he's been with me doing videos for years and years and written three books on video marketing.

See all this stuff, folks? Anything I'm telling you here definitely works. When I looked at my roboform and saw hundreds and hundreds of resources that I've tried and discarded, that's part of the value of being in my program is you don't have to do that because that cost literally millions of dollars for me to go through all those. Check them out. Have my people check them out and they say. Tom, this is not worth it. I made might have paid a lot of money for something. And it's just not not any good. So I don't promote it or teach it to my students. So anyway, back to video now, I personally use Vegas for the P.C. for my video editing. I do just easy stuff. If it's anything fancy, I have Marc do it, but it's just not worth taking time and waiting like this weekend. I'm going to have a whole bunch of videos up that I'm going to shoot in one take and then have them up their advertising where I'd have to wait till Monday and transferred the Marc and get him back. So it's worth learning basic, simple video editing. Now, Vegas used to be made by Sony, but now it's a company called Magix. So that's what I used for the P.C. Then you can use iMovie on the Mac, too. That's free and comes with Mac. So it's a relatively simple use.

All right. For screen capture video. I use Camtasia. That's the gold standard for screen capture. I'm sure I did a whole episode about that. I don't remember what episode, but that is so powerful. I've been using that now. Well, it's almost 20 years now since the year 2000. I started Camtasia and made fortunes with it because it's just so versatile what you can do with screen capture. So dig out that episode. Animoto is also a cool service where I pay one price per year like 150 bucks for a year. And you can just plug in a bunch of advertising phrases about your product and a bunch of pictures and little video snippets if you want, and it'll create an entire gorgeously edited video for you. And if you don't like it, you hit the button again. It recuts the whole thing and you can. It has music inside. That's royalty free. That'll go with it. So Animoto is a good automated way where you could just give a bunch of pictures of your products and bunch of advertising little blurbs and give it to an intern and they could crank out gorgeous promotional videos for you.

Now, videoFX is a program that has animated characters that you can put music over and you can put text on the screen and have little characters talking. So that's videoFX. I have a video on YouTube about that showing you how that works. Now, Handbrake, that's a free thing that transfers different video formats for you. Now this. I'm not real happy with it. Lately it's had some trouble, but you might want to transfer a .MOV movie maybe off your older cell phone into a .MP4 which is the current format and handbrake We'll do that kind of stuff for you. But again, I'm not. I'm not certain by the time you hear this if the problems have been fixed or not.

Sonic Fire is a really cool program to put music on your videos, and it's it's so it's so cool. You each piece of music that has this cut down into infinitesimal slices. And then if you have like a piece of video that's four seconds and 32 frames long, it'll make a piece of music exactly fit. four seconds and 32 frames and go put it right, right at the end of your 32 frames, so it matches music exactly to what video you have, which would take hours and hours and hours. If you really knew what you're doing so that sonic fire, then you might want to get a subscription to Video Maker magazine. It tells you all the latest stuff and techniques you can use. And it's actually a physical magazine. It still keeps coming. And of course, they have it online too.

All right. For storage offsite, I use Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive. So those are very common. Everybody knows about those.

Here's some miscellaneous stuff. I use Chromecast to project my laptop to my big 72 inch TV chromecast you can go down to Best Buy or one of these electronic stores and I don't know, it's 30 dollars or something, you plug it in both places and bam, wham. You can project your laptop or probably tablet, too, I think. Or even cell phone onto your big screen.

Now I use Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Now I am getting thirty five hundred views a week of my videos on my Roku channel. It's the public speaking channel on Roku. I don't know exactly on Amazon Fire and I'll be glad to hook these up for it. For five thousand bucks, I'll do it. All right. Some people are charging twenty five thousand, but now they're accepting from people like us. And I mean, in the first week, I got I don't know if I'm trying to remember. Twelve hundred people decided to put my channel in their favorites on their TV in the United States. I'm pretty sure it was only United States. And who who looks for public speaking stuff on TV? It's a lousy thing. Some of the people that were doing it at the same time as me with better topics like travel or more what mainstream topics were getting 8, 10, 12000 people in the first week, putting their channel in the favorites of their Roku TV and Amazon Fire TV. So it's a little complicated on how to do it, but if anybody wants me to do it, give me five grand. I'll do it for you and I'll teach you how to to keep adding stuff to it now. By the way, this isn't live TV. This is just the same kind of videos you would have on YouTube is now on somebody's TV and Roku is going crazy. Amazon Fire's going crazy. And the cable companies are scrambling because Roku is free. If you have Wi-Fi and a smart TV. You've got tens of thousands of channels to pick from it's just crazy. So I think I have a potential of 60 million viewers now between Amazon and Roku. I can do that for you, teaching you how to do it. Not worth my time because it's very complicated. But but I'd be glad to do it for you if you want. If you want that kind of thing. Five thousand bucks. Excuse me. That's five thousand bucks each. All right. So I suggest Roku first, actually, because it's just going like crazy. OK. We use Vimeo to host the videos that go on Roku.

All right. This is miscellaneous section. So I'm into that stuff. All right. We use fresh title, which is like a secret weapon. I got an affiliate link for that. It's very cheap. It's like 30 bucks or something. And it generates headlines for you subheadings. It gives you an analysis of what? Which one it thinks is the best for your product. I mean, it's crazy. So that's fresh title. Now, we frequently help our students one on one tutoring and we use join.me. We use teamviewer. We use zoom. And we use Skype. Those are all different ones that we use to take over somebody's screen. Some of them will let you actually take over the screen and click for the person and some it's just we're seeing what they're doing. And that's so efficient when we're working with our students because, you know, they try to tell you, you know, they're not really savvy online people and they're trying to tell you what they did, but it's impossible. So if we see we can say, no, no, don't click there, click over here. And it just goes so much faster helping them. All the students rave about that, that that's how we help them. And it's just like sitting right there in there, in there in a room with them.

Let's see, we're trying out a thing called Loom is like a video email kind of thing. I'm not sure everything you can do with it. Just tried that the other day and then I use the thing called Zello. It's like a walkie talkie for my staff. So, you know, we have three buildings, but one's eight miles away. And it cost a fortune for me to try to do an intercom directly to that through the Internet. And it never worked. It would always quit. So I got sick of that and I found a free thing online called Zello. It's a walkie talkie through the Internet. So it sits on my desktop. If I want to talk to Travis or Larry or Marc or Lakia. I just hold the button down and I say, Hey, Travis, you there? And then he comes back. He could be walk into the store and say, Yeah. What's up? You know, so it's a direct walkie talkie. Now it is like walkie talkie, like you have to hold the button down and they can't talk while you're talking. There are some more fancy ones that are called duplex where both, you know, you can be talking at the same time, but this is just one way it's free setup was a breeze and it took care of all those. I mean, probably over a thousand dollars I wasted over the years trying to keep the intercom working through a static IP address going all the way to my school. I was just just a waste of money. So Zello does it for free. There I just saved you time. All right. For spyware and virus stuff, we used Microsoft Security Essentials. If you don't use a Mac. I don't know if it would work for Mac, but if you use a Mac, but it's free. You know, so I don't buy any kind of McAfee or anything else. I just use that it's free and they keep it updated like crazy, which, you know, they have a big stake in keeping it updated because it makes windows look bad or worse than they already do. If people are getting viruses. So Microsoft Security Essentials.

All right. Now I use reflector3. This is a thing is pretty cool once you hook it up. It allows your cell phone. Screen to be projected to either your desktop or your laptop and you say, well, why would you do this. Well we do training all the time. You've probably seen YouTube videos where somebody is showing you their cell phone screen. Now, you can't see the person's finger clicking on the screen, but you can. It's a really handy thing if you're training or teaching or you want to project your cell phone.

Now, the iPhone X, it's a little bit different. I just got iPhone 10 and it has its own screen capture, kind of like Camtasia. But that's a little bit different. And it's great. But you'd have to take that video and then import it and put it into your other training video where reflector, it's all recorded at once. So. So it's a handy thing on the iPhone 10. But Reflector 3 allows you to project your cell phone screen onto your laptop, your desktop. And then a cool timer is. We use that a lot of times on webinars for how much longer I'll stay on for questions. So it`'s just a little utility that has a countdown timer, like I might say. Okay, I'm a stay on for 30 minutes for Q and A and I put the timer on and everybody can see it counting down. So that's I think that's free.

And then the last one I'm going to tell you about today is hybrid webinars. Now, this is now it just so happens, the first guy ever that we've had back as a guest on Screw the Commute will be next episode Wednesday. And his name is Geoff Ronning from Stealth Seminar. Now, I coined the term hybrid webinars because I think the young a lot of young people doing this are lazy and they just want to play the automated webinar with no interaction. So I coined the term hybrid webinar where I have the replay playing, but I'm standing by to answer questions live. So I called that hybrid. It's like part live, part Memorex or part recorded. And it caught on and I do a lot better and take care of people and sell a lot more because of that. And I've even been at it when I say stand by live. I could be at the mall. I was literally deer hunting, leaning up against the tree, answering questions. And I'm sure the deer were walking by like, look at that dummy over there. No wonder he's never going to eat us. He answering his cell phone instead of hunting. I couldn't have even got to my gun and shot him. By the time they'd run away because I was too busy on the cell phone, I'm sure they just walked by me laughing. But anyway, that's how I do it. And he's coming on Wednesday to just tell you all the kinds of benefits about webinars. So make sure you catch that one.

All right. So those are my resources. Remember, you can't use all of those at once or even probably in years. All right. So anything I tell you. Take your time and learn how to use it. I know this is the society where everybody is shiny object, but these are not shiny objects. These are things that will help you if you take the time to learn them. If you just install them and cross your fingers, you wasted your time. You wasted all your time and effort. And some of these are paid resources. All right. Now, also, you want to go to screwthecommute.com/resources where I have tons of webinars, all my paid stuff is there, my free stuff is there. It's this one stop shopping for all the stuff that I have is right there.

Now I want to tell you how I turned the Internet marketing world on its head around the year 2000. I mean, people like me were charging 50 or 100 grand upfront to teach what they knew to small business people. And I said, that is too much money. This is you're putting you know, first of all, there's no incentive for the supposed guru to help anybody after they got all the money upfront. That's not built in like my program and it's too much money. You're putting the small business people at a lot of risk because of this. They won't have any money to do what you tell them. If if they gave you all the money. So what I did is I made all those gurus mad, which I don't really care. Lot of them are rip offs anyway. And I turned it upside down in that I charge a relatively small entry fee and then I get a percentage of profits that's capped. Now, currently, it's 25 percent of your net. Net means you have to make money before I get any money and it's capped at fifty thousand dollars. So for me to get my 50 thousand, you have to net two hundred thousand. So when I did this. People went nuts and seventeen hundred students later, it's still going strong after 20 years, folks. So this is the real thing. No lawsuits. Nobody charges back asking for their money back. High value, high touch. Everything is one on one except for the special visit. You get to the retreat center where you actually live with me for an immersion weekend. And that's averages five, six people at that. The most we ever had was 10. Right. So that's part of your training. And like I said earlier, you don't have to go through all the training to start making money. In fact, I don't want that to happen. I want to get you to the money as fast as humanly possible because I want my share. OK. No question about that. And then the other thing is, is you get a scholarship to the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. It's distance learning. It's IMTCVA.org it will be in the show notes with all this other stuff and the scholarship is nineteen thousand one hundred dollars, which you can either use yourself or gift to somebody else. And the way it's different from my program is the mentor program I'm going to see what you got going. See what your skills are. Boom. Head you as fast as we can to the money. The school is different. It's you've got a past class one before you go to class, too. So it's way more structured to make sure you don't miss any little details that will bite you in the butt. So it's good to have both. But you can get everything from me with your one on one consultations and you also have one on one with everybody that works here. You know, I don't like group stuff because if I'm talking to an advance person, the beginners are lost and they quit. And if I'm talking to the beginners, the advanced people are like bored and they quit. So I take the time. Like nobody else on earth will do and talk to a one on one along with the rest of our staff will do the same thing for you. And another really great feature is that I know people are out there, were busy doing their thing. So if you have an assistant or people in your organization working on your stuff, they can contact us on your behalf while you're doing your higher level stuff.

Now, that doesn't mean I want you to be divorced from this because those people always leave, always is in all caps. They always leave. And if you're left dumbfounded, like, well, I don't know my passwords, I don't know where I'm hosted. No, that's that. You're being negligent to your business. That's why you get roboform and everything should be in there if you get stuck. Hey, at least you got, you know, can get in this stuff and you know, where you're hosted and you know, you know things. You can't just be the big diva like, oh, I'm a big shot business owner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen so many dumb arse business owners that think they're big crap and they're nobody's they're just you know, they just like the ego boost that they're not running their business. Then they've got their mortgaged to the hilt and they're wonder why they're not getting really well off because they think they're better than they are. Don't be that person. That's the fastest way to the poorhouse. All right. So anyway, I'm on my rant a little bit here, but check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and then you can always call me, ask me about the program. And we totally serve people here. And I came from a small town, super high levels of customer service. I do what I say I'm going to do and so does everybody else that works.

All right. So check everything out in the show notes. This was episode 160. And like I said, you have no choice but to get the show notes from this episode because if you want to find all those different resources, then what's best for you and print them out and get the transcript of this episode and you'll see. You know, and when I could probably do another one. I don't know in six months or so because there's I'm testing and using new stuff all the time. And I'll be a great source for you. And if you're in my program, you hear about them right away after we vet them for you. All right. So that's it. So I will catch everybody on the next episode. That's Geoff Ronning all about webinars, hybrid webinars that can make you a fortune. Catch ya later.

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