272 – Drive a “Medium” amount of traffic: Tom interviews Jeff Herring

Episode 272 – Jeff Herring
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode two hundred and seventy two of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm here with Jeff Herring. He is a repeat guest because he was so great last time. I really needed somebody to fill in today. I called him up and here he is. So anyways, he's a great content guy and he's got some really cool stuff to tell you about now that you haven't heard anywhere else. I can tell you that. Hope you didn't miss Episode 271 on residual affiliate programs. This was one of my Monday training sessions where, I mean, this is what just money just comes in, whether I do anything or not. And that's what a residual affiliate program is. And and I'm going to give you all the details about how to do that on the on Monday. So that was episode 271. Hey, how'd you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving the ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Go to screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says Send a voicemail. Click on it and talk into your phone, your computer, and tell me how the show's helped you and put your website in there will give you a shout out and you'll hear your voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Let's see. Hope you didn't forget to get a copy of my automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. This is how I've handled one hundred fifty thousand subscribers and forty thousand customers without pulling my hair out, saved millions of keystrokes and stole business from other people that took too long to get back to people. So this gives you all the details of how we automate stuff around here. screwthecommute.com/automatefree while you're over there. Grab a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. Does all kinds of cool stuff. We've got video training, screen captures to show you how to use all the fancy features so you can take us with you on the road. Hey, you know, we're sitting here in the middle of this quarantine pandemic. And you know what search thing is going crazy on Google? Work from home. Yeah, well, that's a big surprise to me since I've been doing that my whole life and I've been preaching it says nineteen ninety seven for times like this and for economy crashes in two thousand eight and other pandemics and for 9/11 terrorist attacks. So that's the reason I can keep going all day, all night. Not have to worry like average person. So get busy and learn to work from home. You got Jeff on here can help you. I got a mentor program. I got a school. So get this skill under your belt. Guess what? It's a great legacy gift. Probably the best legacy gift you could ever give to your grandchildren, your children to get these kinds of skills that are in super high demand. So check out our school at IMTCVA.org.

[00:03:31] All right, let's get to the main event. Are you struggling with creating content? Well, Jeff Herring provides you with tools, templates, wizards and strategies to make content creation fast, easy and profitable. And no experience is necessary. And a little bit later. He's got a super freebie for you. So hang in there for that. So, Jeff, you ready to screw the commute?

[00:03:56] Absolutely, let's do it with. Sounds like the two hundred and seventy second time for you.

[00:04:03] So what you been up to?

[00:04:05] Oh, just, you know, enjoy in life, even in the middle of all that's going on. I don't know about you, but this is my first pandemic. So I'm just trying to figure everything out and it's going well because I'm busier than I was before. And I owe a lot of that to you just by doing the things you've taught me to do all these years.

[00:04:26] Well, this isn't my first pandemic I was in that does that one down in 1918.

[00:04:35] So that was @newday age. Well, it was pretty bad. Yeah. But you see, to me, nothing's much different because I've been working out of my home since nineteen seventy seven. So I'm used to this, but I know it's driving some people crazy, but I want them to make money whether at home and then forget about it.

[00:04:55] And I'm the exact same way people ask me, you know how you handle this. I said well I'm pretty much doing what I've been doing for 13 years. Right. From how I said the only the only real challenge is the peer pressure.

[00:05:08] Say, what do you mean you have a staff at home? No, it's my dog. Right. They nap all day. It makes you want to nap. Other than that, I'm fine.

[00:05:17] Yeah. Yeah. So I don't have to wear a mask around the house or anything. So what are you been up to, though, since last time we talked?

[00:05:24] Well, you know, the boys are great. John, the oldest one's married almost two years now. I keep sending cases of wine over there so I can be a grandfather. He's about to graduate college, going to get a good promotion, you know, within the church she works for. Caleb is doing great. He's getting ready to start, you know, your school because he sees what I've been doing all these years. He's he's grown up with it. And I found it very, very interesting place that very few people know and the ones that know about it, they don't know how to use it. They can really get your visibility up good high quality traffic, build your audience and and sell your stuff.

[00:06:10] All right. Go before you tell him about it. We got to go back to the send in the case of wine so you can be a grandfather. Yeah. You're not too far off there talking about a term called Corona boomers'. Oh, yeah.

[00:06:23] Because everybody stay at home. And so they figured nine months from now there'll be a whole bunch of extra babies running around.

[00:06:29] There absolutely will be. I mean, they've they've decided a way, you know, to bring anybody into the world, which I get. But, you know, Tommy, he called me up the other day and I was asking how he was doing. He said he was getting bored. I said, son, you guys haven't been married even two years.

[00:06:46] Did I not teach you? Well, you shouldn't be bored, son.

[00:06:50] I mean, she's a teacher. She's home to, you know, and there's nobody at the church. They don't take that long to schedule stuff now because he's the events coordinator. So.

[00:07:02] I guess it's not I guess it's not appropriate for you to go over there and help them out or something.

[00:07:07] So I. Probably not. You have to just turn him off and do the best you can. Did as a dad. You know, I guess I could find instructional videos begging them for something I don't know. All right. So tell him about this secret place you found.

[00:07:24] Well, interestingly enough, it's got a strange name. It's called medium.com.

[00:07:29] Oh, wait right away. It'll never work for me. I'm a triple X. Oh, I know. I'm going to pretend that well, here along those lines.

[00:07:39] And next time you know you're in a store shop if you want to has some fun. They say, what size do you need? Ask for extra medium.

[00:07:48] That's because what happens is they take a step to go get it and then turn around and go. Well, I mean, they have extra small and extra large. Large. Why not? Extra media wrote about that.

[00:08:02] Medium tips we have for those of you that have been around as long as Tom and I have. You may remember a site called Easy Articles. And back in the day, you could create a piece of content. Call it an article, a column, whatever. Once a week. Place it over there. And you doing pretty good in terms of free traffic. Do it three or four times a week or maybe even every day. You were golden. And with a lot of the Google changes, that kind of just changed things.

[00:08:30] Well, then they wouldn't. They're still around, right? So don't you think they would have like, say, Jack, their system up a little bit?

[00:08:38] They didn't. Tom. No, that's what I mean. I wish they would have because they were doing so great. And then, you know, all those PR slaps the penguin in the panda and all that stuff came along around 2010 and they had built a system.

[00:08:53] You're saying they got peed on basically.

[00:08:55] That's a I. You know, I was counting on me saying that. Right. Absolutely. Well done. All right.

[00:09:04] They had built their system. And this is a side, too. They had built their system based on Google. And so they were beholden to Google. And with those changes, they were able to keep their organization, but just not dry. The same kind of traffic. Right. You know, and and like you've taught me, I mean, I do keyword stuff. I call it content wrap keywords. And I do that stuff. But I've never been beholden to Google. Like you have never been right. And so when it changes, it doesn't affect us. And the nice thing about medium, because a part of my job out in the world here is a content guy with my students is to keep up with what's going on. And where's the best place to publish your content, whether it's text, audio, video, whatever. And there has been things that have tried since then, but nothing has done as well as medium.

[00:10:01] And I think that Seth Godin thing, that was a rumor that he had a thing where you could get paid for putting content on. But I haven't heard about it for years.

[00:10:12] I think it faded like all the others. And LinkedIn did pretty well for a while with their publishing. But that did cut it anymore. The beauty about medium is that I want everybody to think of it as like it's like your it's like your content canvas and you can put all kinds of great stuff there. Text, audio, video, graphics. You can put your podcasts on there. It's a beautiful thing. And what it does and here's here's here's a piece that you'd like to know. The most recent figures I've read in terms of traffic is in November of nineteen. They had one hundred and seventy eight. Unique visitors. Now, I left the word out. You got to guess what the word was. Billion, million, exactly. One hundred and seventy eight million unique visitors a month, which ain't too shabby. You can go over there and search for any keywords and you'll find all kinds of information. And here's the cool thing. You'll be able to find articles. About that topic. You'll be able to find all the people that write about it. You'll be able to find the publications that are there and also the keywords that are the strongest. So you go in with your head up and there's there's no. There's no word minimum, there's no word count. You're able to do graphics, and I know people that that do a daily medium post and it's a graphic and then their bios underneath and they get make speaking engagements from that. But what we're working with with our students is using this to get incredible visibility because it's getting harder to be found out there. We're using it to drive really high quality free traffic and link back to sites from it. Oh, you can link anywhere. Oh. And the beauty of it, Tom, is back in the easy article days. You had to wait till the end to link, right? Mm hmm. Well, this you can link anywhere as many times as you want. We've got students that are linking to their ebooks straight from there. And Stellan books like Crazy. We've got people putting their podcasts on there so that it is multimedia.

[00:12:48] They can they're linking to the podcast or they they can play it. Oh, no. You could.

[00:12:53] You can use your. You can use Spotify. You can use SoundCloud. And you can use YouTube. And they play right there on medium-. Wow, that's handy. It's great that there is a great reason for that, we'll get to a little while. You know, not to to link out for that. You could also put in graphics to have a dual readership path.

[00:13:20] You can even put it means if you want to get a graphics, you still is doing the meme stuff.

[00:13:28] So some good ones today. But I can't say on the on the.

[00:13:31] Well, you know, I see a few of those back and forth. But yeah, only only to enhance everything else. Now you can go. The cool thing is you can go in there. Let's say you you've got a video over on YouTube. You can pull that video in and show folks the video. It plays right there. And what's really cool is it counts as a view on YouTube. The other thing you can do is then you go get that video transcribed. You go over to rev.com or temi.com where you have on rev, you have a choice between a real person doing it or a, you know, a machine doing it. Comeback.

[00:14:14] How much is a cost? How much is a constant? Because we're all dollar.

[00:14:18] It's a dollar and a quarter a minute at red for a real person to do it.

[00:14:25] How much for automated? Twenty five cents a minute at rev or temi.com. Oh, I got that beat, man. Yeah. You know them play on me. How many plays I uses? Five dollars per recorded hour. And in the back of it, and it's back in 10 minutes.

[00:14:42] Well, I got an affiliate link that will get me one hundred free minutes, so I'll send it to you and then if you sign, do. Yeah, OK. Yeah, it's it's one of those recurring affiliate programs, but I don't get paid in money. I get paid in minutes. So you know I've done this is two hundred and seventy two podcasts and I haven't paid for any transcriptions for two hundred seventy two podcasts of the Mike Leach thing.

[00:15:04] If you send him a ten minute video or a three hour video, it's, it's just a $5 per recorded hour.

[00:15:12] Yeah. And it's back in ten minutes.

[00:15:16] Awesome. So, I mean, does it cost five dollars for ten minutes or is it.

[00:15:20] No, I don't think I think they just add up the minutes of transcription. Larry handles it for me, but but I don't really know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure it just goes by how many minutes they transcribe for you. It's all added up and it comes up.

[00:15:38] In gentlemen, there's the proof being a guest on Tom Antion screw the commute pays off. I got me a great resource right here. And still with that, you've got a video. You've got the transcript. You haven't even had to really write that tweak, tweaking the transcript a little bit. And then you got a piece of content on there. And you can link out to anywhere. You can link anywhere from the piece of content. I like to call them columns now because our articles tell and column sell. And in the link you can link out to opticians, build your list, build your audience, you can link to your podcast, you can link to your Facebook, you know, your live cache. You can link to opt in. You can link to your Web site. You can link anywhere.

[00:16:21] So are you saying this is a good time because it's not overloaded yet? Because you know anything, if there's gets too many people, you just kind of get lost in the shuffle.

[00:16:30] So, exactly. It's not overloaded yet. There's there's enough people there, but it's not too where you're getting drowned out. And when you do that, do it the way you you teach your teach, you're going to stand out anyway. And particularly now and here are our first pandemic is a really great time to be doing it, because the two worst things to do right now that I see people doing and you probably do, too, Tom, is I seen you cough on other people.

[00:16:59] Well, yeah, there's vegetables in the store. Good. Apparently get you arrested. At least that's what a friend told me.

[00:17:07] But, you know, a lot of people are just gonna hold on, wait for this to be over. I call it going dark. Don't go dark. Be a light double down on all the good stuff you're doing. And don't panic. TiVo'd and this is a great place to pivot into and get this content out there because of the position I'm taken with my students is let's do stuff now. It's going to benefit you now. Well, you can keep doing well through this and we'll be incredibly well positioned to do well when this passes. And it will.

[00:17:40] Yeah. Yeah. I just did a podcast called Corona Bellona.

[00:17:47] And it was and it was basically I mean, I wasn't making light of all the bad things happening. But, you know, if you're sitting in your home and the bad things aren't happening to you or even if they are, do something about, you know, there's a something the Herman Munster said, I think life is good. Life is earnest. If you're cold, turn up the furnace. So wit and wisdom of Herman Munster. Yeah. So so.

[00:18:13] Yes, and this is a perfect time. You could crack I mean, you could have it by the time this thing is is over. You could have a massive presence right on this medium.

[00:18:25] It is a medium. And, um. And not spend a nickel. Right.

[00:18:30] Exactly. Now just just to be totally transparent, there is a free version. Okay. Okay. And you can do everything over there for the free version.

[00:18:41] Can the free stuff be transferred into a paid version later. All the stuff you create?

[00:18:45] Well if you'd go for the paid version it'll all just stay there. And the only thing the paid version gets you that the free version does it is at the free version you get something like you get to look at three to six other articles there a month, which is limited, especially if you're doing research or want to learn what other people are.

[00:19:09] Or isn't that from the user's perspective, not the content providers?

[00:19:13] Exactly. From the user's perspective. Okay. And to have unlimited access. Brace yourself, Tom. So it's a whopping five dollars a month.

[00:19:23] Well, I'll tell you why. 50 bucks a year. Exactly. But the thing is, is that that tells me that you're gonna get more qualified people there. Exactly.

[00:19:33] They don't want that, though. Mind spending 50 bucks or spend on anything. And you know, because, you know, there's a thousand freebie seekers for every one person that'll invest in themselves or ten thousand hourly. So you'll get a more qualified person for sure.

[00:19:50] Now, here's here's all everything I've talked about, we've talked about so far as great. And you should have your stuff over there to promote yourself, especially now building a presence and a following, etc., etc.. Now, what sets them apart is that you can get you can get paid to promote. Yourself over there, you can get name to promote your content, your videos, your podcasts, your books, your opt in, your products. And here's the way you do it. That is called the partner program. Now you can be in the partner program without being a $5 a month member. So you don't need to pay the five bucks a month to be in the partner program. And what happens is you get paid based on the time a reader spends on each page of yours. Right. And so it's its length of time. And they'll let you know in advance when you create something. How long the reader time, proximate reader time is sweet spots around six to seven minutes. Now, I've had, you know, three minute read time breakout. And so what you do is just like anything else, you keep taking your shots and keep swinging. And you know, the things you think might break out won't the things you think aren't will you know?

[00:21:14] Is there any kind of editorial scrutiny on this?

[00:21:19] Yeah, they do. They do. They do. Look at everything. If you want to be curated, if you've if you've put it in to be picked up and put in one of their their publications or somebody else's or featured in their stuff, they'll look at it. Now, I've never had anything kicked back.

[00:21:38] I've had some things picked up, some not put you know, some people are going to go in there, just put sales letters up.

[00:21:44] Of course. Of course. Now, which which is not going to get see, what's going to happen is you're going to get self-policed.

[00:21:52] People are just going to not going to read this stuff.

[00:21:54] Exactly. In a five minute article will be read for like ten seconds or more. Count for it. Now, one of the things my my partner Tim Model and I are working on is how to do this, you know, added to this an advertorial. Right, where you're you're teaching stuff, but you're also promote. Right. So you can do it that way and get a lot of people reading to not get, you know, ignored or whatever.

[00:22:18] They just tell me you could put like your own channel uppers or something. I don't know if it's called a channel, but, you know, I could do a section on public speaking or on some exact ship or all, um, publications, publication and medium has their own publications.

[00:22:34] And you want to try to get in those because they they're listed across the top of the home page along with other popular content. Now you can also write for other publications and there's ones that are harder to get into, ones that are easy to get it. Do we help you with to build your your base and your foundation and your network? And like you're asking, you can start your own publication. Like you could have one for public speaking? I could have one for content creation. And what happens is you're the editor. People apply to it and you decide whether that. No article should be in there or not.

[00:23:15] Oh, OK, so you're the publisher of that section. But who gets the credit for writing or do you split it or what?

[00:23:21] How has a day they get the credit? Okay, but you get more traffic to your publication, which gets people reading more of your stuff is in your own publication.

[00:23:32] All right. So you guys have a webinar coming up on this or what we do? We do. All right.

[00:23:37] So we'll have that in the show notes and. And we've got to take a brief sponsor break. But when we come back, Jeff has got a really great freebie for you.

[00:23:46] And then we'll figure out how to get a hold of him and stuff and the whole webinar. When's it coming up and all that stuff. So. So, folks, I want you to go do something that'll take two minutes.

[00:24:01] You know, a lot of things. It takes you longer to make him mad than two minutes. So this is only going to take two minutes to make your math. So, you know, I'd like to make things easy on people, you know, to get mad. So I want you to go to IMTCVA.org/quiz. And it'll only take you two minutes to take the quiz called the seven college rip offs. I am really upset with the way traditional colleges and universities are screwing over families and and students and and fake and grade point averages and doing pool and stuff with books so you can't resell them. And there's all kinds there's seven ways over there that they're taking families like crazy. So I want you to know about this. Even if it doesn't apply to you, I guarantee you there's somebody in your life that's thinking about got kids or nephews or nieces or grandchildren. The thing about going to college and the colleges have done a good job at brainwashing you all for the last hundred years of how important it is. Well, that's just no longer true. Google, Apple, IBM, Bank of America, all these places have gotten rid of their college degree requirement to apply because they're sick of these people. All they get them and all they know how to do is protest. So they want people with real skills. And that's what we teach you at the Internet Marketing Training Center. Real skills that are in high demand and you can be making money. And plus, it's distance learning. So you don't have to be there. You can we have one girl's making the eleven hundred dollars a month in her first month. She made three thousand a month in her second month.

[00:25:49] Thirty four hundred a month in her third month. Fourth month. Six thousand quit her job where her dad had spent 80 grand on her crappy college education and she was working some crap job. So this is high demand stuff. I've been living this lifestyle since nineteen ninety four. Jeff has been 13 years doing this. So this is real, real, real. And it's better than coming out with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. So check it out. IMTCVA.org/quiz. And then if you'd like to know about your future, your kids or your grandchildren's nephews nieces future, I'd be glad to talk to you with no obligation.

[00:26:31] All right. Let's get back to the main event. Jeff Herring's here. He's a superduper content guy and he was telling us about the medium and the things we can do with that. But you got a big freebie for him, right?

[00:26:43] Sure do. It's at contentdoes.com/medium. And what that will show you is how to craft your medium profile bio because you get 160 characters. But the way they position it and you could have a live link in there, Tom, you can position it so that people are opting in and join in your community before they even consume your content.

[00:27:19] So that's beautiful. You can do that on Kindle. And that's a great trick. And that is just like everything, folks. There's details, you know. Yeah. This is a great opportunity.

[00:27:29] But you can figure it out for the next six months on your own or you can you know, they're going to have a training session on it with a webinar to cut your learning curve like crazy and get you profitable and traffic driving in the very quickly instead of, you know, fight it out and figure it out on your own. So so how they get a hold of you.

[00:27:51] You can reach me at JH@JeffHerring.com. That's the best way. And go ahead, grab that video over at contentdoes.com/medium. And let's use this time well, folks, and come out of it shining and positioned to do really well out there.

[00:28:11] Absolutely. And so is that video you're going to tell him when the webinar is coming up.

[00:28:16] Well, what we have that in the show notes.

[00:28:18] Yeah, we'll put in the show notes for you. You know, we'll have we'll be holding it pretty soon. And hey, as soon as you. I've been telling people, hey, as soon as you get that twelve hundred bucks from the government, I'll hold it for you. So you don't blow it.

[00:28:34] That's big of you, man.

[00:28:35] I know. I'm a giver. I'm a guy. Ah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks for catching us up, man. And this great new thing, you're always coming up with great innovative things that that people can can do to get their name out there, drive traffic, make money. That's what we like to do with a lifestyle business.

[00:28:52] Thank you, sir. I've enjoyed being had once again.

[00:28:55] All right. All right, everybody. We'll catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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