202 – Get in front of 53 Million people for FREE: Tom talks Flash Briefings

Episode 202 – Flash Briefings
[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 202 of Screw the Commute podcast. We're going to talk about Amazon flash briefings today. And this is going to be kind of a flash episode because I'm don't have a lot to say about it, but it's really, really powerful. Oh, my goodness. How how do you like to get in front of fifty three million people just in the U.S. alone every day for free? That's what I want to talk about in this episode. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 201. That's Jen Groover. She's a super serial entrepreneur and she's got the mental game of business down pat. That was episode two hundred and one. And make sure you get a copy of our podcast app on your tablet and your mobile phone. You can go to screwthecommute.com/app and we've got complete instructions on how to use it so you can take us with you on the road. Use all the fancy features. And while you're at it. Make sure you grab a copy of our e-book, How to Automate Your Business. And just one of the tips in this book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes and allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and 40000 customers without pulling my hair out. Now we sell this book for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free as my thanks for listening. And when you're on the download page, make sure you grab a copy of the white paper we have on podcasting. People are charging it for five and six thousand bucks for this same information. You find all this at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and everything that we talk about will be in the show notes and you find that by going to screwthecommute.com. In this case, slash 2 0 2, episode 202. All right. Our sponsor for this episode is the Internet Marketing Training Center, Virginia. It's a distance learning school which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business or both. So check that out at IMTCVA.org. And we also have big scholarships for law enforcement, military and first responders and then a special Department of Defense scholarship for military spouses. So check that all out. If you go to the site, IMTCVA.org/military, you'll see about the military scholarships we have.

[00:03:03] All right. Let's get to the main event, flash briefings from Amazon. I'm breaking the norm a little bit here because I normally talk to you about things that have either made me a lot of money or saved me a lot of money. Now, this is something I'm just doing right now. And, you know, I was a little late getting into the game of podcasting in case actually I pooh poohed it for a while because nobody was making any money. So I always wait. I don't use cutting edge technology. I wait until I make sure it's real. And then I waited a little too long on the podcasting. But we're catching up here with two hundred episodes under our belt. But I'm not going to do that with flash briefings. And I already have the equipment. These are audio things. So Amazon Alexa Flash briefings are short pieces of content that could be news, weather. And guess what? It could be your content is going to be mine here very shortly, I'll tell you that. And guess what again? The latest figures I was able to get was that there are 53 million of these echo devices, these listening devices in people's homes in the USA alone. And yeah, I know some houses have several of them, but that's a lot of devices. And what we're talking about here is a concept of voice first. See voice first means that systems that are mostly only voice commands or at least that's their main input is voice. And that's why we did episode one hundred and thirty on keyword research based on voice search, because it's different than episode one, which is basic keyword research. You need all of this keyword research, but voice first means that it's something that it's voice activated and people are doing more and more of that with their cars, with their dashboard in their car and their cell phones and that, you know, and this Alexa device and Google's got a device and all this stuff. So. So, yeah. This is something you got to pay attention to.

[00:05:09] Today we're just going to talk about getting your flash briefings on the Amazon Echo and Dot. And I know some people are afraid of these devices listen to you all the time. I just unplugged mine. It's good to have one to test out what you're doing, even if you don't want it to handle your lights and and play music for you and all kinds of stuff. So I just unplugged mine when I'm not testing. So that way it can't possibly be listening. You know. Maybe it could. All right. When you set up a flash briefing on Amazon, you can deliver a pre-recorded audio to your customers and prospects on a daily or weekly basis. I mean, you can actually do it hourly, but I'm not that crazy to try that. Now, when you set this up, it's going to be available to people on Amazon in the Alexa Skills Store. Now, if you want to see, you may not even know this exist, but if you want to see this, you just go to Amazon in the search box on the left. There's a little dropdown box. It starts out with all. And then it has all their different categories or about the third one down, says Alexa Skills. So if you click on that and leave the search box empty, it's going to bring up all the featured ones in this, the highly suggested ones and the real famous ones. And also it has a section that will bring up ones based on your purchase history. And again, I know people, frankly, to have, you know, big brother watching, but that's just the way it is. So you could take advantage of this. They're already watching you. So it's too late with that. But you can see what else is out there. And then go ahead and put your topic in there and you'll see who your competitors are. And a lot of these. And the reason I'm bringing this out before I fully made money with it is that it's time you can get in on the ground floor and get a lot of subscribers see people can subscribe to these things and we'll talk about that the minute before it gets overly competitive. So this is a perfect time to jump on. And since I already have podcasting audio equipment setup, I'm in perfect shape to go ahead and use it for these. In addition to my podcasting in my tele classes and everything else. So. So it's a perfect time to get in on this. Now, if you don't want to have or go buy one of these echo devices, you can just put the Alexa app on your smartphone. I mean, that's a way that, you know, if you're afraid or you don't want to spend 50 bucks to buy an echo dot, then you can test your flash briefings on your own cell phone and you can subscribe to other people's flash briefings.

[00:08:06] All right. So let's talk about these flash briefings a little bit. They're short. I believe the maximum is 10 minutes, but you really don't need to make them that long. In fact, you got to kind of think of how people are using these. A lot of people were using these in the morning just to get a quick overview of the stuff they like. And they might be getting ready to go to work, getting the kids ready for school. And so. So you want to keep them short. And it's a good idea to train people on how to use these things, so once they enable one and it's on their phone or it's on their echo, you got to teach them what to say so they can say, Alexa, play my flash briefing or briefings. I forgot to turn my echo dot off and Alexa heard me in there and started playing my flash briefing. Alexa, stop. Alexa, stop. Alexa, stop.

[00:09:16] I'm glad you heard all that, so I have to be careful. I could stop here and go turn her off, but I'm pretty good at turn it off. I guess with you notice I had it say three times the turn her off. So I'm not going to say that. I'll just say A. You'll know what I mean. I could get up and go to pull the plug on her. But another thing is like a. And then play my news is another thing you can say as the command. Or you can say a play. All my flash briefings or play all my news. Or you can also say previous. So if you want to listen to one over again, you could say previous. So you could say next. Or you could say quit, stop, you know. So those are commands, easy commands to learn. So I'm going to do one of my flash briefings for you. I'm going to start out with my public speaking stuff because I've got hundreds and hundreds of tips on this. And then we'll get into a little bit more details of how you put them up there. The first thing that when you make a flash briefing, you're doing what's called a preamble. And that is something that miss A over there is going to read your text and introduce your flash briefing. So this is what I wrote for her. And it always starts, by the way, with the word from or the word in. Now mind starts with the word from. So when you put it in, when you make your flash briefing it, it says start it with the word from or in. And then a little short preamble. So here's my. From Wake Him Up Business presentations with Tom Antion. So that's what she would say or or I'm not sure if I'm going to say from Tom Antion. Wake him up Business presentations. I don't know which one I'm going to do yet. So she says that. So I'm going to go ahead. So I'm going to go ahead and do the actual tip that I did for this one flash briefing. It's it's less than 90 seconds. Here we go. And I won't say my name again at the beginning because they already know it's me. And they you can advertise in these, but you don't want to push it too hard. People don't want their news to be filled, their quick tips to be filled with ads. So all they say my name again and I'll probably promote the podcast at the end here.

[00:11:52] So here we go. So she said the preamble from Wake Him Up business presentations with Tom Antion. The size of your audience has a direct effect on the types of humor which are most appropriate, the expected audience response and the timing of the presentation. Members of very small business groups tend to be too self-conscious to laugh much use short one liners, be brief and informal with your humor, don't use any long stories or jokes in small groups. Laughter will come more quickly. It's now ok to stretch the jokes in short stories. Your presentation will take less time to deliver then to a large group. Now, a presentation to very large crowds and enormous rooms or venues such as large ballrooms and even stadiums will take longer to deliver because laughter comes in waves. The portion of the audience right in front of you will laugh first, then most of the rest of the crowd will laugh. And the third wave will come when those slower to get the joke finally do get it. And when those who laugh because everyone else's laughing kicks in, you must allow time for this phenomenon to occur in large crowds. You got to play to the back of the room. These are the people that are hardest to reach. So this is Tom Antion saying to check back tomorrow for your wake him up. Tip of the day and subscribe to screw the commute podcast to get you out of the car and into the money. I'll catch ya tomorrow.

[00:13:29] All right, there you go, folks. That was a short briefing that pretty much came from a book I already wrote. So I just copied the text, made sure it's readable and more conversational fashion. And I recorded it. So there's lots of details about flash briefings and what you can say. And I put a link in the show notes directly to Amazon that talks to you about this and the commands you can say to the Amazon thing to play the flash briefing and the pause it and all that stuff. Now, I did find out if you're playing music. This is a sidebar. If you're playing music in your echo dot or your other your echo thing, you can say a, you know who I'm talking about. So she's listening to me. A backup Fifteen seconds. So if I'm playing karaoke or something, I can go practice a segment again without starting from the beginning each time. That's just the sidebar. So you can create flash briefings for tips. Industry news quotes. You know any of your content. That's what I'm going to concentrate on. Feel good stuff. Success jokes I even subscribe to a joke thing. One of the jokes this morning was what happened to the kid that was kept shocking his little sister with static electricity? He got grounded. That's a little yuk yuk for this morning. But I'm going to do briefings on Internet marketing, public speaking, entrepreneurship, protection, dog self-defense. I've got enormous amount of content on all this stuff and it's going to have a chance to be in front of, like I said, fifty three million in the U.S. alone and there's hundreds of millions. And when you look at worldwide in English speaking countries.

[00:15:22] All right. So before I tell you about the services that help you do this. I'm down on my knees begging you to check out a particular webinar or pass it on to someone who could use it. I mean, has to do with higher education. I mean, if you're considering getting retrained because you hate what you're doing or you want a better life for yourself and your family or or if you have kids, nephews, nieces or even neighbors who are wondering if they should burn up hundreds of thousands of bucks and then end up broke with mountains of debt and no marketable skills, you just might want to watch this webinar. Nothing to lose. I mean, 90 minutes a time could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars and keep your kids out of debt. So check it out at screwthecommute.com and then click on webinars. And there's the one on higher education. You can watch it or you can download or listen to the MP 3 file. And I'll tell you what, it's not just me hawking my school. All right. It's high level education people saying how you're getting ripped off and be prepared to be mad about this because they're inflating grade point averages to make it look like they're giving your kid a better education. And the testing showing that the kids are dumber. I don't know if I'd want to mortgage my house to pay for this kind of stuff. And then four years from now, they're competing for jobs at Starbucks. So. So check that out and then give us a call if I can help you with a skill that can be had that's legitimate. And it's a skill that every business on earth needs. And you can get your certificate as little as six months. But some people in my school are making money in the first couple months, you know, work doing social media for other companies and things like that. So check this all out, screwthecommute.com/webinars or you can click on webinars and then give me a call if I can help you out.

[00:17:19] All right. So there are some companies that will help you create these skills, you can just do it straight away. Right on Amazon. But I don't think they have a scheduler on Amazon, which means every day you would have to upload stuff. So that's nobody wants to do that. So here's some of the places and of course, they'll be in the show notes: soundupnow.com skilexa.com effct.com voiceflow.com. All right, so all of these services are relatively inexpensive. I'm seeing if I can do it through my podcast host Libsyn But it's a weekend when I'm recording this, so I can't talk to them till Monday. But what you're trying to get is an RSS feed. An RSS feed is just something where it's connected to like Amazon and then every time you put new content in it. Libsyn or Skilexa or one of these other places it. Updates the feed. So Alexa plays the new stuff for the people. That's kind of just connects it and it's dynamic. So keep playing the new stuff. So you don't have to know the details of any of that, but you can check out those companies and see which ones suites you especially if you don't have a podcast host already like I did.

[00:18:49] Now you are going to have to have an Amazon developer account. So you just go to developer.Amazon.com and sign up for one. That's nothing. No big deal. It doesn't mean you're a techno geek or anything, you just have to have the account. And then through one of these services, you submit your skill. It's called a skill. Why? They call it a skill, I don't know. But this particular skill is a flash briefing. So that's the terminology. You're going to submit it for review. But you really want to record at least one when you go for the review because it will just delay your reviews so they might approve the name of your thing. But they have nothing to check. So you you may as well wait and record at least one flash briefing when you go for the review and you're going to need a couple graphics. 512 by 512 is the biggest one you need. And and what I say is just go to Amazon, click the dropdown box, go to Alexa skills and leave it the search box blank. But search and it'll bring up tons of them. And you can just look at what everybody else is doing for graphics. It's real tiny. And then you need even a smaller one. Also, let's just like about a hundred eight by a hundred and eight, something like that. They tell you when you go through it and then you have to pick whether it's hourly, daily or weekly. Well, hourly. You'd have to be serious to try to do an hourly one and weekly if you did a weekly. I'm pretty sure that means that one episode is going to play for the whole week. And that gets boring to people and they're going to unsubscribe from you. So daily is what you should pick, but you're not held to it.

[00:20:41] So if you miss a day, the Amazon police don't come after you. But daily is best and you can if you use one of these services that schedule them, you can sit down and do 30 of them in a day. And that takes care of the whole month. And then my plan is, is once I get a couple hundred of them done for public speaking, anyway, I'm done. I'm just going to read. So if you go to hundred of these and then I play the first one over and start them over again, guess what? Nobody's gonna even notice. All right. And so. So I think once I get a couple hundred in the can, I'll be done with these for the public speaking one. And I'll just go to the next topic and the next topic.

[00:21:25] OK. Now there is a. You're going to describe you have to have a description of your skill, obviously, to tell people what it's about. Even if the name tells them what it's about, you give them more description. But I was looking at other ones and I found a really good trick. You can tell people in the description to go to the settings in their Alexa app on their phone and go to flash briefings and then they can move yours to the top. If you tell them to do it. OK. So they might have 10 or 15 flash briefings. Well, you know, maybe they never get to the end. And so I want them to listen to mine first. So it gets listened to so you can tell them to go in, find your flash briefing, click edit and then you click on it. You just drag it up to the first position. And then when they click done, now yours is going to play first. So I'm going to remind people in all my flash briefings to do that now you need still need to promote it even though people can find it. You do need a lot of keywords. I think they'll give you 30 keywords you can be found on, but you want to promote it just like you out. Anything else you can put it in your social media. You can blog about it. You can talk about it on your podcast, which it can be. Sure I will. You can social media post. You can email it to people. You can put a link to it in your signature file of your emails. All that stuff and you can share it. So right from Amazon, you can click Facebook or Twitter, whatever, and share it right from Amazon. So, yeah, you still have to promote it. And then again, I tell people about how to play them.

[00:23:13] You know what to say. And I actually put a link in the show notes for you so you can see that commands that they can do to check your or to listen to your flash briefing. You want to tell people about them and then you can check your analytics in your developer's account to see how many people are downloading them and how many listeners you had and all that stuff. So. So that's pretty much it. Folks, this is a great opportunity. It's fairly easy to to do. You can do it totally for free if you use anchor.FM to host it. But any free hosting on stuff I'm a little skeptical of because, you know, they you know, how how can they spend a lot of money on good servers and make sure your stuff gets delivered properly? It's you know, I think I'm going to pay $5 a month on Libsyn. Some of these other ones that this is all they do is $20 a month. And you can actually put a podcast up there, too, in a different section of Amazon Echo. So absolutely, this is a great opportunity. But you do need to have good sound quality, because if you have just schlocky sound quality, they won't accept you because they want a nice consistent sound coming out of those Amazon echo devices. So make sure you don't have a really terrible rotten microphone with static all over it and so forth.

[00:24:39] All right. So that's flash briefings, folks. Listen for mine. I'll give you some updates as we go along. And there you go. So next episode is Two Hundred and three with Margy Feldhuhn and she provides podcast guests for people. And I love her extra because she rescues animals. So check her out on the next episode and watch for my flash briefing. See you later.

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