316 – Make ’em wanna come back: Tom talks Website Return Visits

Episode 316 – Website Return Visits
[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 316 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about website return visits or how to get people to come back over and over and over again. And I'm going to give you a bunch of ideas. I don't do all of them. You couldn't possibly do all of these things. But different ideas are going to suit different people. But the more they come back, the better chance you will have to turning them into customers or increasing your ad revenue. If you have an advertising monetization model. In other words, you make money by showing paid ads or affiliate ads. Anyway, we want people to come back. I hope you didn't miss Episode 315 that was Headline Formulas. And if you've been around marketing at all, you know the importance of a headline when you're trying to sell something. So I gave you a bunch of formulas so you don't have to sit there with writer's block, trying to come up with good headlines for your product. So make sure you caught episode 315. Now grab a copy of our automation ebook, you can go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree and download a copy of this book that we sell for 27 bucks. But it's yours free for listening to Screw the Commute podcast. And it saved me millions of keystrokes and helped me steal customers off other people because the other people were too slow to get back to people. So so are the prospective customers, so not me. I get back at lightning fast and in part because of all these automation techniques I use. So check it out. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it. Grab a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and that app you can download to your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road and has all kinds of cool features. And we have video instruction on how to use it and screen captures and everything so you can use all the fancy features. I know everybody still worried about this pandemic and of course, it's affected the entire world. However, if you have been selling online and you continue to sell online, bravo to you. You probably listened to me years ago. But for those of you that didn't, I have training courses. I have a formal school that is the only one of its kind in the country. I have a mentor program, two ways to help you so you never get in this mess again. And maybe you like working at home. Maybe you don't want to have to commute. That's why screw the commute. Right. But you got to learn the techniques on how to do all these things and there's a million. All right. So none of them are hard, but we put it all in one place and teach it to you. We do it one on one in my mentor program and we lay it out in our school. So this is a very powerful thing to keep you out of this mess in the future. That's what I want for you. So check out the school at IMTCVA.org. Of course, we'll have that in the show notes. This is Episode 316. And any time you want to go to the show notes for a particular episode, you put screwthecommute.com and then the show number. This is three one six. So screwthecommute.com/316.

[00:03:46] All right, let's get to the main event. Website return visits. Now, I want to tell you about a spin off to just one of the ideas that has created a big income and great lifestyle for a guy who sells information products to accountants. The report I read said this guy capitalized on the idea of what's new in the industry. That's something you want to write down that you may want to use on your site. So that's just one of the ideas we're going to talk about today.

[00:04:15] But in this case, you become a place where people can keep up on what's going on. Now, the guy I'm telling you about, I don't remember his name. I mean, if you're an accountant, you probably know him. If you're an accountant in California, that is, he used this idea in California, but he made a half a million dollars a year on this one idea.

[00:04:36] So what he does is he spends about three months every year researching the changes in California tax law, which is no doubt voluminous.

[00:04:47] Now, he compiles all the changes into a big binder and sells it for a large amount of money to California CPAs who have to have the information to do their job properly.

[00:05:00] He then puts on high fee seminars for CPAs who want live explanations of the new laws. Now, in their report, I read he makes about a half a million dollars in roughly six months time and takes the rest of the year off. So they only work six months a year.

[00:05:18] So if you think past the surface of the ideas I give you in this episode and relate them to what you do or what you would like to do, hey, maybe you can get a big hit winner like like that.

[00:05:32] All right, now, before I get into a bunch of different ways you can use to get people to return to your website, I want to ask you something. Do you think it's a good idea to drive enormous amounts of traffic to a Web site where when people get there, they say to themselves, I yeah, this is too hard to navigate and read? And they're they're making me look at a hundred ads to read one article. I'm out of here. Do you think that's a good idea, to just send tons of people who immediately leave?

[00:06:08] Well, if you said yes to that question, I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to leave your house unsupervised.

[00:06:17] Now, before you concentrate on what I'm covering in this episode, you better make darn sure your website will please most of the people that come there the first time. I mean, be honest with yourself. Would you return to a site that was terrible?

[00:06:33] No, you wouldn't. And no one will return to your site either, unless you make sure of the following. Here we go. The site loads quickly. Google came out years ago with this. You got to the site has to load really fast. I've covered all these and other episodes. It must be easy to read and scan. This is called Web site readability, which I just covered in episode 312. Now, is your site easy to use, which is called website useability, not readability this time useability. I covered that in episode 313. And those are entirely different topics, readability and usability. I mean, they're related, but they're not the same. So make sure you listen to those episodes and implement the techniques and ideas on your site. Next, don't pummel people with many and highly intrusive ads. I won't go back to a lot of news sites that are so desperate for money, they plaster ads over top of what I'm trying to read now once is OK, but over and over again means, guess what? I ain't coming back. Now, it should go without saying, but I'm forced, unfortunately, to say it anyway, if you have a content type site, make sure the content is of high quality and current. That'll make people want to come back. Now, another thing I've been hammering people about for years is it must be mobile friendly, that's an absolute or they call that responsive. Now, if you have a substantial site, make sure it has a great search function and have lots of people test to make sure they can find what they want easily, have good options that are intrusive enough to work.

[00:08:34] I mean, you can have an opt in that's on a pop up box and, you know, things like that, but not so intrusive that it turns off your visitors. We want that opt in because we can use it to get people to come back to our site. Have lots of contact options if your site is really big with tons of content and sections, you might want to have a button saying new users start here or something like that, but have lots of ways where they can get in touch with you. So I'm telling you, if you get all this stuff right, it will be infinitely easier to get people to return to your site because they had a wonderful experience on their first visit.

[00:09:15] All right, let's get into some of the specifics of getting return visitors, and these are no particular order discussion boards, you probably seen them. Many organizations have discussion boards, in other words, forums where people can post questions and other people visiting the site who are interested in the topic can answer the questions or jump into the discussion. Though there are moderated discussion boards and unmoderated ones, unmoderated ones are a little more risky.

[00:09:49] They're risky in the fact that someone can get on there and start cursing or writing nasty things or saying all kinds of crazy things.

[00:09:58] Unless you go there and delete it, it would be broadcast to all your people that stop by, so that's what makes it a little bit dangerous.

[00:10:08] A moderated discussion board is a lot more work and it's controlled by you, the moderator. The questions come in to you and then you check them out and filter out any crazy stuff before you let the members see it.

[00:10:24] Now, something in between is most common in that members can report bad comments to you, and then instead of you having to review every comment, you only have to review ones that are reported to you on most normal topics.

[00:10:38] You most likely won't have much trouble with this unless some troll gets in and then you just ban them. And since it's your discussion board with potentially tens of thousands of comments per month and many thousands of visitors coming back over and over, you control the advertising and can make a substantial amount of money this way. So that's the discussion boards. All right. How about an ask the expert. Now, you could change the discussion board a little bit to be an ask the expert section of your site, and you would invite questions and then answer them as the expert. Now, you're the only one giving out answers in this case.

[00:11:21] And this would more be more likely that you're going to be the big shot.

[00:11:26] And, you know, if you have that goal in mind, then this would be what you would do.

[00:11:32] Now, you wouldn't get nearly as much traffic because like in a discussion board model, people get an ego trip out of having their opinions heard.

[00:11:40] So that's why they come back over and over. But in this case, you're answering all the questions.

[00:11:48] And I'm got to have a link to discussion board software for you, if it's an ask the expert, you can just put a form on your website that emails you there question and then you can answer them in blog postings or you can have them comment and you answer right in the comments next to their question.

[00:12:08] You can compile, oh, this is another way to make money. You could compile the best questions and answers into a product. All right. So anyway, I'll have a link in the show notes that has a whole bunch of different forum or discussion board software. All right, now you can do surveys and polls now. I didn't have much of a choice when I started my electronic magazine.

[00:12:31] You can do surveys and polls and surveys can show up in some very big newspapers and on the radio.

[00:12:38] And the survey doesn't even have to be totally like scientific. You hear them all the time on radio and TV and see them in print.

[00:12:48] Here's an example. Like 1100 parents were surveyed and 62 percent of them make a big deal about their kids brushing their teeth. OK, that could be in some parenting magazine. And there's not scientific at all. You just surveyed 1100 parents. OK, so so that could get you a lot of publicity.

[00:13:09] And you can use surveys as a means to getting people to come to your site and then you can split the survey results back to them because people like knowing the final results of polls and surveys and stuff.

[00:13:23] And you can also do live polling on your site and, yeah, you can do those things on social media, but this episode is about website visits to your site. And if I was going to do it part of it on Facebook, I would say something like.

[00:13:43] Take the poll, give him the topic first and then say take the poll, but when they clicked, it would take them to my Web site to actually take the poll.

[00:13:53] I might even ask for an opt in to see the poll results. But, you know, you got to be careful with that. That might make people mad, but people like to come back and see the current results appearing on your site as more and more people respond to the poll. So that keeps them coming back. And, of course, your ads can be around the poll results.

[00:14:13] And I've got a link in the show, notes to a bunch of survey and polling resources for you, or you can just type in survey software or polling software into any major search engine and you'll have lots of choices. One of the things we use is Wufoo. Like I do a thing where you can have a 30 minute strategy session with me if you qualify and you have to fill out this extensive survey to prove that you're serious and you have the ability to possibly work with me. So anyway, if you want to know about that, just email me and I'll send you a link to it.

[00:14:47] Ok, here's a crazy idea that actually works. You can have daily updates of horoscopes and even soap operas on your website.

[00:14:57] Now I have a link in the show notes that a company that will feed these to your site automatically and people come back and look at him every day.

[00:15:06] And there are many ways to have recurring information to get people to return. For example, if you had a male dominant clientele, and I'm not being sexist here, this is just the way the world works.

[00:15:16] Folks, you could do football scores or, you know, sports scores and there's no problem with that. And it's and it's not sexist at all. It's just good marketing. I mean, you're not going to market women's shoes to guys on the sports page. In fact, if you look at the sports page, it's all tire and Viagra ads. OK.

[00:15:36] But anyway, and the same with women stuff, you could have things of interest to women, you know, children, you know, if it was parenting site, you could have things of interest to parents, you know, have it just recurring. So it comes back every day. Contests and sweepstakes. A contest, of course, requires that people compete in some fashion. And a sweepstakes is similar to like drawing the winner out of a hat. And they're contests and sweepstakes are great. But you have to be careful. You can easily violate contest laws. There are sites on the Internet. If you want to know all the ins and outs, I'll have something in the show notes for you. Or you could just type in contest laws and a bunch of sites will come up that will tell you what cautions to take. But make sure you get proper legal advice if you do this, you need to be extra careful with sweepstakes and and similar programs, but as long as there's no money involved, you might you're probably going to be OK.

[00:16:34] For instance, I did a Valentine's Day "Tom is a single" contest in my electronic magazine and people are still talking about people had to count how many times Tom is single was in the magazine. Now, this was the most read issue I ever had. They looked at it word for word, but I actually got in trouble with one female over this, though nobody could figure out why. So she said, unsubscribe me. I can't do business with someone as insensitive as you.

[00:17:07] I still don't know why she was so angry and nobody could figure it out. I actually ask everybody what, you know, was there something wrong with this? And and this is just a sidebar here. But you you know, you can't take one crazy and change your whole business model over it.

[00:17:24] You know, you're going to get the more numbers, the bigger numbers you get, you're going to run into more nutcases. And you can't change your whole business model because of one, you know, stupid complaint. So anyway, in the context, you had to count the number of times the phrase Tom is single was in the Great Speaking ezine. The winners won a free copy of my Wake 'Em Up business presentations book, which I was promoting, and the losers won a date with me. It was hysterical that the contest was designed to push people to the website and then they won a book and one of my other products, I gave away five books, but no one accepted the date option. I wonder why. Yeah, I think I limit it to the first five people or something like that, so it cost me ten bucks plus shipping to do a major promotion that people are still discussing.

[00:18:18] So these are all ways you can do this electronically with very low cost. But I want to just put one more warning again. Don't accidentally run a lottery when you have a prize involved as well as consideration like money and winning is just a matter of chance. You are running a lottery, which is pretty much illegal and in every state and I don't know where else, you know, around the world.

[00:18:47] Now, if there's judging involved, legitimate judging and they have to pay an entry fee, that's perfectly legitimate, but not if it's by chance and they had to pay money to get in. Now it's a lottery.

[00:18:58] Now, here's just another sidebar. Here is a contest to give the grand prize to the winner, but email everyone else who participated. They were second place winners and can get a substantial discount on the purchase of the same prize that made a ton of money on this. In other words, the losers give you money. OK.

[00:19:19] But anyway, I got a contest law article in the show, notes for you. And also check Episode 46, which was all about viral marketing contest.

[00:19:31] Surveys, what else was on their quizzes, I think quizzes and the content laughers that was episode 46 and be careful where you post your contest. If a large contest site gets hold of your offer, you may get thousands of entrants that try every single contest they find.

[00:19:52] And yeah, this is a lot of traffic, but it's not the kind of traffic you want. They're not targeted, say. I go into that in depth in the viral marketing thing.

[00:20:02] All right, how about frequent visitor and buyer plans? I mean, you could start a program just like the airlines and lots of other companies. I mean, even old Radio Shack had a frequent battery buyer's plan to encourage you to buy all your batteries at Radio Shack.

[00:20:17] And they gave you some free batteries after you bought so many. And, of course, they're out of business, but you can blame that on their battery program. So in the show notes, I have links to a bunch of software that will handle frequent buyer and and frequent visitor plans. All right. Your signature files of your e-mail. I got a bunch of different ones that I can swap out easily, depending on who I'm. See, if I know they're interested in public speaking. I'll use a different one than if I know they're emailing me about Internet marketing. This gets website visits. If I'm responding to a speaker, I don't know. I'll send one off with get him sign up for my free magazine, email magazine and an ad for my speaker video. And of course, it has my name and the other information. Now, if I'm responding to a client, it'll be different. Therefore, you know, if I have a bunch of different ones so that I can just click on one I prefer and it pops right in at the bottom. So it's a constant ad every time you send an email.

[00:21:22] Now, don't make your signature so massive that you have to sentence, you know, message in, like, you know, four feet of your signature file.

[00:21:31] That's just stupid looking. And I've had people say until I saw your signature, I didn't know you had a certain product, you know, and then they buy it. And those that don't know you have an easy way to click to your site, which is what we want them to do. All right, bookmarks, you should encourage visitors to your site to bookmark your page.

[00:21:53] Techs could be placed on all your important pages, reminding the visitor to do so, please bookmark this page now.

[00:21:59] Now in most browsers control-D works or command-D probably on a Mac. But on mobile, you have to hope they know how to do it on their device because it's a little crazy. All right. Now there's a really important one, Autoresponder. Another thing to use to get return visits is called a sequential autoresponder. There are lots of ways you can use this really powerful tool. In fact, if you lined up a bunch of us old guys who have been on the Internet since the beginning and ask us what are some of the most powerful tools ever used in Internet marketing, virtually everyone would have the sequential autoresponder at the top of the list. The autoresponder is always triggered by the recipient. That's kind of engagement and they're doing something as opposed to a broadcast email that you send out any time you want. Someone has to do something to trigger your autoresponder, like purchase something or opt in to your mailing list. Now, when they do trigger your autoresponder, you have a great chance of getting them back to your Web site over and over to buy more stuff and create tons of they call them eyeballs when people get to your site.

[00:23:14] So you can charge more for ads if that's your monetization method. So what you do is you create a sequence of emails that goes out over time that gives people good information and also has links for them to come back to your site to buy things or read your blog posts or watch your videos or whatever. You can also do E courses either free or paid. Now, the first free E course I did brought in seven thousand dollars the first week. And you said, well, how can a free thing bring in 7000 bucks? Well, 90 percent of the email that they got was what they were looking for the topic. But then a little bit at the bottom, it said, hey, if you're really interested in this topic, I have this multimedia CD for you. Check it out. And it took him to a sales letter. It was one hundred ninety nine bucks by the end of the first week, 7000 dollars in sales from that CD.

[00:24:10] So anyway, they come back to your website every time they get one of those emails.

[00:24:16] You program him in ahead of time, I've had some of them running for, I don't know, 12, 13 years. Okay, so so, yes, it's that's why they're so powerful. You do it once and it just keeps working for you behind the scenes while you're doing something else. Now, if you have the shopping cart system kick start kaat, which I push like crazy because I know how great it is. It's cheap compared to all the other ones and it's very powerful. You've got unlimited sequential autoresponder. Now I covered shopping carts in Episode 10, if you want to know all the things your shopping cart system should do for you.

[00:24:53] All right. Next is electronic magazines.

[00:24:57] This is one thing that's made virtually all the money for me over many years is an electronic magazine. And it's basically an email that goes out to people and please sign up for it and go to Antion.com or screwthecommute.com and get on my mailing list somehow. But you can make a lot of money off of targeted list of subscribers. And it's a simple email. It's called an Ezine or Electronic Magazine, or some people call them electronic newsletters.

[00:25:28] I just called mine a magazine because occasionally I'll drop in what's happening in the industry and most of the time is how to format, how to be a great speaker, how to market yourself.

[00:25:38] You know, it gives you all that kind of stuff. And, you know, sometimes I'll throw in some jokes you can use in your speeches, things like that. That's a simple thing to create. And all you need is a simple word processor.

[00:25:51] But you do need to use a broadcast service like Kick Start Cart, it's a big system. You absolutely do not try to send this out through your Web host because you will get kicked off your Web host in no time flat. You have to have a broadcast email service. And that's again, that's part of Kickstart. My heart is whole system of things that it does.

[00:26:15] And each issue of your magazine would have links back to your website or your e-mail might just be an announcement that your new issue is ready. I'm on lots of lists like that where they just say, hey, the new issue of search engine news is available and then, boom, I go and read it, say. You can put just a few headlines in the email and then they click on your website to read the articles.

[00:26:40] Ok, there's other cool stuff you can do, useful and fun things you put on your website to get people to return. You can put links to interactive maps, phone books, all types of online conversion programs, metric time, you know, mortgage rates, things, all those things are available. Just make sure you don't distract people too much from the business of buying your stuff. All right. I mean, you could even use your ezine and website to promote a big party in a personal chat room on your site.

[00:27:14] Remember, yeah, this stuff can be done on the social media, but I want people coming to your site not making Facebook richer. All right. All right, now, here's a really important topic, retargeting, it's called it's an advertising technique where you advertise directly to people that you know are interested in your stuff. How do you know that?

[00:27:40] Well, because they've already showed an interest by searching for something or buying something or visiting a certain Web page of yours. I'm sure you've noticed that you might look at something on the Web and then you see ads for what you were looking at following you all around when you go to other places on the Web.

[00:28:01] I got to tell you, I had to buy a bra one time and don't ask me why I had to buy a bra, but I had to buy a bra. Well, guess what? Bra ads started following me around the web. The next three months.

[00:28:21] I said the way it works is when someone, let's say, reads one of your blog posts, when they hit your page, you've put a little piece of code called a pixel. And it's kind of like you may have heard of cookies is kind of like that.

[00:28:36] And so, you know, that person hit your blog post and hopefully read it while retargeting means you can advertise directly to all those people that have that pixel or kind of like a cookie, you can advertise only to them. And you know that they already saw that blog post.

[00:28:56] So it makes it very targeted advertising and it gets them to come back and buy something or read another one of your blog posts or watch a video or whatever you want them to do. So that's a way to create a return visit.

[00:29:10] Now, before I tell you, one of the most powerful methods that have created many, many, many billion dollar sites, I want to tell you about my mentor program. I mean, it's the most unique, longest running, most successful Internet marketing and digital marketing mentor program ever on the face of the Earth. I put it up against anybody. I don't care. Big name celebrity. I don't care. No name. Whatever you bring to me, my program will blow theirs away.

[00:29:40] There is no question about it. I triple dog dare you to find one and compare mine to theirs and see what you get.

[00:29:47] So about twenty years ago I made all these gurus mad because they were charging 50 or 100 grand up front to teach you this stuff, this internet marketing and shopping carts and email marketing and blogging and all this stuff. And blogging didn't even exist when I first started.

[00:30:05] And I thought, you know, there's too much money and you give those people 50 grand, they'll disappear, you'll never find them again. So I said, I'm going to turn this upside down. So I charged a relatively small entry fee and then I got a commission based on what I taught you how to do that was capped.

[00:30:25] So for me to get my fifty thousand, which I was worth and still am probably more. You had to make 200000 while people just love this and flocked to my program, 7500 students later, it's still going strong. And so it's very unique in that it's one on one with me and my entire staff. And you're not lumped in with people more advanced or less advanced. So you're either bored or lost all the time.

[00:30:53] And then you have an immersion weekend to the great Internet marketing retreat center, which, of course, after the pandemic, but no one on Earth lets you live in their house with them. Some of them have you visit their house in the day and then kick you out to a hotel. No, you actually live here. You eat here. We take you out to restaurants. We pick you up in a limousine. I mean, it's really, really, really unique. And then we have a TV studio here. So we teach you video and we shoot video, high def video with our crew in our studio for you. I mean, all these things are just unheard of in other programs. But the big thing is the one on one tutoring. So there's no faster way to learn how to do something than to have somebody take over your computer screen and say, click here, do this, do this, do that, do that, boom, you're done. Instead of watching 50 hours of YouTube videos that all say different stuff. Ok, so check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And it includes if you're in my mentor program, it includes a scholarship to my school and you can gift it to somebody or use it yourself. Very powerful. We have tremendous success stories out of that. So check it out. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com, and get in touch with me and we'll discuss your future online.

[00:32:15] All right. Let's get back to the main event, getting return website visits. This multibillion dollar concept is called user generated content. I mean, some of the biggest sites in the world use this method. This is where the visitor contributes to and builds the site. And these sites can be as simple as a blog where people comment on what you say to.

[00:32:43] There's a fun site called Kissthisguy.com. This is a site where people tell how they misread lyrics to song titles and it is just hysterical.

[00:32:54] See that? But the people are contributing. It's called the archive of misheard lyrics.

[00:33:01] You got Epinions.t com where people voice their opinion about everything from beer to bullets to everything else.

[00:33:09] And here's the biggies everybody knows YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, all are multi billion dollar companies where people like you and me gave them all their content. I mean, even the March of Dimes has a tell us your story section, where people tell how the March of Dimes have helped their family, which, of course, helps them the March of Dimes with their fundraising efforts.

[00:33:37] So. Most sites like this get their revenue primarily from advertising, because if you get enough eyeballs visiting a site, ad networks will start soliciting you and sharing the revenue with you that was paid by advertisers. So that's it, folks.

[00:33:56] These are ways, many ways. And there's more. Of course, if you search this out online, you'll find hundreds of ways to get return visits. But if you just did what was in this episode, you would have way, way, way more people coming back to your site regularly. And your site would convert better because of usability is better. The readability is better. You have the elements that make people want to come back. You know, all of these things will turn into more money for your bottom line.

[00:34:27] All right. That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all on the next episode. See ya later.

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