349 – Create assets for your financial security: Tom talks Intellectual Property

Episode 349 – Intellectual Property
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and forty nine of Screw the Commute podcast.

[00:00:29] I'm going to talk about intellectual property today. I started creating this in the late 80s and some of it's still selling today. I mean, 30 odd years later. I mean, it's an asset adding to your net worth and it's like an insurance policy for your family and you can pass it on to your kids to help them out. I mean, it's really great.

[00:00:52] Hope you didn't miss Episode 348, that was Marc Bullard, he's been with me, one of the longest employees here. Tell us about work life balance, handling two kids and camping and selling surfboards on the side and doing all kinds of stuff that he does and still gets a full time income. So that was episode 348.

[00:01:14] Well, how'd you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all or your business and and given your ideas for helping your business or starting your business, we want to hear about it. Go to screwthecommute.com and there's a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talking to your phone or computer. Tell me how the shows helped you out. And hey, don't forget to put your website in there because you'll get a big shout out in your own voice in front of thousands of listeners of screw the commute.

[00:01:45] And while you're over there, grab a copy of our automation ebook. We give it away, free to help your business. And I will tell you, it will help your business. It'll save you enormous time, enormous amounts of money. We sell it for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the podcast. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it. Pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. All right. The search volume for work at home is still going crazy. I got to tell you, people are this pandemic.

[00:02:30] Not only some of them could go back to work, but they're figuring, hey, I don't want to I like staying at home. I like that fight in traffic and deal with idiots in the workplace. Right. So so but you got to learn these skills so that you don't have to work for somebody else. You can if you want. But if you learn the skills of selling online, you really can write your own ticket. Every business on Earth needs this websites and email and blogs and chat bots and all the stuff that we teach. So there's an enormous amount of business out there just waiting for you. Now, I formalized this in two ways. One is my mentor program, which I'll tell you about later.

[00:03:11] And 12 years ago, I started a school. I mean, I sweated blood and I mean, it was three years ago on through hell to get the license. And it's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, digital marketing, too. So check it out at IMTCVA.org. You can get a full scholarship if you're in my mentor program. If you're in certain groups like military first responders and their immediate families, by the way, nurses, law enforcement, we give a fifty percent scholarship just to thank you for your hard work to keep us safe. So check it out at IMTCVA.org. It's great for your kids so they won't come home and live with you. They'll have their own income. We had three kids in high school can even make money doing this. I mean, they just love the computer stuff. It's the best thing you could possibly do for a young person today.

[00:04:08] All right. Let's get to the main event. Back in 1990, Dottie Walters, who is the grandmother of professional speaking, told me personally, Tom, you have to become a product machine. I didn't fully understand what she meant at the time, but I sure do now with four hundred in some products later, it's the main source of my direct and indirect income.

[00:04:33] Now, what I mean by indirect income, well, let's say someone read one of my relatively low priced books and they said to themselves, boy, this guy really knows what he's talking about.

[00:04:45] Well, in most cases they would join my mentor program, which makes me way more money than the amount of money you get for a book. Say, now, in some cases, they might hire me to speak or have me speak and sell at the back of the room at one of their live events. Both of these indirect methods were spawned from a relatively low cost ebook.

[00:05:09] Now, with print on demand and online digital everything, your risk is extremely low and most of the pieces of intellectual property you create are 97 percent profit, just a little bit of a percentage attributed to credit card fees, because that's how people pay for most of this stuff.

[00:05:30] It amazes me that supposedly smart people out there are not screwing the commute. They dutifully get up, fight traffic, run the kids, the school, you know, just just run like crazy to go make somebody else rich.

[00:05:48] I mean, every day, five days a week, usually they're doing this.

[00:05:52] And I'm hoping that if there's anything good that comes out of this pandemic, it's that people will realize they can legitimately work from home as long as they get the right knowledge and take the right steps. And I'm either talking about working for somebody else or having your own business or both.

[00:06:12] So let's talk about intellectual property, and it can come in many forms, I mean, ebooks, especially reports, white papers and online courses are the ones we mostly deal with now. Of course, there are others like music patents and I guess certain inventions or others. You know, I've never dealt with them because to me they are super risky, expensive, and the chances of succeeding in any big way are slim.

[00:06:41] For instance, I mean, I love music. A lot of us love music, but I suspect for every 10000 songs written, maybe one ever goes anywhere. And even less than that hits the top hundred billboard chart. So I mean, as a business person, then, even though I'm glad others take that risk, to me, writing songs is similar to gambling. Then I don't gamble and I especially don't gamble when trying to help my students, I want them to have the greatest chance of success with the least risk. That's what ebooks, special reports, white papers and online courses are all about, extremely low risk and extremely high returns. If you have the knowledge like the kind I provided my mentor program in school, you can create online and online business with the tiniest of investments. You can create a world class website for about twenty dollars a month. This is no hocus pocus here, but on the open market, it would cost you five to ten thousand dollars plus monthly maintenance fees where you basically get nothing for your money. Plus you wouldn't know how to operate it. So that would cost you more money every time you wanted to put some content up. That's crazy. But besides selling my own products, that's been my value to the business world, is that I teach people how to do these things on a shoestring budget.

[00:08:14] I'm going to be using the term information product instead of intellectual property during this episode, because I think it's a term that's more understandable to the average person and doesn't sound like legal mumbo jumbo. But I want to be clear. You are creating intellectual property when you create an information product and it's an asset that you can earn from now and pass on to generations of your family to come.

[00:08:44] All right. Let's talk about evergreen products. The term evergreen means it's information that doesn't change that much over time. So the return on your investment of creating it pays off for a long time. This is as opposed to a current topic information product in a field that changes often. For instance, many of my public speaking products have been selling for over 20 years. Much of my Internet marketing information has to be updated regularly because of the rapidly changing nature of the Internet.

[00:09:19] I mean, some of it I just have to take off the market because it's totally obsolete now that fact has its good and bad points.

[00:09:27] See, on one hand, I can't sell a product on the on the Internet stuff for 20 years like my public speaking stuff. But on the other hand, there's a constant demand for new and updated materials. So I always have a hungry market for my product. I figure out the technique or idea and then sell it to the public. That doesn't want to take the time to figure it out for themselves. I save them time and money and they pay me for it. Now, I want to talk to you about my wedding and eulogy books. I want to give you another concept about picking a market to go into. See, for many years I've been selling wedding and eulogy books and I've enjoyed a heck of a lot of money from them, and I'm thrilled about that.

[00:10:13] What I'm not thrilled about are people dying, of course. But but I am thrilled about the fact that I was able to help people in their hour of need and get paid for it too.

[00:10:26] I guess I'm, you know, kind of like a funeral director who's looking sad when somebody dies. No kidding. So they brought in a lot of money from wedding books and funeral books.

[00:10:38] And of course, some people say wedding is like a funeral in a way, but I won't get into that here anyway, even though I'm happy with the money that came in from these e-books. I'm not happy about the market.

[00:10:52] See, if someone buys one of these books, they never buy anything else. It's a one shot deal.

[00:10:59] The dad who has to do a toast at his daughter's wedding doesn't all of a sudden want to be a professional speaker or Internet marketer.

[00:11:07] He just wanted to get through the wedding and do a nice toast for his baby girl and her new husband. And the Yogi book is pretty obvious. Obvious. I mean, the distraught person just needs help getting through a traumatic event. And again, doesn't all of a sudden decide to be a pro speaker, that marketer. So even though I make great money on these ebooks, I don't suggest these kinds of one off topics to my students anymore. My eulogy book came out 19 years ago, and even though it's evergreen, it hasn't created a list of customers that I can sell to over and over and over again. You want to pick topics that when someone buys your first product, that proves they are automatically at least interested in your next product because of the topic. My Internet marketing products are a perfect example. If I come out with a book on list building and someone buys it, that proves they are at least interested in online marketing. I mean, that's by definition. I mean, who would buy a book on email marketing that wasn't online or wanting to get online? So it's reasonable to assume that person would also be interested in a book or course on chat boards, text marketing, podcasting, maybe web design, shopping carts, blogging and all that stuff, say, all right, now this can happen very fast. I know it may be hard to believe if you've never created a piece of intellectual property. And I in the beginning resisted myself. Also, I didn't think I knew what I was doing. But it turns out being logical and having some common sense, you can make a fortune because this is not that hard and it can happen fast.

[00:12:55] My fastest ebook has made the most money four hours and a layover at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. An e-book that I wrote has so far brought in three point six million dollars and still brings in from six to fifteen thousand dollars a month. OK, so now the other end of the spectrum on income, I'll still take any day of the week. I wrote an e-book in eight hours. That was my previous record before the four hours that brought in a couple hundred dollars a month for nine years straight. And I've had various others that took from a few days to a few weeks to to write and all of them were profitable. See, the cost to produce them was minimal or zero. I already have a computer with Microsoft Word on it. I got a PDF maker. I used fiverr.com to create an ebook cover for me. And now I wouldn't even do that. I'd use the free version of Canva and I'd have zero cost in creating the book. Now, if you can't make money when you have no cost and you have a piece of intellectual property to sell, there's something wrong here. No, if you're a terrible writer, no problem. Just jot down your ideas and hire a freelance writer from places like UpWork and Fiverr. Also, I've never paid more than two hundred and seventy five dollars for a completely written e-book. Now that doesn't mean I used it as is they ruffed the whole thing out for me.

[00:14:32] And then I put in stories of my own that they would never know about and, you know, other information to finish it off.

[00:14:38] But the whole thing happened within a couple of days in some cases, you know, so. So you can do this. You can also use a PLR e-book to start and then customize it. What's PLR? That's called private label rights, where somebody else has written the book and giving you the rights to take it, adapt it, put it out under your name and sell it. And I covered PLR stuff, private label rights in episode 55. Any time you want to go to a certain episode of mine put screwthecommute.com slash and then the number 55. I'm working with a mentee right now who in two weeks has created his first quality ebook on some topic in project management that I can't even understand. He can, because that's his field, he's been doing it 20 years and it wouldn't have taken two weeks. Other than the fact that I had to teach him the proper formatting and such for an ebook, all the knowledge was already in his head. He just put himself ahead of 99 percent of the people in his field that just go to work and come home every day doing project management. Now that he has the PDF version of the book, will convert that to a Kindle version for Amazon, will get him an author page on Amazon, and then start cranking out more products and courses on project management.

[00:16:04] And he's still going to work every day. But I guarantee you remember I talked about indirect income. If he becomes really well known for being the expert on this topic because of his variety of products, he'll have a much greater leverage when negotiating salary if he chooses to stay, going to work every day, and if he has enough income from these products, he'll just quit going to work and take speaking engagements and consulting contracts on the top. See, this is my goal with mentees that start with me while still working a job. I want to get them to the point where listen to this. It's too expensive for them to go to work anymore. Right. Because they're high profit online and other indirect income is more than their salary and they're killing themselves going back and forth to work and everything involved in that say. So that's my goal, is to make it too expensive for them to go to work. Now, I start pretty much everyone with PDF e-books unless they already have a book out. This allows them to collect all their information in one place and then they can repurpose it as a Kindle e-book, online course, podcast, webinars, speech or whatever, consulting or whatever else they invent in the future.

[00:17:29] Now, before I tell you how to start and give you a super tip and some other app episodes that will fill you in on all the details of creating information products, I want to tell you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing.

[00:17:47] And I say that boldly with no reservations, because in all the years I've been doing this, I've triple dog dared people for 20 some years to come up with another program that rivals mine. Guess what? Nobody has ever come even close. All right. So so I'm a fanatic's. It's good to have a fanatic on your team. You know, I don't have any work life balance. I just work like crazy to help small business people day and night, seven days a week, holidays, weekends, evenings. It doesn't matter to me. All I care about is success. And you might say, well, you know, you're not very balanced Tom you're going to drop dead. Well, I'll drop dead happy because this is my life. This is what I love and don't think I don't have my own hobbies.

[00:18:33] I got my dogs, I got my guns and my all this stuff that I do tennis and all these things that that I enjoy doing. And I got time for it because I'm running a home based business.

[00:18:46] I have I've never spent any time on the road making somebody else rich. Even had a nightclub where I lived above the nightclub.

[00:18:54] Right. For six years now. I'll never do that, that kind of business again, that's for sure.

[00:18:59] But anyway, it's one on one tutoring. So we take over your computer screen, we show you where to click, where not to click, what to buy, what not to buy.

[00:19:08] In fact, I don't let anybody even spend any money unless they ask me because they're so darn many rip offs out there. And so I know where they are and what they are. And so I shield you from that and you get very rapid progress like this guy I was just telling you about within two weeks, he's got his first book. The next one will come within a week, I'm certain, because now he knows the formatting stuff and I don't have to he doesn't have to stop and ask me a million questions. He can just write the darn book just like the last one. And now he's cranking out intellectual property.

[00:19:40] Then we'll put it on audio. Then we might put it on video. He'll have speeches on it, consulting on it. All of this stuff that he's been going to work for for twenty years now will be intellectual property that he can sell over and over and over and get big chunks of money from speaking and consulting engagement. Say so. So this is this is just awesome. And you have an immersion weekend at the retreat center where you actually live in the house with me in a small that's the only thing group is like four or five people here for an immersion weekend. Now, of course, you have to wait till the pandemic's over. But when people join, like if you join today, it's at least four months before anybody comes. Anyway, I want to make sure you're not deer in the headlights as you're here and you have a whole team of people at your disposal.

[00:20:27] And the big thing that one of the biggest things that made everybody mad is that they were charging fifty or a hundred thousand dollars up front to teach you this stuff. Well, I turned that on its head. You just pay an entry fee and then I don't get my big money unless you make big money. So I don't get my fifty thousand unless you make two hundred thousand and then you don't owe me another nickel you're not stuck with me forever. So that's the most unique program ever, I triple dog dare you to come up with something that is powerful and successful and is long running as this one, you won't be able to do it. So don't waste your time. All right. And before we get back to the the last tips I have for you, you get a full scholarship to my school. If you're in my mentor program, one guy gave it to his daughter and she's making six thousand dollars a month and hasn't even graduated yet. All right. So so it's it's just crazy, crazy, powerful. Give me a call about it and we'll discuss it. There's no big machine gun nest here, no high pressure. If you can't see the value here, God help you. All right.

[00:21:32] Let's get back to the main event. All right. To get started. You just open a word document or any word processor you got and just start filling it in with stuff that you know about the topic.

[00:21:44] Don't worry about anything or organizing. Just start filling it in with stuff about the topic later. You can group the information together and and those will become your chapters. And here's your great trick. OK, and such a time saver.

[00:22:01] I do this all the time is to look up similar books on Amazon and then you use the look in function where you can see the other person's table of contents and usually a percentage, you know, maybe 10 percent of their text. So I'm not saying plagiarise, I'm just saying somebody else did the work thinking about all the different areas that you should address for your topic. That doesn't mean you can't change them or add them or subtract ones you don't think are important, but it just does all the work for you right there to get started really fast.

[00:22:36] So that's a super trick with the look in function. You know, every time you get a book up on Amazon, there's a little thing right above the book cover that says, look in, you click it and boom, you get to see all the stuff already.

[00:22:49] Now, if you want to make a piece of audio intellectual property and make it sound high quality, check out all my podcasting episodes. This is all going to be in the show notes, folks.

[00:22:59] So screwthecommute.com/139 another episode 142 and add up another episode of 190 and the like I said, I'll be in the show notes. And what if you want to do an E course delivered through email, check out Episode 205. What about a webinar. Check out episodes 214 217 220 and 318.

[00:23:23] What if you want to do an online course, check out episode one ninety six. Man, I got lots of stuff for you folks and and all the stuff I put in this podcast and three hundred and forty nine episodes.

[00:23:35] You know, I'm not even scratching the surface of what I could do for you if you were, you know, if you're in my program.

[00:23:40] So there we go. So there's pretty much no excuse for not doing this. You can even create intellectual property by interviewing other experts that you can find all over the place online. Then most of these people were thrilled when someone asked to interview them. So I want to challenge you to go out and create a piece of intellectual property and sell it. Then rinse and repeat will become a product machine like Dottie Walters told me back in 1990. But once you get a taste of this, I'll tell you it's very addicting in a good way.

[00:24:15] All right. So watch for our big three hundred and fifty eight episode sale starting tomorrow. And we'll have a real special episode for you on Wednesday.

[00:24:26] All right everybody. We'll catch y'all Wednesday.

Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
OR
Join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com