351 – Do these 3 things to improve your business: Tom talks Three Critical Business Tasks

Episode 351 – Three Critical Business Tasks
[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 fifty one, Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about three critical things you can do right now to increase your bottom line. Now, hope you didn't miss episode 350 on podcasting. Wow, that was a big thing. And we still have the sale on for our three hundred and fifty eighth episode. So watch your email for that again so that you see what the deal is. Now, let's see, how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? If the show's helped you out of it all in your business or giving me ideas to help you start a business? We want to hear about it, visit, screwthecommute.com, look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer. Tell me how the show has helped you and put your website in there to see you get a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Now pick up a copy of our Automation eBook. This ebook has saved me millions of keystrokes and allows me to just handle my work lightning fast. And what does that mean? That means that you can handle customers and prospects way faster than your competitors, so grab that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then also pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and you can put it on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road.

[00:02:00] Now, don't you think it would be great if you have young people in your life that they have a marketable skill when they get out of their higher education? They don't come home and live with you and suck off you because they can't get a job anywhere they're competing for or they get a crappy job at Starbucks or something.

[00:02:22] Well, put them in my school. I have the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. It's a distance learning school, but it teaches these high end demand skills that I've used for twenty six years to make millions and millions of dollars. And my students have made millions of dollars so that they're they have something marketable to every business on earth needs to know about email marketing and shopping carts and text and chat bots and all the kinds of things we teach in my school. It's licensed to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But like I said, you don't have to be in Virginia to attend it's distance learning. And it's not this crappy distance learning that little kids are suffering from because of the pandemic. No, it's real things. And you do have an instructor you have me to fall back on. You have live meetings once a week, but you can study anytime, day or night in this school because it's asynchronous learning, they call it.

[00:03:27] So you don't have to show up at a certain time so it can work around work schedules. And if you like to do it in the middle of the night, great. If you're an early morning person, great. So check it out at IMTCVA.org that will be in the show notes and also. But I'll tell you how you can get a scholarship if you happen to be in my mentor program, which I'll cover a little bit later.

[00:03:50] Let's get to the main event. Three things you can do in your business right now to increase your bottom line. All right, here's number one. Quit chasing search engine positioning. Yes. I want you to do the basics, which is proper keyword usage and so forth and some link building. But this is a whole different atmosphere. I mean, I was taught by the best of the best in the in the mid 90s, Michael Campbell, he could get all ten positions on the search engine for he and his clients. I was I got to the point where I could get four to six of my own websites in the top first page of the search engine. But guess what, folks? That's a long time ago. People nowadays are spending enormous amounts of money or I'll say spending, but I meant wasting enormous amounts of money on search engine optimization, stuff that could take months and months and months to ever pay off. And if it did a little bit, all Google has to do is turn a dial a little bit and you disappear off the face of the earth.

[00:05:00] You're just crazy as a small business person to fool with this. Yeah, if you're a big company and you got millions and millions and millions and billions of dollars, great. You can have a team, people working on this. But it doesn't make sense anymore for small business people. And I have been living and breathing this for 26 years straight. So if you want to try to argue with me on this, you ain't going to get very far. Put it that way. All right. Now, I say go to paid traffic. Now, I have an episode about this. I'll be giving you episodes that you can go deeper on. A lot of things I'll talk about today. And then at the end, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of other things you should be concentrating on and what episode numbers cover that in case you want to go deeper. All right. There's a lot of places you can advertise and get traffic immediately. See, we want you to fail fast. That's one of my overriding principles. If you put out a product and a sales letter, well, if you're waiting on search positioning for people to see that sales letter, you'll be tripping over your beard before you get enough traffic to it. So we want to send traffic to it immediately and then turn the traffic off it if it isn't working or ramp up even more traffic if it is working.

[00:06:20] So if you're going to fail, we want you to fail really fast, not take six months to a year to fail and then be broke and then tell me that all Internet marketing doesn't work. No, you just didn't know what you are doing. That's what the problem is. So fail fast and there's loads of places you can advertise. Google is fine. I'll tell you what the best bargains is there in a minute. Bing is I think it's still called Bing. They change it all the time, but but it's pay per click and it's generally cheaper because it doesn't have as much traffic as Google. But it's a good place to learn. And still, if a person sees your ad and clicks on it and buys that money's just as good as somebody that went to Google to buy. You have solo ads now, this is email now this is where you can get somebody else with the big email list to email for you, and a lot of times the fee is negotiable, especially if you've never advertised with them before. You say, look, hey, I'm not sure if this is going to work or not. You've got to give me a discount. So a lot of people will. Now, you do have to watch to make sure it's a reputable email account holder because you don't want to get spam complaints, you know, because you can get your website shut down if somebody complains properly.

[00:07:39] Now, there's another place you can advertise called Outbrain. Now, this is very general stuff, but you can get placement on really big high traffic sites, AOL and Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine. And, you know, all those kinds of places use an ad agency like Outbrain and it's still pay per click so you can turn it on, turn it off really quickly and get your message out there. Now, Facebook's got all kinds of ways. They invented a lot of this stuff to do, advertise on desktop and mobile. And and when you're advertising, one of the things you want to do is learn about pixels. These are like cookies. These are like things that when somebody lands on your ad or one of your videos, they get pixel. So then if a thousand people landed on all your stuff, this created an audience that you can then advertise back to. And a little later, I'm going to tell you about warm audiences and cold audiences and how you advertise to people that have done a certain thing on your website or your videos or whatever. And you can advertise based on people's interests, their location. A lot of times their income. You can advertise to people that follow you and you say, well, why? Why would I bother that they already follow me? Well, the thing is, is that you got to hit him in multiple ways nowadays because people are inundated with ads.

[00:09:13] You can even advertise in many cases to your competitors lists and also there's a thing called a lookalike audience where you can upload your client list and then Facebook will go out and find I think it's up to two million people, just like the people that are already your clients. OK, it's just amazing the kinds of things you can do. That's called a lookalike audience. All right. Let me take a little sidebar here and we'll talk about temperature strategies. So so a cold audience is some somebody that's never heard of you before. So you might put an ad up on Facebook or on Google or a YouTube video ad and the people never heard of you before. So what you don't want to do is try to ask for too much. Don't try to go for an immediate sale. That's very difficult unless you have some outrageous invention that nobody's ever heard of or or some commodity. And even if that's even tough, because if it's too cheap, you can't make any money by the time you pay for the ads. So don't ask for too much. Just get them to know you. And then guess what, if they look at your ad, they are now pixelate. So that means that you can advertise back to them later because they've already heard of you. And one of the things you want to do in a cold audience is get immediate credibility in the first few seconds, you got to really grab them, hold your book up if you've written a book or say, look, I've been teaching equestrian for 32 years, you got to listen so you don't fall off your horse or something that hits them in the face.

[00:10:58] Start watching ads more carefully when you see ads to see what people are doing and you'll see the ones that grab you and you'll see the ones that are kind of blah. Well, don't do that. All right. So let's say you advertised and got 100 people or a thousand people that say to to to watch a video or to do something that for free. You didn't even ask for an opt in or anything while those thousand people are now an audience. But they've heard of you and they've watched your video, let's say, or read a blog post. Well, now, when you advertise back, they are now a warm audience instead of a cold audience. So now you can ask for an opt in or give them a super deal on a product or something. But you really, again, you got to hit an immediate benefit in the first few seconds, maybe even remind them of how they heard of you say, because you're still you're moving them along a path. And then once they bought something, they're now a hot audience, so you can take the all the list of people that bought stuff and advertise to them to just sell more stuff and more expensive stuff. But you don't want to only hit them with stuff to buy because, you know, they'll get sick of you after a while.

[00:12:19] So still, give them keep giving them value of things that help them and then they'll stay with you for a long time. So that's cold, warm and hot audiences when you're advertising. Now, Amazon's also a good deal. A lot of people don't know this. I don't kill myself to promote any of my stuff on Amazon because at the top of every result now is called a sponsored ad, or it's an area where for a lot of times for a few pennies, you can ever have your book right at the top of Amazon when somebody's searching for your topic, you know, just by using keywords, which I harp on like crazy. In fact, that's Episode one and episode one hundred and thirty of this podcast. So keywords are you got to know understand that, that Amazon's a good place. Now, YouTube to me is the best bargain to advertise. Now remember, we're still on number one of what you should do to increase your revenue and bottom line quickly, and that is paid traffic. So YouTube is the best deal on Earth. And the reason I say that is because I'm talking about a very specific ad that they have called an end stream ad. This is the one of the ads where you can click the skip. But the thing is, is if they click the skip button before 30 seconds, you don't pay anything.

[00:13:45] OK, so you can get a heck of a lot of branding and a lot of free exposure. And pixel Google also has pixels you can put on and. See, a lot a lot of of branding and and, you know, exposure for free, and if somebody does watch your whole ad, I have some of them running as little as two cents of you see, and it would cost me a buck and a half to five bucks for some of my keywords on the Google Pay per click section, you know, and their search results. Now, there's a reason for this in the search results they were searching for. That topic that I'm doing, public speaking or Internet marketing or whatever, so it costs more, but in this case, you're kind of interrupting them before they watch another video. So the conversion rate isn't as good. But you can do a heck of a lot of testing, get massive exposure and stuff for just pennies. So Google and stream ads are some of the best bargains on the Internet. All right. So that's a little bit about paid traffic. This is an important thing to you. If you ignore what I'm talking about, you just sit for months and months and months, you know, trying to get traffic and God help you. So this is a way you can turn it on and turn it off at will. And that's what we want you to do, fail fast, find out what's not working, cut it off.

[00:15:20] When you find something that works, you ramp it up and that means put more ads in about that. OK, number two thing you can do is you've got to increase your Web presence, but you've got to decrease your costs and time to get this Web presence. And I'm talking about your website, your blog, your videos, you know, your podcasts, even all this stuff are things that increases your presence and has more and more people getting into. You know, everybody talks about the funnel, but getting into your your realm, your arena and hearing about you. And there's just so many things and there's always new stuff coming and it's hard to keep up. So you got Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and all these places tick talk. Now, it's impossible for one person to keep up. So people invented tools. We even have a full time person that works on this and she can't keep up. All right. You got to use tools to help you. So one of the main tools we use is called Meet Edgar, MeetEdgar.com. And it's called a content recycler. And they even have a thing on their website showing you the kind of how how it works. So these are their numbers. So, of course, they're they're blowing it up a little bit for it to get you excited. But I'm telling you, this is we use this like crazy in my business. So if you put a new piece of content or a blog post and let's say it got 220 views and then just a normal course of time, after 30 days, it gets six hundred and thirty views and after one hundred and eighty days, it gets 890 views.

[00:17:04] Well, if you put that piece of content in to meet Edgar after 30 days, it would get a thousand and forty views, which is one point six, five times the number it would normally. But after 180 days you would get fifty eight hundred views, which is six and a half times the normal. All right. So like I said, this, there figures that they're getting excited about it. But what it is, is every time you make a piece of content, no matter what it is, you add it to a library, and Meet Edgar, which keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And some of you may have stuff that you've written long ago that you can locate, dump it in to meet Edgar and then you can tell it, OK, send this piece of content to Facebook this month, Twitter next month or next week, and something else and something else is something else. And then next piece of content, you know, so it just takes all this content and randomly keeps putting it out for you automatically because the worst thing you can do is have like a Facebook page in your last post was eight months ago. You know, you just nobody will people immediately discard you as a potential person to do business with.

[00:18:23] So meet Edgar does this for you. Just keeps everything up. And every time you do something new, you put it in the library and boom, it starts going out to all these places for you automatically. So that's really, really important kind of thing. We also use a thing called Audiense. I think it's audiense.com and it learns what people like so that you can target specific content and ads towards people without guessing about it. Now, these are both paid tools. But I mean, you couldn't possibly. Afford, unless you're just rolling in cash to have somebody do all this stuff individually, keep up with it, and then what happens when they're sick or on vacation? Everything stops while these things don't get sick. They just keep rolling and rolling and rolling. For another thing, I used to use it when I was doing a lot of stuff by myself called HootSuite, which brings in comments and allows you to grab things that you see and put them on your social media very easily. So it's still a great program. I just don't do as much of this personally anymore. All right, so that's the second thing, you got to increase your Web presence, but decrease your time and cost to do it. That's critical for your bottom line. All right. The third thing is you got to improve your sales copy. And of course, this is episode 13.

[00:19:50] I have the but one of the greatest courses ever on it and the most cost effective because I paid one time, 4500 dollars, 4500 bucks for just a headline course, had to fly to Texas for it. And there's 31 different elements that I've identified in a sales letter that you need to know about. And I mean, a copy is the basis for everything. You can have the greatest product on Earth, but if people can't, you know, if you can't get them to want to buy it, you're screwed. So this is I've identified this is the most important skill in my entire 44 plus years in business, long before the Internet even. But even since the Internet, there's so many places you need copy. You need it for sales letters. You need it for online ads. You need it even in a blog post. Some of these techniques kind of infiltrate all of your writing that moves people to action to get them to do what you want them to do. There's no sense in you writing a blog post and people say, oh, I was interesting and then they do nothing. No, you you should have written the blog post to make them want to do something that leads to a potential sale for you, say, or an affiliate sale or something like that. Also, I've coined this is the fastest way for you to increase revenue, because if you already have a product, chances are you haven't got professional copy to make people want to buy it.

[00:21:32] So if you could just increase your sales by 10, 15, 20, sometimes 30 or 50 percent because of better copy, that's immediate revenue rather than just, you know, limping along at 10 percent efficiency of your sales copy when it could be 50 or 60 or 70 percent efficient. And also you can get paid, if you like writing to write this copy for other people that were too lazy to do it themselves. So it's a really critical skill to any business. And if you delegate it, you know, I have this whole when you listen to Episode 13, you know, you delegate, you think you can delegate it to somebody else. That takes you more time because you've got to check what they wrote and go back and forth, wait for weeks until they get your revisions.

[00:22:23] And, you know, you could have had the whole thing out selling and that amount of time. So, so really critical skill, most important in my my whole career. All right. Before I give you a whole bunch of other episodes, listen to let me tell you about my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, most powerful, most successful ever on the field of Internet marketing and digital marketing. And you think, oh, he's kind of a braggart saying that, you know what, I triple dog dare you. And no one in the last and 20 years has ever tried to take me up on this because my program has so much value. I say you bring any program, any mentor program on Earth to me and compare it a feature for feature benefit for benefit. And I will blow them away to the fact that they go crawl under a rock and they're embarrassed about their program. So. So that's how, you know, that's that's conviction right there. And I mean, I'm a fanatic, so fanatics are great to have if they're on your team. Right. It's like having a mean, rotten lawyer. It's great if they're working for you. It's that great if they're working against you. This program has run for over twenty years. It's cost effective in that you only pay an entry fee instead of paying my upfront fee, which is what people used to charge. And I kind of made them all mad. They charge 50 or 100 thousand bucks to teach this stuff. Well, for me to get my fifty thousand, I've tied myself to your success. You got to make two hundred thousand. Well, people love this. And seventeen hundred and some students later in twenty years, it's still run. And so, so they know I'm not going to disappear on them like a lot of these rip offs would do.

[00:24:17] So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to my school that you can gift to someone or you can use it yourself for extra training. So it's amazing programs. Last for many years, we got nobody chasing me around with chargeback in their credit card and nobody suing me because I take care of people and I'm a fanatic about it and it's all one on one. So you're not lumped in with a bunch of other people either more advanced or less advanced than you. So, you know, when when you do the group stuff, the advanced people are bored. When you're talking to the the beginners and the beginners are lost when you're talking to the advanced people. Well, that's not very efficient, I would say. So all of my staff and everybody will book one on one time with you. They'll take over your screen if necessary, show you where to click. I mean, it's just very powerful. Plus, we got a TV studio where we shoot videos for you. We have the great Internet marketing retreat center where you actually stay here for an immersion week. I mean, I could go on and on and tell you about this, but it's the most powerful ever in this field. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. All right. So some other things you really need to to be super profitable. I gave you three really main ones to jump on right now. Other things are email marketing. I cover that in episode 34. All this will be in the show notes, folks. Product development got three episodes on that 19, 55 and 304.

[00:26:01] And we cover digital physical audio products specifically on three or four on video. I got eight episodes on creating and selling videos, coaching mentor programs, Episode 124 Retreats Episode 232. So these are all things that you know, you can create to make money for yourself. You need to learn about database development. You've got to be mobile friendly. You got to keep the technology costs down and use it to the max. And most people have, you know, spend money on expensive technology and then underutilizing. They don't even know how to operate it. That's a shopping cart is a good example. Somebody has been selling one that costs three times as much as the one I promote and they don't even use the features, you know, so it's ridiculous.

[00:26:54] Now, this coming Monday, I'm going to be talking about membership sites so you can get recurring income also if you're willing to do speaking now, nowadays, there's not that many live speaking engagements, but there will be again, because there's just nothing like a live speech from a great speaker. You can make a fortune doing that and you got to get good at publicity. So that's on episode. I cover that on Episode 223 and 280. So these are all things that you can do to help your business. But if you do the first three, which is quit chasing search engine positioning, go to pay per click paid traffic, if you increase your Web presence and decrease your costs and you improve your copywriting, that's going to be immediate good things for your bottom line. And then you can do these other things and keep adding and adding and adding. See, I've been in business for four years. Twenty six online. Yeah. I'm not expecting you to do this all at once, but the more you do to improve your business, the happier you're going to be when you get into my position a long time ago or a long time from now, because I don't have to be here talking to you, OK? I could just quit, sell everything and just have my feet up, but I'm not made like that. I want to help you. I get a kick out of it. I make money of just thrilled to be in this position.

[00:28:21] So anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Don't miss Monday where we're going to talk about membership sites. I'll catch ya then.

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