360 – Live streaming is da bomb: Tom talks Facebook Live

Episode 360 – Facebook Live
[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 three hundred and sixty of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about Facebook Live, which is it's just another way to reach and engage with prospects and turn them into customers. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 359. That was Bob Dietrich. He's co-founder of the online business Tool Box, which I'll be featured in here. It's going on right now. And BrainWorx where without medication, his company helps overcome ADHD and other challenges of the brain. So make sure you sign up for his upcoming online summit at ScrewtheCommute.com/obtoolbox. That's online business toolbox. Now we've got a nice voicemail from Richard Villasana from ForeverHomesforFosterKids.org. He's doing some great work. I've known him for a long time helping children, so make sure you check out his site. Here's what he said about Screw the Commute podcast.

[00:01:32] Hi, my name is Richard Villasana. I'm the founder of the charity Forever Homes for Foster Kids. And I am very happy to share my comments with you. I just finished listening to Episode 355. Ask a question where Tom goes into details with some basic questions. For some of these questions are ones that cost companies and small businesses hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, because they're doing things in a particular way that isn't maximizing their investment to grow their business. And whether you're thinking of starting a business today, you just started it this week or you've been in business for ten years, there's going to be an answer that Tom gives during this podcast that's going to help you with your business, help either save money or make money. I cannot recommend his podcast Screw the Commute more than I am right now. It was so good I had to stop the recording to shoot an email to a colleague because Tom covered what are the answers that my colleague needed to hear. That's how good it was. So once again, if you're not listening to Schruder commute, put it on your calendar. This is going to pay off for you and save you time and money or helping to make more money. Thank you so much and enjoy your show.

[00:03:02] Now, if you'd like to get your own big shout out on Screw the commute, go to screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says, send voicemail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer and tell me how the show has helped you. And hey, put your website in there so we can give you a big shout out in your own voice on a future episode of Screw the Commute. While you're over there, check out our free Automation eBook we give you as a gift for listening to the show. It saved me millions of keystrokes, literally. We figured it out one time. Just one of the tips. It has cell phone tips, it has email tips. All these ways I automate my business to to handle things lightning fast and save myself tons of work. So grab that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. We also have a podcast app that you'll just love. Put it on your cell phone or tablet. You can take us with you on the road. It saves your favorite episodes. It does all kinds of cool stuff and we have training to show you how to use it. All right. One of the best things you can ever do for people in your life or yourself is to get into. My school is the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing and digital marketing school in the country. It's certified to operate by SCHEV, State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to live in Virginia. It's a distance learning school.

[00:04:30] It's the most legitimate way on this earth right now where not only can you learn a highly in demand skill from home or your office, whatever you want or I mean from Starbucks doesn't make any difference.

[00:04:48] But you can legitimately work from home now, this is not this is oh, my God, this is more evident now than ever with the pandemic thing.

[00:04:57] So absolutely this could be one of the best legacy gifts you give to a young person in your life, save them from enormous debt and yourself from enormous debt and mortgaging the house just to send them to a four year college that teaches them how to protest. And and then they get out and there they are working at Starbucks.

[00:05:16] So so this is one of the best things, because it's an in demand skill that every business on Earth needs. We have people within a few months of starting the school are making thousands of dollars a month on the side, helping other business with social media and shopping carts and email and all that kind of stuff. So check it out at IMTCVA.org at orders@Antion.com. You know, my all my contact information is easy to find at screwthecommute.com. And also at the end of this episode, I'm going to tell you how you can get a scholarship for free if you're in my mentor program. All right. So that's the story.

[00:05:57] All right. Let's get into the main event. Facebook Live has lots of benefits. First, it's free, it's in real time and it's interactive. See, being in real time means you don't have all the precise editing involved when you're putting out a pre-recorded video. I mean, they're expected to be correct without glitches. And we love video, but this is much easier to produce a video without any editing.

[00:06:25] Now, when you're doing something live, you get a pass, if there's a hiccup or you misspeak or your cat walks in front of the camera, hey, nobody cares. Also, people love the interaction which you should encourage, not only from making the watchers happy, but from the standpoint of Facebook.

[00:06:48] See, the more engagement you get with your Facebook live, the more people Facebook will show your live event to also later, when we talk about setting up an event, Facebook will allow you to invite more people based on your record of getting good engagement.

[00:07:07] In other words, Facebook can see that people like your event because they were engaging with it and watching a great deal of it.

[00:07:17] With Facebook Live, you can have a direct connection with many watchers at one time. They can make comments and ask questions and you can answer them and give them shout outs in front of the entire universe of watchers. Now, with some of the external services I'll talk about in a minute, you can actually put their comments on the screen. They love that. Now, if the crowd isn't too large, I invite them to put their book titles, websites, products and services in their comments. And I show as many as I can on the screen. This makes them very happy and more likely to stay on longer and to make sure that they show up at my next Facebook live because they know they'll get more promotions. So so for me, it's making me look better to Facebook because so many people are engaging throughout my presentation. Now, all of this live interaction helps to humanize your brand. I mean, lots of people have heard of me over many years, but much less people have spoken to me or seen me in person. This helps build a much greater rapport when people see that, hey, I'm fun to deal with.

[00:08:35] I make fun of myself and I still give great info. So it kind of humanizes you as a brand.

[00:08:43] All right, some of the technique that you want to make sure you take care of is the longer you stream, the more likely people will discover and share your video.

[00:08:53] So minimum of 10 minutes don't go on for two minutes, it's counterproductive.

[00:08:59] I mean, you may have to for some instantaneous thing while you're out and about, you want to go live to show it. But in most cases, you want to go a minimum of 10 minutes. And I think I've never done this. I think you can go up to four hours. But no, I've never done that.

[00:09:16] Now, near the beginning and frequently throughout your event, ask people to share. Many of them would do it if you just ask them, too many of them, that button is right in front of them. But they're concentrating on you and never think of doing it. So just ask.

[00:09:32] And that exposes your video to way, way, way more people say now when talking directly to the watchers, force yourself to look into the camera lens instead of watching yourself or watching what's on the screen. Find out where the lens is if you're using a cell phone or your webcam and force yourself to look directly into it. This makes a better rapport with people. If you're looking at your screen all the time and it's kind of a dis, the angle, the angle is different between the webcam and your eyes and you kind of look a little shady or beady eyed. Now, it is perfectly OK for you to look away as you're reading comments and manipulating your software. Just don't leave what what we call in the business dead air where nothing is happening. OK, so so I might say, oh, hey, folks, let me look at the comments here. You know, so now they it's telling them I'm going to look away from the camera and look at the comments and then I might read them and then look back into the camera, say, so that's a much better rapport building than just, you know, looking at the screen the whole time. And you look beady eyed and untrustworthy.

[00:10:52] Now you want to prepare visuals ahead of time. Now, up to this point, this requires a third party service, which I'll cover shortly, but nothing stops you from holding up a T-shirt or a hat or a sign or something right into your webcam lens.

[00:11:09] Now, if you wear glasses, try to make sure they aren't filled with glare. When you look into the camera lens, this really reduces your connection with people as as they like to see your eyes frequently. The light from your computer screen hits your glasses and bounces right back into the webcam.

[00:11:29] So virtually all computers have a thing where you can dim your screen or tilt it to try to prevent this. And an old TV trick we've used for a hundred years is to tilt up the temples of your glasses off your ear.

[00:11:45] Now, this tilts the lens of your glasses down a bit and bounces the glare off your lenses down instead of horizontally directly into the webcam. So that's a good tip for you. Now, avoid massive back lighting like a big window behind you.

[00:12:05] This makes your face go really dark because the camera sees all that massive light from the window coming at it and it closes its iris down to protect itself and to try desperately to make a decent picture.

[00:12:20] But you ruined it by putting the big light behind you, which makes your face go dark because the camera lens closes down.

[00:12:28] That's the same if you're doing a live shot outside. Watch where the sun or the greatest amount of light is coming from and make sure it's hitting your face rather than behind you say.

[00:12:41] All right, setting up your Facebook live, well, you can certainly go live any time you feel like it with no preparation at all. And sometimes I do. If I got to get an immediate message out or if I see something that happened spontaneously, let's say it was out at that at the beach and I saw some cool thing. I might go live spontaneously, but if you want to get the most people there, you want to do some things to promote the event. And I have been calling it an event. See, that's one of the terms Facebook uses. So you should set your live stream up as an event where you describe it, you put in a graphic that describes it, but the best part is you can invite people to the event right through Facebook, make sure you do this and in the beginning tried to only invite people you feel will really show up, see if you invite 100 people and only one shows even interest in it. Facebook, well, maybe next time only let you invite 50 people say so. So once you get a good track record of show ups, a high percentage of show ups, you can expand more to inviting people you don't quite recognize that are on your friends list and expand out. But in the beginning, make sure you get the highest percentage of people showing up as you can. So one of the things I do is I send out an email, you can put it out if you have a chat bot list, you know, a lot of you have chat bots. See, Facebook gives you a link you can send out that takes people directly to the event.

[00:14:27] I mean, call up even some of your closest friends and ask them to attend, so you want to get people there, especially in the beginning, you want a high percentage, but it does mean you can just next time invite a thousand people and only to show up, because then you're going to go right back to the beginning in Facebook's eyes again.

[00:14:47] All right. I mentioned some of these aftermarket services that allow you to do a bunch of cool things. Now, a free one is called OBS, but you got to be, you know, pretty technical to operate it.

[00:14:59] It does cool stuff, but if you're not tech savvy, it's really not worth is going to be more frustrating to you than than it's worth.

[00:15:08] Now, I originally started with a thing called BeLive, and then I used it for a good while, but it kept crashing on me and then they changed the interface and it was worse than the original interface. And so I gave up on it. Currently I use Streamyard.

[00:15:25] It's about 25 dollars a month, but I'll show you all the stuff it'll do here in a minute. But in the show notes, I've put links to places that show you the top ten streaming services and, you know, so you can go look through all the different ones in the valuated for yourself. But keep in mind, some of them are biased because if you got dacast.com, and they're giving you the 10 best live streaming platforms, well, you know, they're going to make theirs the best. You know, they put out the list. So so just take it with a grain of salt. But it'll give you a good idea of the all the kinds that are out there. I'm not pushing extremely hard on you, but it's cheap. It works great. Never crashed on me anyway.

[00:16:14] Ok, now, what are some of the advantages of doing this, spending this money? Well, you can syndicate to multiple platforms. So that means that I can when I set up my live stream in advance, I can say, go to all my Facebook pages, go to all my Facebook groups, go over to YouTube and go over to LinkedIn. So I'm broadcasting at one place, but it's going to all these places. OK, so that just gives you more and more and more reach. Now, in the beginning, some of these services, they had that ability, but the problem was if somebody saw me on another page where from the one that I'm broadcasting on or it's the main page that I'm broadcasting on and they commented on another page or in a group. I couldn't see the comment, so the people would think I was ignoring them, so that sucks.

[00:17:12] So make sure whatever service you get can what we call aggregate the comments from all the different sources so that you can see them. You don't want somebody really engaging with you and you never acknowledge them.

[00:17:27] Say now if you had 10000 people on the that's expected. But if you're starting out and you got 15 people, you want to be talking to those people. But if they're commenting somewhere else, then they're going to be alienated very, very quickly.

[00:17:44] In the beginning, I had to actually say that, folks, if you're not on Antion and Associates page, I won't see your comments till afterwards.

[00:17:53] So I did. That is kind of a Band-Aid. But now I don't have to do that because all the comments come in. The one place that's really important now in stream, yada. I don't know about the other services. The first time people have to agree to have their comments, their name attached to their comments. Once they hit the button and agree one time, then their face and their name and everything shows up on their comments. And almost everybody wants that because if they think you're going to put them on the screen and give them a big shout out, they want their you know, they don't want just some text up there. They want their picture and their names.

[00:18:34] Now, another thing about these third party services, you can prepare pictures and videos and easily just click and they show up on the screen and get broadcast out in your broadcast so you're not holding stuff up to the webcam just to try to, you know, limp through this. So that's very important to me because I talk about stuff. If I say, hey, here's an example of putting hashtags on a YouTube video. Well, I want to show them where they show up and where you put them rather than just tell them, say so, show and tell.

[00:19:06] In other words, also, most of the services allow you to put branding. So my screw the commute logo is on the edge of the picture the whole time. You can also, like I mentioned earlier, show comments. You can put stickers across the bottom like a moving thing, almost like a stock market ticker with website addresses and other information. And it's a little thin line across the bottom so people can write it down. I can show my websites that I want them to go to. I can show the address to my email address, my phone number right on the screen. So it's very difficult to do. And without one of these third party services and I can invite guests to be on so I can send a link out and that person can click on the link and they're kind of in a virtual green room. And then when I click on them in the green room, they pop into the live presentation and I can make them their pictures, the only one on there, or have a side by side or, you know, if you have multiple ones, you know, you can I don't know how many can go up to, but you can have multiple guests on. So that's why it's really worth it and really up your game. Every time I do, one of these people ask me, wow, that was really professional. How did you do that? Well, I just got this stream yard for 25 dollars a month.

[00:20:32] All right. Now, after the fact, after you do your Facebook live, see a lot of people emailing me to say, hey, I couldn't be there. There a replay. Well, here's the thing. When you do a Facebook, live immediately, when you're done, it shows up as a posting right there permanently. And when I say permanently. This is something you want to do very quickly after you finish a Facebook live is get what is called the permalink. So you open the thing up in a page by itself and copy the link. It's at the top.

[00:21:08] Also, there's another trick where if it says Tom was live four hours ago, if you click on the right, click on the for hours, you can copy the link from there also. But you want to have this handy to send out to the people, because as you keep doing stuff, that particular Facebook Live is going to move down and get buried, you know, buried, buried, buried, but it's always there. For instance, my funeral I did for my dog, that was a couple of years ago.

[00:21:38] But I saved the permalink because a lot of dog lovers want to see it and it's had like 14000 views or something. So I can just send them that link and they don't have to scroll through two years worth of postings, say so keep the permalink and then you can resend the permalink to your list, your email list and reposted places to to get grab people that couldn't make it say. And you can put it in your social media, other social media channels and all kinds of stuff with it. So grab that permalink.

[00:22:11] So Facebook Live is a great way to get your message out. And if you like to learn this, plus the other thousands of things you need to know to be successful online, you might want to consider my mentor program at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:22:26] This is also get you a scholarship when you're in my mentor program, get you a scholarship to my school, which you can use yourself for extra training. But most people gift it to somebody very valuable, saves them in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars and gets there the person in their life, a marketable skill within months. And this is no B.S. This is no hocus pocus. Every business on Earth needs websites, blogs, chat bots, shopping carts, email, text, marketing. I mean, all these things plus a hundred more. And so the demand is very high and most small business people are just pulling their hair out. They know they need this stuff, but they don't know how to do it. So they will throw money at you pretty much to get somebody to take it off their back. So you're really you're really doing a great service for a person that you give them these skills through my school. But the mentor program is the longest running over twenty years. Most unique in that you have an immersion weekend at a retreat center here in Virginia Beach. Of course, after the pandemic, you have all one on one training. I mean, nobody at my level would even talk to you, let alone teach anything. We have a complete staff of people to train you one on one will even take over your computer screen and tell you where to where to click and where not to click and what to do. Very, very personalized so you can make rapid progress. Then we have a TV studio here, so we shoot high definition videos for you. Nobody's ever gotten out of here without between 10 and 15 and one couple got 53 videos. All right. Each one on the open market goes for between 700 and 1500 dollars. So we added them for you. Put graphics on and give you all these marketing videos just as part of the deal, not even counting all the year long training that you have.

[00:24:36] And you have somebody in your in your team that cares. And here's why that's that's proof that I actually care. Well, the way I set it up is that you pay an entry fee, but I don't get my big money unless you make money.

[00:24:52] So for me to get fifty thousand, which is the going rate for somebody like me, you have to make 200000 net. Well, people love this and seventeen hundred plus students later over twenty years, it's still going strong. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com but dive into Facebook live will will teach you how to do it. Will teach you how to use dream yard. I mean we teach you and tutor you which cuts your learning curve almost to nothing compared to fighting it out for I mean, you could go and learn to use Streamyard by taking either two, four hour days or a complete eight hour day. And in less than an hour, I would tutor and have you up to speed say so you an enormous amounts of time.

[00:25:39] So anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So catch everybody on the next episode. See ya later.

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