448 – This simple document can make you money: Tom talks Buying Guides

Episode 448 – Buying Guides
[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 with Episode four hundred forty eight of Screw the Commute podcast talking about making money with buyer's guides today. I've made many millions doing this and and I've only really done it on a small scale. Now, I hope you didn't miss Episode 447. That would Judith Briles. She's an insider in the publishing industry and she sold over a million books herself in 17 languages. And we're going to have her on again this week later this week to talk about book marketing. So in this episode 447, she talked about publishing and now she's going to talk about marketing later this week. All right. Hey, if you like to make money with affiliate commissions, which you can do with buyer's guides, you can also make money referring me in my products and services. And I hardly get any refunds because I really go overboard making great quality products. And I love sending out commission checks and PayPal or however else we can. Gold bullion or I don't know what said you send you the money somehow except Bitcoin. I don't understand that crypto stuff. Now grab a copy of our Free Automation eBook. This has helped me handle a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and sixty thousand customers over many years and save me carpal tunnel syndrome. And we sell this book for 27 bucks, but it tears free for listening to the show.

[00:01:58] Grab your copy it. screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And we always put all the links in the show notes at screwthecommute.com. This would be episode 448. So screw the Metuchen slash four four eight and pick up a copy of our podcast app while you're at it. It's screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Hey, I'm really excited. I am passionate. I'm excited because I'm in the middle, almost ready to roll out our Go Fund Me program for this pilot program we're doing in my school to help educate people with physical disabilities. Oh my God, I'm excited. I got three great candidates as of this morning. More coming. And later this week, we're going to roll out to go fund me campaign. I'm going to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. I'm just freakin excited about it. So please keep your eye out, make sure you're on my mailing list and you'll get on there. If you grab this copy of this ebook and you'll hear announcements about the program and updates and see how the people are doing. And I'm encouraging people to go over to Facebook and putting encouraging words in for these folks that really help them change their entire life. So keep your eye out for that.

[00:03:26] All right. Let's get to the main event. So what the heck is a buyer's guide? Well, I'm sure you've all seen many of them and maybe didn't realize what you were looking at was a buyer's guide. A buyer's guide is usually a document or a Web page or even a video that helps you make a decision on which product or service to buy when you're looking to purchase something. Sometimes you may see it in the form of a comparison chart. Now, there are two types of buyer's guides, one focuses on a single product, either yours or an affiliate product that goes over all the features and benefits of that product or service. The other type of buyer's guide, it's more like a comparison chart, although it isn't always presented in chart format. Now it might simply be a listing of products and services along with a discussion of the product. And maybe even a pros and cons section is thrown in for each product, along with pricing and a link to where you can buy the product. Now, before we get into the details of creating and making money with buyer's guides, I want to bring up a very important point here. So you must not appear to be overly biased in your buyer's guide, and when I say guide, I really mean guides because you can have many of them on different products and services if you want it.

[00:05:00] And I do emphasize the word overly when I say overly biased, it's OK to be biased and admit that you're biased as long as you're showing people why your bias is good for them. For example, one of my buyers guides, it's made me the most money is well, I can't say the most money because I've got two completely different ones. But there's all been in the millions is the one I have on picking a shopping cart system that makes you money. I'm clearly biased towards this shopping cart and I get a great ongoing commission if you purchase it. And as of this morning, that buyer's guide has brought in nearly three point sixty five million dollars in anywhere from five to fifteen thousand dollars per month. Now, am I biased towards this shopping cart system? You bet I am. But here are some things that make this buyer's guide work. See, I used the cart myself and have for more than 19 years, many of the people looking at the buyer's guide have heard of me and know that I could buy and use any shopping cart system I wanted to. The readers of this guide are thinking, hey, if the cart wasn't any good would Tom be using it in his company? Well, no, I wouldn't. So this lends massive credibility to my enthusiastic endorsement of the card system. And by the way, I call it a system because it includes everything you need to sell up, sell, collect money, broadcast email, use autoresponder, responder's use, affiliate tracking, split testing coupons and a ton of other things successful online businesses need.

[00:06:58] And I cover shopping carts at screwthecommute.com/10 for episode 10. You always use the numbers when you're looking for a back episode. Anyway, if I've used it for all those years and still do, it must be good. Now, another anti bias element in the buyer's guide is a checklist of features that every good shopping cart system should have. See, for many years, people would come to me and say, Tom, why should I pay for kick start a car when this other car that I found does the same thing? Now, after reviewing over a hundred cards over years and and showing people that the car they were considering absolutely does not do everything they need. I finally got tired wasting time reviewing other cards. And I referred people to my buying guide checklist. So I said, here's the checklist of what a good car should do, take it to the other car that you're considering and see if it will do everything on the list. I can't tell you how many times the person would come back and say, yeah, you were right, Tom it won't do this or that or some other critical element needed to be successful online. When you invite people to check out competitors in your buying guide, you are sending a really confident message that what you have is superior and that's why they should buy your product or service rather than someone else's.

[00:08:36] So I've just mentioned two things that knocked down my obvious bias I use the cart myself and I invite them to compare it to other carts. Now I have a link in the show notes, screwthecommute.com/shoppingcart where you can download your own copy of. I have several names on it. So how to pick a shopping cart that makes you money is one. It's the same book as what's the other name? 34 things you need to know about e-commerce, shopping cart systems, this exact same book with a different title. So just copy it and plug in your own product or service. Now, I did this again with my mentor program. I have a 54 page buyer's guide called How to Invest in a Business Mentor program. And you can download that at screwthecommute.com/mentorprogram. Of course, like I said, this will all be in the show not. Now, in this case, I tell all the benefits of my program and I give a checklist of things to look for in a mentor program. Now, it's hard to tell how much money this document has brought in because I have so many ways to promote my mentor program, but it's definitely in the millions. Also, I have a short video on the mentor program page that shows you hundreds of other people I've helped over the years.

[00:10:03] So, again, that adds to the credibility. Now, I encourage you to download these two buyer's guides, one for my shopping cart and the other for my mentor program and make similar documents for yourself. OK, now let's talk about the other type of buyer's guides, where you put multiple products of your own or affiliate products, most of the time this is done with affiliate products. But there could be a situation where you have multiple products of your own and you're helping people make a decision of which one is right for them. Now, this part of this whole I mean, that's part of this whole process, you can't be just doing this for your own benefit or things will fall apart quickly. You must, and I emphasize must be doing this to help the prospective customer make a decision. That's right for them. Even if it means they don't buy from you. So an example of this is that someone comes to me and wants me to help them with local search for a local service business. Well, local search is a very specialized field and it doesn't interest me. I'm always trying to get people to think globally so people around the world can send them money, not just somebody in your local area. I always use the example of the local ice cream shop that pulls from maybe five miles at the most, ten from any direction.

[00:11:40] Well, they could make a digital eBay or an ebook on, you know, how to make an ice cream cake and sell it all around the world at 97 percent profit. That would bring in way more money than they could ever make in a local ice cream shop. All right, so that's the way I think. So I'm not an expert in local search. It wouldn't be right for me to take their money, even though I could bone up quickly on local search and give them a snow job. And I'm certainly going to know more than them about it. But I really have no track record or deep experience on local search. So it's in their best interest that I send them elsewhere. Yeah, I could go for the short term money, but in the long run this would hurt my reputation and probably not yield them the results they need. So for long term success. Make sure you're always thinking in terms of what's good for them, not you, when making a buyer's guide. OK, now in buyers guides with multiple products of others to be legitimate, you have to do some work to actually review the product. Including what you liked and what you didn't like about the product. See if your reviews are all rosy for every product or service, you will not appear credible and people will go elsewhere to get a more honest review and they'll purchase through the buyer's guide of somebody else that appears more honest about the reviews.

[00:13:20] So if you're not honest, you probably won't get the sale. Now, it only makes sense that if you get an affiliate commission for any product you review in your buyer's guide, there's no reason to be extra rosy about any particular product. Whichever product they pick, you get paid. Yeah, some of them may pay a little more than others in commissions, but. But that extra money will be negated with less clicks if people perceive you're not being honest. Also, keep in mind, you must give notice in the buyer's guide that you may get a commission from things you review, that's no big deal. It's very common. Now, people people kind of get that, but it's up to you to put it in there. That's a legal thing now. Another point is that you don't necessarily have to name what you've created by a buyer's guy, I haven't used that term in mind, but it doesn't hurt if you do and people will recognize and respond to that term if you do use that in the title. Here's an example, the ultimate buying guide to camping tents or something like that. And just for the heck of it, as I prepared this episode at seven or eight a.m., I typed in kitchen cabinet buying guide. You can go ahead and Google the same thing or any random thing you you think you might like to buy. And you'll most likely see all kinds of examples of buying guides.

[00:14:57] Yeah, there was a bunch of cabinet ones in there. So start looking more closely at buyer's guides and consider making some of your own. I think you'll find it can bring you a lot of money, either selling your own products or bringing you lots of affiliate commissions. And if you need help with any of this, plus the other myriad things, you need to be successful online. You know, I've been selling online 27 years and living this Internet lifestyle. And I'll tell you what my resume looks like best because I've done so darn many thing when you're not sitting in traffic making somebody else rich, which is the name of this podcast, screw the commute. So if you. Would like help with this, check out my mentor program, hey, you're going to get the buying guide that shows you all the stuff in it. I don't need to run my mouth on this episode about it. Go look at it. And, hey, if you want help, I'm here for you. And also, please, please, please, please, please contribute to the the pilot program we're doing for persons with disabilities, because we are going to change some lives. And then I'm taking a grant writing course when I can prove that this works. I'm going to roll this out big and help lots and lots of people because that's my mission in life.

[00:16:16] OK, everybody, I will catch you all on the next episode. See you later.

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