462 – More questions answered: Tom talks Ask me a Question

Episode 462 – Ask Me A Question
[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 four hundred and sixty two of Screw the Commute podcast. It looks like this is Ask Me a question week because he got loads of questions coming in. And so I thought I'd knock a bunch of them out yesterday and today or not yesterday, day before yesterday, I guess the day before I answered questions about clubhouse and calendars and new image formats and Facebook boosting ads, spell checking a website, a big rant about Cry-Baby marketers. And I did do a big rant and how to improve the sound of your podcast. So did all that the other day. That was on episode 461. And today we'll get into it here in a minute. But make sure you grab a copy of our podcast app. As always, screwthecommute.com/app and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet. There's all kinds of fun stuff and then grab a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. I guarantee you you'll thank me if you just do a little bit of what it says. I mean, one tip has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes over the years. All right. So just allows you to do really, really automate your business.

[00:01:40] So grab a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and then please help us and support us with our Go Fund Me campaign that's putting five disabled people through our school so that not only can they learn without all the hassles of travel and to class, but they can legitimately be hired from home. I mean, these are people with mobility and sight problems that, you know, it takes them three hours to do something that takes us a person without disabilities, you know, a few minutes. So, so really want to help them out. So go to IMTCVA.org/disabilities and at the top, well, you can see all the stuff on that page about how we help folks with disabilities. But at the top is to go fund me campaign because we're going to hire people to help run the program for the persons with disabilities. So I really love your help with that. It's a really great program and it's going to change their lives.

[00:02:41] All right. Let's get into the main event. These are questions I have gotten recently.

[00:02:46] Can I use my domain name through Gmail? Well, yes, you can, and I almost always want you to be using your domain name for your email, whether it be through your Web host or Gmail or Microsoft Exchange. Now, you probably need a geek to do this for you because you could mess up some settings in some settings. You probably most people wouldn't even know where to find him or get him. But anyway, yes, you can. And yes, you should. Now, I just mentioned Microsoft Exchange. Now this is where your email is synchronized on all your devices. I'll tell you how I got onto this years ago. I was complaining to my geeks here in the office that. You know, I'd be working all week and then I doing emails, all this stuff, and then I'd have to go do a speaking engagement on the weekend somewhere, take my laptop. Well, my laptop didn't have all the emails that I had on my desktop. And I would do emails on the road and then I'd come back and then it would take hours to synchronize these giant files, they were called and then I'm scared to death to use my laptop because it's going to unsynchronized everything again if I start using my desktop. I mean, just the mess. So I'm complaining about this. And so the geeks came back with a thing called Microsoft Exchange where all the emails go to this exchange service. You can hire this, you can go directly to Microsoft and hire it fairly cheaply. And then my email is synchronized everywhere on my cell phones, tablets, laptop, desktop, multiple desktops. So that's called Microsoft Exchange. So if you're having that problem of keeping synchronized on your website, email or, you know, stuff with your domain name in it, you don't have to fool with this for Gmail or AOL or anything. But if you really want your email going through your own website and so forth, this is how you synchronize it everywhere.

[00:04:55] All right. Next question. What's a good length for an ebook? Oh, man. I get this question all the time because, you know, I sell thousands and thousands of ebooks and we have an e-book mastermind. We run every so often, too. So watch for that announcement of that. So it's a 12 week course, basically, but the question is always, well, how long should it be? Well, all right, well, here's a couple of things with regard to that. No. One is the length of your e-book can be varied easily with the size of the font, the white space, the graphics and so forth. So you can vary it quite a bit from, you know, compact to larger. I mean, you could turn a 30 page book into a 50 page book just because of the things I just mentioned. But I don't even want you thinking in those terms anyway. What I want you to think in terms of is how can I make this book so great that people will say, wow, I can't believe I got so much value for so little money. That's what you want. It's not the length of it. It's it's the value that you give the people. Now, I'll give one caveat there. If it's a very short and, you know, I'm subjective here, but if it was 10 or 15 pages, something like that, here's your tip and you're perfectly welcome to sell those things. I've paid as much as one hundred and eighty three dollars for an 18 page report one time from marketingsherpa.com, I think it was called. It was some report on the state of email marketing industry. But notice I didn't say I bought a book on it. I said I bought a report on it. So if your document is is fairly short, don't call it a book. Call it a white paper, call it a special report. Call it an article. All of those are perfectly or that I say white paper. I can't remember. All those are perfectly legitimate to sell. But if you call it a book and it's very short, you'll get immediate bad reviews and that's going to kill the whole project. So don't worry about the link. Make it the greatest you possibly can and the length will take care of itself and go overboard. Put put a glossary in the back. If that makes sense for your book, you're clickable index in the front, keeps you from having to index the book. But you know, the books will have a search function also so people can search out different stuff. But you can put more graphics in, make sure you put captions if you put the graphics in, so your book will expand, expand, expand. There's no limit to it. There are no parameters. Like if a printed book say so, you can just keep loading stuff in there as much as you want to make sure that people feel like, wow, I got such great value checklist of things, resources. And and here's the thing, folks. Your resources can be profit centers. Many of the resources could be affiliate links or links to either your your other products and services say. So it helps people to put them all in one place. Now, I do suggest that you spread the resources or affiliate links or your other products throughout the book. Don't just only put them on one resource pages or page or pages at the end, because if there's too many in one place, a lot of times people will get confused and do nothing. So putting them in the book strategically and talking and building them up while they're in the book at the place there in the book where people are concentrating on one link, that's a better way to make money. It's still OK to list them at the end of the book so that if people said I really wanted to do that one thing, but I can't remember where it was in the book, well, they can just go to the resource page and just skim down through and find it real quick, but I don't suggest putting it only on a resource page.

[00:09:05] So anyway, keep thinking about it. Here's the other thing about what I just said about your attitude is make the book so great. Well, nowadays, a lot of times I get I mean, I'm a pretty hard worker both day and night holidays. I don't care. However, sometimes I don't even bother writing a sales letter because I know that I can put out a book and just tell somebody about it in an email to my big email list that knows me and knows my reputation of putting out good stuff. So I don't have to write a forty page sales letter to tell people all the details. Now, it doesn't hurt. And yes, I go ahead and do it usually. But if I'm in a hurry to just get the book out and get sales coming in, a lot of times I'll just put it in an email they can buy directly from the email with a little bit of copy with the title and a few bullet points of what they'll get out of it. And because of the reputation I've built, I've given high quality people. A whole bunch of people will just buy it like instantly. And then later on I can, you know, make a sales letter for people that don't know me and. So forth, so so I know I went off on that one, but quit worrying about length other than the fact if it's too short, don't call it a book.

[00:10:20] OK, Tom I've heard you say something about email addresses and Ecourses on one of your other podcasts. What were you talking about? Well, I'm pretty sure what you mean is, is that I talk about in the course of being a good, you know, lead magnet, ethical bribe freebie, that kind of thing, to get people to opt in to your email list. So when I was talking about if this is what you were referring to. Was that an Ecourse, if you remind people at the sign up area that. Something like this, put your best email in so you don't miss any parts of the course. All right. Because when people have just a one time freebie, a PDF file or audio or video or something like that. Frequently I do it myself, they'll put in a throwaway email address that they never check other than to go grab that one freebie. So if you remind them that they're going to miss and have to go grab, you know, I mean, you're implying that don't put your crappy email address in that you don't ever check. And that's what you're implying by saying put your best email address in so you don't miss any parts of the E course. You will get a higher quality list of people because that's their best email address. Not everybody will do it, but just reminding people a good percentage will.

[00:11:56] And that's making your list better because it'll be emails that people actually check rather than throw away emails for just one time download. So that's I believe that's what you were talking about. OK, what's the next question? What's the difference between a coaching program and a mentor program? Well, largely, it has something to do with just terminology. I want to go into that a little bit deeper so you understand what I'm talking about. I have been railing against the term coaching for many, many years. And the reason that I'm railing against the term coaching is because. Every lowlife that never did a thing in their life wants to be your life coach. OK, and and I'll say that I'm not trying to step on the toes of any really professional coaches that are really competent and really caring, you know, but a lot of people get into coaching because they just think it's an easy buck. And it is in many cases, if you hoodwink people into that, you have more expertise and you really do and you don't really care that they get any success now. So I don't like that. So term mentor, mentor was the trusted advisor to Odysseus in Greek mythology. And it's I'd rather be a trusted advisor than a coach. It seems. It just has a feel of a higher level relationship. Now, the reality of it is, is. A mentor program could be run exactly like a coaching program, a coaching program could be run exactly like a mentor program and anything in between.

[00:13:51] So a coaching program may have a certain number of features. Well, the mentor program might have the exact same features or it might have more or it might have less. It just depends on how you run your program. Very few of you are ever going to match my mentor program, because I've been running 23 years and 7500 students and all these fancy, you know, immersion weekend in this retreat center and, you know, TV studio time and one on one attention for a year, you know, this is this is serious in my life. I've devoted a great portion of my life to this, to helping other entrepreneurs. And I you know, I don't have any kids and so forth. So, I mean, this is really my baby. I got my dogs, of course. So the difference is, is there isn't any difference because of the name coaching or mentor. It's what you call it, you're still going to run it however you decide to run your coaching. All right. So so that's the only difference, is that the mentor thing, I think, has a perceived value much higher than the term coach, although everybody understands the term coach, but not everybody understands the more rampant. Number of fraudulent, what I would call fraudulent coaches that are not qualified to be helping anybody.

[00:15:18] All right, so that's my take on that. All right. Next question, what is a Google Web story? Well, hopefully you're familiar with stories on Facebook and Instagram, these are the vertical things that only there for 24 hours and you can have different pains in your in your campaign, as your story could have. When I say Paines, I'm not and it hurts. I'm saying that windows that show up or graphics or videos that show up where people can go from one to the next. And so they really are highly, highly popular, highly popular. So I don't know about a year ago, I mean, it's not been very well known to this point, but it's getting a little easier. But Google and I think I mentioned that. Yeah, that this Facebook and Instagram kind of stories are only up for 24 hours and then disappear. Or you can save them in another in a thing on Instagram and that kind of stuff. But but typically they're for 24 hours. So Google Web stories are basically Web pages built using a format called AMP accelerated mobile pages. And they cut they're basically Web pages on your website that look like stories that people are used to seeing and Facebook and Instagram. But you have a lot more things you can do with them because you can run ads on them, you can use them as ads, you can put affiliate links in a lot of things that are restricted in certain ways on Facebook and Instagram stories.

[00:17:09] You can do whatever you darn well please. It's on your Web site. Now, there are plug ins for WordPress that assist you in making Google Web stories. Other than that, you got to go to like Google document developers stuff, the geek stuff, you know, so I would try I think there's one major one put out by Google, a plug in for WordPress. Just put in the search for Google Web story, WordPress, plug in Google Web story, WordPress plug in. I'll take you right there, install it. And I'm sure there's YouTube videos showing you how to use it. So that's something that's said. It's been around, I think, about a year, but he just hasn't caught on. I mean, and I don't know if it'll be here forever because Google has a history of, you know, making features. And then if they fizzle, they just get rid of them, just like Google Plus is an example of that. So so I think it's worth looking into. I'm going to certainly look into it because I do get good response on my Facebook and Instagram stories. So no reason not to try this. All right. Next question. What does disqualifying mean? Well, I'm going to assume that you've heard me talk about paid advertisement. And specifically, pay per click PPC, or sometimes you see it, CPC cost per click. And that's that's like how much you pay per click pay per PPC is the generic term for somebody clicks on your ad you pay.

[00:18:52] So disqualifying in in that light is and I don't hardly talk about disqualifying other than. Advertising, so I'm assuming that's what you mean, so disqualifying means when you are paying per click. You want to do everything in your power to get people not to click. OK, that sounds like oh, that's kind of ridiculous, Tom. Well, it is in some ways. In that the more clicks you get on your ad, the cheaper your ad is. So that's the opposite of what I just said. However, you don't want to pay for people that are just click crazy, that are never going to buy anything. And I'm going to give you some examples of this, the disqualifying people, so you want to get them not to click. An example would be, let's say that you had a beginning gardening course. You would not want a really experienced gardener that, you know, that puts their roses in rose shows or, I don't know, road rose Bush shows, I don't. Because I mean, gardening, I don't know why I picked this example, because I've killed every plant that ever came near me. So you would not want a an experienced gardener to buy your course because. They're going to get it up. First of all, they'll click and you had to pay for that click. They're going to purchase the course either online or if it's physical, whatever, they're going to get it and say, oh, man, this is I knew this when I was in kindergarten.

[00:20:42] Kindergarden, gardening, I guess. And they're going to return it, so you're going to go through all that hassle, if it's digital, they don't really have to ship it back. They just own it without. Paying for it because they're going to get a refund from you, so you paid to get them there, you paid for the hassle of delivery if you had to deliver it and you gave them their money back in the long run. Well, how long is that going to last? You know, how much money are you going to make doing that? Right. So if you were going to disqualify the person, you would say in your ads, something like for beginners only have the best roses on your block, you know, or something like that. But now all the experienced people are just going to skip the ad. They're not going to bother clicking. There have nothing to do with it because they feel that they're advanced. And that way you don't pay for that click. So now disqualifying like for YouTube in stream ads, you know, the ones that you can click skip button. Well, in that case, I might say, hey, go ahead and click that skip button if you're not interested in blah, blah, blah. But if you are, stick it out.

[00:21:58] I'm going to tell you this great stuff. So I encourage them in many of those ads to click the skip button if they're not interested and get back to the video they wanted to watch and those kinds of things that I'm disqualifying them or I'm getting them to disqualify themselves so I don't have to pay because if they go 30 seconds, you know, if the ads longer than 30 seconds and they watch more than 30 seconds, I got to pay. And if they're not interested, I want them to click that darn skip button so that I don't have to pay. All right. Next question is, what is anchor text while anchor text is part of your web design? I'll say that, and it's also part of search engine optimization. And if you're a little doggie in the background, I got a rescue dog here that's getting acclimated. The way this plays out is let's say you have a really long link to your product. It's really weird looking with a bunch of numbers and question marks in it and stuff like that. Or maybe you have an affiliate link that's like that and you don't want to display that on your Web page. Well, what you do is you type the text that you want people to say, and then you go insert hyperlink and then the text will be there in a little box. But the link that the text goes to, when they click on it, you'll paste in there the youngest ugly looking link.

[00:23:28] Then on the Web page or in an e-mail, HTML email, they'll see click here or they'll see. Visit our site or they'll see I use a command and a benefit usually. So click here to get standing ovations around the world, things like that. So the anchor text is the text that they read, but it's connected to the link if when they click on it to where they're going to end up either in your shopping cart or to another Web page in your site, click here to read more about this topic. Boom. It takes them to a more in-depth article. So that's anchor text, as on your Web site or in an email. Now, with regard to search engine optimization, text anchor text. Is seen by the search engine spiders, so you want to put key words in the anchor text whenever possible, as long as it makes sense for the visitor and the search engine, see that and give it a little boost in the ranking of what the page is about, because the the anchor text stands out. You can all I mean, other things you can do on a page is bold something make the font bigger. You can use an H1 or heading one tag or heading to tag. These are other ways you can do it. But anchor text is kind of in that ilk that the search engine spiders see the text and it helps them decide what your page is about.

[00:25:03] So it helps with that SEO and it also makes the page look nicer. Now, one thing about that, if if the links aren't really crazy long, weird looking, I don't always use anchor text and here's why. If I feel like somebody may print this page out. Well, if it was anchor text, they can't see the link under it where the link went. So if it's just something like screwthecommute.com/viral for my viral ebook, I'm just going to put that on the page. That way, if somebody prints it out or gives it to somebody else and prints it, they know where that link goes rather than click here to have viral traffic. Well, then if they print the page out, they can't see where the link was going. So if it's a simple link. I put it on the page by itself, clickable, if it's a complex link with all kinds of weird stuff I buried under anchor text. OK, next question is, I've heard the term heightmap. What does that mean? Well, you can get services online, some free, some paid, some free trials that will look at your Web page and they'll see where people use their mouse on your page the most and that'll light up red. And maybe the lesser places where the mouse goes is yellow and maybe where they hardly ever go is blue.

[00:26:36] You know, red is hot. Heat map write code is blue. And that's frequently the color scheme that they use. They'll even look at each link on your page. Now, you can do this with our shopping cart, too, but this is just another service that'll do it for you. It'll show on the number of people that hit the page. How many people, what percentage of the people clicked on the different links on the page. And it'll read it right out for you. So you'll see this. You'll see your website with this overlay of the heat map with the red and yellow and blue and different colors. Just make sure you use whatever service you use and you use their color code to make sure you're you're not doing the opposite. Know that you think that people are quick in one place and they're never clicking there. Make sure you use their color code. But it's usually red is heat. And then on all the links, there'll be a little percentage of the percentage of people that clicked on that link and every link has its percentage. And it gives you a lot of insights about your website and changes that you can make, so maybe you see some important piece of information is in a cold area not getting clicked on. Well, maybe you move that to a hotter area and see what happens, you know, so it gives you a lot and maybe certain links, like we just talked about anchor text, maybe certain anchor text was getting way more clicks than other anchor text.

[00:28:12] Well, then you would go ahead and make the changes to the ones getting the most clicks for you, that kind of thing. So that's what heat maps are. You can just type in heat map service and you'll have loads of companies to pick from. All right, so that's a bunch more questions, people seem to like these, so I'll do them frequently if if people like them better. I just want to remind everybody before you leave about our crowdfunding campaign for disabled folks that put them through school, you'll really be helping to change people's lives. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. And then at the top of the page is the go fund. You quickly go fund me link and you can see the pictures that are in of people in the program so far and a description of the whole program. And please, whatever you can throw in is appreciated. If you're really flush with cash, 15 grand will get you a pic of a student of your own. It's so and also we're going to be using the money to hire some disabled people to help run the program. So anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I will catch you all on the next episode. See ya later.

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