468 – And our listener questions just keep coming: Tom talks Ask me a Question

Episode 468 – 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 sixty eight of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm really back at you with a bunch of ask me a question stuff. I mean, I got like I said, I got hundreds of questions. I could have done the entire four hundred and sixty eight episodes on. Ask me a question. I wanted to when you were around. As long as I am you get to ask a lot of questions. So last episode was Episode 467. That was asked me a question where I talked about handling large amounts of email. What podcasters are doing wrong, independent contractors versus employees. What's a Schedule C in your tax code? Car expenses, hottest trends in my workflow. So so we're going to get into a whole bunch of new stuff today. Now, how would you like me to send you big checks? Well, or pay or whatever? Well, get into my affiliate program. It's a referral program where you referral refer my products and services. And if somebody buys, you get a commission and it can be anywhere from eight dollars and fifty cents to in excess of five thousand dollars. So this can be this can really make somebody whole salary for a year if they were doing this. Email me if you're interested at Tom@screwthecommute.com and I'll give you details.

[00:01:46] Now, pick up a copy of our automation ebook. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. This will make you lightning fast if you implement even some of the things in there. It has cell phone techniques and and all kinds of ways that I am lightning fast taking care of customers and they love it and getting back to prospects so that they spend money with me and not somebody else say. So grab a copy of that book and while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. And you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now, I'm in the middle of this crowdfunding campaign, by the way, anybody that contributes gets a copy of my new crowdfunding book that will be out probably within a week. And this is where you can get the money for projects and not have to pay it back. So I wanted to have a project to help people with disabilities and also to hire people with disabilities to run the project. So I started to go fund me, campaign for it. I mean, I put a couple million dollars into my school and never took a nickel out and all the money goes to salaries and running the programs and all that stuff. So. So I wanted to do this.

[00:03:09] And I'm also taking a grant writing course so that when I prove that I can help these people with disabilities get hired and study and get a profession, then I'm going to roll it out much bigger. But I need your help on the Go Fund Me campaign. So go to IMTCVA.org/disabilities and then you can click on the Go Fund Me campaign and see all about it. See some of the people that are in it already and, and anything you contribute is great and we appreciate it and they appreciate it. And if you're really flush with cash, you might want to sponsor a person by yourself. How about that? That would be that's almost like putting your name on a library at a school, you know, so you'd really be doing some great things.

[00:03:59] All right. Let's get to the main event. So questions. How do I increase my sales per customer? Well, this is a topic that we call up selling. And virtually all campaigns that you see me do that aren't big, super big ticket products. You see me do an up sell. Now, at up sell isn't offering you cheap product and an expensive product and you pick that's you could do that. But that's not what we're talking about here. And by the way. 30 to 50 percent of the people go for the up cells every time I do it, and it's an enormous extra amount of money, the way you structure it is, is you.

[00:04:43] I like to use the example of, let's say somebody was going to buy a new suit and they allotted 600 dollars to buy a suit. And so when they went in to go for the suit. The salesperson said, hey, anybody buys a suit today, gets shirts and ties, half price. Or two for one or whatever. So there's a formula here, and I guarantee you 30 to 50 percent of the people would go for that deal if they went in to buy a suit. Now, the other way around doesn't work so well, you run into by a tie because you spilled gravy on it and you got to do a speech and they say, hey, anybody buys a tie today, we give you a, you know, six hundred dollars off an eighteen hundred dollar cashmere suit. It's they're not going to go from a tie to spending. Twelve hundred dollars now, maybe one person out of a thousand would, but not very many. So the formula is, is you you have an up sell that after the person makes the first purchase decision on the main product. This is the way it works, folks. So somebody decided there's they're going to spend six hundred dollars on a suit and they're in there getting fitted for it. And so if you offer a related product, shirts and ties, obviously related to a suit.

[00:06:06] And make it a deal. You will get 30 to 50 percent of the people going for it. So you got to take your whatever your main product is and they have to make that purchase decision before they even know about the up sell. And then they make the first purchase decision, put it in the cart. And that's when the cart and you got to have a good cart to do this, like KickStartCart. And it offers them the up sell, which is a related product to whatever their main product was, and it's a deal. You know, add this to your cart and save a whopping 28 dollars or whatever, the discount prices. And 30 to 50 percent of the people go for it, and never in 23 years I've been doing this, I probably wasn't doing it 23 years because the technology wasn't there. And it taught me about 20 years ago. Never once has it been less than 30 percent and frequently it's 50 percent or more. All right, so that's upselling and that's how you get more money out of the same number of people we call. You want fries with that?

[00:07:14] So and then I had another question related to this. So I put it right, right here for you. Question was, what are bundled offers? Well, this is a little different way to upscale people. This is where you you can take several of your products and put them together as a bundle for one price that's cheaper than if the person bought them individually.

[00:07:41] But it's way more than if they just bought one of the products. And again, good shopping carts will do this. But that's why I harp on KickStartCart that I've been using myself for 20 some years because it does this kind of stuff. So that's another way to upscale is to bundle several products together and put one price on it. That's higher than any individual, but cheaper than buying all three separately. OK, so that's that.

[00:08:10] All right, next question, what is Glancey bull marketing? They heard this on a marketing email or something? Well, first of all, let me tell you what it relates to. I did a whole episode, I don't remember what number it is offhand here on readability of your website, one of the biggest mistakes I see is people have the text too wide. It looks like a tennis match trying to read the text. They have too much dense text that fills up your whole cell phone, two or three screens because they didn't bother to make really short paragraphs. And white space in between them, like, for instance, we we try to tell you no more than two or three brief sentences per paragraph, don't worry about getting away from your English teacher. That's OK. But if it's especially on the screen or on a cell phone, it's harder to read than if it was in a book or or on a piece of paper.

[00:09:12] So. You want people to instantly be able to hear, first of all, want to, because if it looks too hard to read, people are half morons now, is it? Is they you know, they they don't know how to read and write and and as it is and you can't if you make it harder on them, they're never going to read your stuff. So you put all this effort into this beautiful bio about yourself and all your CV and your nobody's going to read it. All right. So you have to really abbreviate stuff, make it shorter with whitespace and all that, so. With all that being said, glancing blow means that. The instant somebody hits your website, they should be able to tell what it's about, even with a tag line or because of the design of it or the graphics or something. And that's what glanceable marketing is in a half a second or less. People instantly know what whether they want to be there or not. Now, this contributes to what called a bounce rate. But the thing is, that is offset by the people that are interested staying because they instantly knew it was for them and it made them want to look deeper into your site, say so. Yes, your bounce rate could be high. See, bounce rates really high don't really mean anything. That just means somebody hit your side. Now, if you were paying per click to get somebody their bounce rate, do me something because you're targeting the wrong people or you're targeting the right people.

[00:10:47] But the wrong message when they hit your page or it's not glancing before it's too hard to read or whatever. So glance, which means you've got to grab them within, you know, sometimes a millisecond where they see instantly that they should be there. And if they see instantly, they shouldn't be. Well, that's going to create a higher bounce rate. But who cares? The ones that do see it will stay. What's the worst thing that could happen? The people that are really interested leave anyway because you didn't make a glancing blow and easy to read. They so you lose everybody in. Okay, so I'd rather have one person out of 500 stay and buy a bunch of stuff. Then zero people out of 500 leave instantly say, OK, that's glanceable marketing.

[00:11:42] All right, next question, Tom do you believe in text marketing? Well, that's a yes and no answer to this question. I'll tell you, though, my history with it is years ago when it was first coming out, I mean, you know, I don't do anything when it just comes out, but it wasn't too long, maybe a year or so after it was available to people. In other words, sending bulk text to people, because I had loads and loads of phone numbers of actual customers, not not even not prospects. These are actual customer.

[00:12:19] So. I started texting them with marketing messages and I and I didn't really go overboard with it because I knew that that's, you know, on the edge of being intrusive. So I think they had to opt in for it even or something at the time, they had to give permission to do it. Yeah, that's the way it was. And plus, you had to pay per message. I think it was 10 cents a message or something. Yes. So it's not something you play around with as much as you would with email. So when I quit doing it was when I start getting complaints that, hey, Tom, I was just getting on a plane and your text came in and I stopped and it just caused all kinds of hassle. Stop doing this. And they had opted into it in the first place. But still, they found that it was too annoying for them. So I quit doing it and I haven't done it since. Doesn't mean I wouldn't. And here's why. Because on the Yes. Side of it. You know, people were more used to this, and they're always with their cell phones every second and they're on them all day long doing God knows how many things. So if they opted in to some type of program where they knew that all of the information was going to come by text, I'm perfectly fine with it. I would be happy. I mean, I get texts from my bank.

[00:13:46] I get I'd rather have a text than a phone call any day because I hardly ever answer the phone anymore, because the robo calls. So a text at least I can glance again. Glance at all. I can glance at it, see if it's something important. If it is great, I respond to it by text instantly, faster. I mean enormously fast. Rather than having the phone somebody and get voicemail and then they play phone tag with you and then you get them on the phone and you know, and I'm as personable as the next person. All right. Believe it or not. But you got to go through all the niceties and it took 15 minutes to do something that should have taken 20 seconds. Say so. So I'm all for text stuff, but if they know it's a text based program that they are going to be getting their information from you through text and they agree to it and you tell them how many texts they're going to get. So, you know, somebody might agree to to text a week and they wouldn't agree to text the day, you know, so you have to be real clear with them. But, yes, I believe in it because they're going to get through they're not filtered with email filters and all that stuff. So, yes, I like it. But be careful that you don't just start doing it and annoying people. I don't mind annoying a few people, but, you know, if you're clearly doing something over the edge that they didn't agree to do, then don't do it.

[00:15:15] OK, next question. Do membership sites still work? Well, I have a bunch of them. They're still working. Amazingpublicspeaking.com, brutalselfdefense.com, greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, copywriting901.com. Now, here's one kind of I don't know if it's advanced. It's just a kind of a technique that you can use. Because some of these things that I do are actually just online courses, but. I changed the terminology in and you'll have to test this to see if this makes sense for you or works for you, but I change the terminology in some of them to say this is a lifetime membership. It's just an online course that they have access to forever, but lifetime membership for one fee is a pretty good marketing ploy, say, and one of them amazing public speaking, is ninety seven dollars a year. And that breaks down into some really small amount of money per month to have four hundred and seventy five training videos on professional speaking. And, you know, so that's like the first day it went live, brought in thirteen thousand dollars. So yes, membership sites though still work and you can even do a bad job and they still work. I wrote an article one time when there's 20 equal 24000. Let's say you had a membership site with only 100 hundred members. And that's about as pitiful as you can get with the size of this world and how many people are on, OK, so let's say it was only twenty dollars a month.

[00:17:03] So twenty dollars a month, times one hundred is 2000 dollars a month, times 12, you just created a 24000 dollar a year cash flow from some of the worst performances that you ought to be embarrassed to tell anybody. OK, so and then what if you had two hundred members, you just exceeded the average income of a U.S. citizen. You're now at forty eight thousand dollars a year for two hundred members at twenty dollars a month say so. It doesn't take much to be successful with membership site. As long as you have a topic that's not so weird and obscure that you can't get any members or it's so super competitive, you can't get any members. But membership sites, yes, they still do work. One of the things you can try is if you have an online course has changed the name to a lifetime membership and see if that helps you sell more.

[00:18:04] OK, let's see. Next question is, how do you charge for consultation? Well, first of all, I don't really like quote. Straight out paid consultation. Now, let me tell you why and, well, first of all, I'll tell you how much I charge a thousand dollars an hour with the three hour minimum. That's pretty, pretty steep, and there's people who charge more than that, but not many.

[00:18:33] Why do I do that? Well, because I don't want the business and here's why, and it's not that I don't like the money. Yeah, I do, but I don't like the results of this. And let me explain this. When somebody comes to me and they know my reputation, know what I'm capable of and they say, Tom, I have this problem, can you fix it? And if it's Internet related, professional speaking, related, entrepreneurship related, chances are the answer is absolutely, yes, I could fix it. But here's the problem. Most people don't know, have no clue of all the other things that are wrong that they don't know about, and so they come with what they think is one problem. And if I fix that problem, which I could. That doesn't mean that the other 40 problems that they have is going to make them be successful, because as soon as I get into looking at the mess they've created, I know that they need 40 things fixed. And if I took their money to fix that one problem and fix it, they still would be unhappy. They'd badmouth me. We gave Tom all this money and we're still not doing anything and they blame me for it. Well, it's not worth it to me to to hurt my reputation because they don't know what they're doing. So I make the money so high to discourage them. And then I try to channel them into my mentor program, which gives me a year to address and even even get them to understand the all these other problems that they have so that we can do something about it over the course of a year.

[00:20:17] I mean, doesn't always take a year, but the thing is, some people come to me with these messes. I'm telling you, I mean, this recently this one person came to me. They had one hundred and forty four broken links on their website that hadn't been addressed for years. They had plug ins out the wazoo that hadn't been updated and were just dead. And I mean, one of them, one lady had forty three plug ins gone and I don't know, maybe six or seven of them were active. The rest of them were just security risks. So I get people coming to me with all kinds of messes that they've created. So you have to be careful that in your field, if somebody comes to you for one specific thing and then you fix it and you do a great diligent job and they still rag on you because you didn't see all the other mess that they had created, that's keeping them from being successful. So I charge a whole lot for and still, when I charge that much, I tell them, are you sure you don't want? Because I've identified all these other problems. Are you ready to fix them when they agree to it? I'll take their money, but I'll tell you, it doesn't happen very often.

[00:21:27] Most of the time they either leave saying that they got a bigger mess than they realized or they joined a mentor program where I can fix it over time and teach them a lot of stuff. All right, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it now, hope you help me out on this crowdfunding campaign and go to IMTCVA.org/disabilities and we'll have that in the show notes. But you can really help change somebody's life. I mean, some of these people for I mean, just for me to jump in the car and go down to the 7-Eleven, I'm there and back in 15 minutes. Sometimes it would take one of these some of these people an hour just to get ready to get into a vehicle that they could either drive or they couldn't drive. To go to 7-Eleven. So they've been dealt a hand that's much more difficult than than I have been and and I want to help, I want to do something about it and really change people's lives. But I do need your help on this project. And you can be part of something really, really big, really, really good, and something you can really be proud of. So so check it out. Anything you put in is fine. And if you're interested in sponsoring a person and you're flush with cash, let me know. We'll put it together for you. All right. Catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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