501 – More stellar questions from our Grab Bag: Tom talks Ask Me a Question

Episode 501 – 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 five hundred and one of Screw the commute podcast. Today, we're going to do another session of Ask Me a question. You know, I could probably have done all five hundred of these episodes with ask me a question, because there's so many facets to online marketing and offline marketing and publicity and entrepreneurship and all the stuff that I've been into for all these years. But anyway, this would be an asked me a question. Now, I hope you didn't miss Episode 500. That was our special edition Antion success method. It's a little bit longer episode, but there's lots of gems in there that came pretty much from what I learned from my father over many years. And if you happen to be listening to this today, we're keeping the 50 percent off sale good that was supposed to end yesterday, but we're going to extend it through tonight. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/resources. Now, how would you like me to send your big affiliate commissions? Well? Email me at Tom@Screwthecommute.com And I'll give you details on how you can make big commissions, referring my products and services. And we hardly ever get refunds because we take care of customers around here.

[00:01:40] So you don't have to worry about getting complaints from people when you deal with us, so. Email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com. We'll give you details now. Pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And this book has helped me save millions and millions, literally millions and millions of keystrokes and handle customers lightning fast. And that's why we have such a good reputation and allows me to ethically steal customers from other people who are too slow to get back to prospects. You know, if you get back fast, you have the greater chance of making the business say so you've got to take care of people, so grab a copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now we'd really love your help with our pilot program to help persons with disabilities. We are putting scholarship folks through my school, so not only can they learn from a distance school, they can legitimately be hired from a distance school and and or start their own business. So once I put about five people through and get them hired or get them in their own business, then I've been taking I took a grant writing course.

[00:03:14] I'm going to go big and get some big money from some big companies to help loads and loads of persons with disabilities. So, please help out with that. We're doing a Go Fund Me campaign, and part of the money is going to be used to hire persons with disabilities to help run the program. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and click on the Go Fund Me campaign and you can see updates from the people. They're very inspiring these people that are that are in the program currently.

[00:03:49] All right, let's get to the main event. So first question comes, Tom, I want to start a membership site. What should I do? Well, I mean, of course, first of all, you've got to make sure you've got a topic that anybody wants. All right, that'd be the first thing. But if you're talking about the mechanics of doing it, here's here's the thing you can pay a lot of money a hundred two hundred three hundred four hundred dollars a month or more. For turnkey membership sites now, you still have to load it with information, you know, so it's just the mechanics of it. So I, you know, with my frugal background, there's just no way I want to do that. I want maximum profits with minimum expense doesn't mean minimum quality. It means minimum expense. So we put together membership sites, we use WordPress, which is the gold standard of of websites, don't let anybody tell you anything different because they just don't know any better.

[00:04:53] With a plug in called WishList Member, I think that cost you about one hundred and fifty dollars. You can buy a lifetime membership too, but about one hundred and fifty dollars a year. And then a couple other small plug ins for 40 or 50 bucks to automate everything. And yeah, it's a little more hassle in the beginning to set it up. I agree. But if you can save, you know, let's say you were paying three hundred dollars a month for some turnkey thing, that's three thousand six hundred dollars a year instead of one hundred and fifty. I don't think you're making good decisions if you make those kind of financial decisions when you can have the same quality with a little bit more effort on the startup end and then multiply that by years, you know, 10 years you got thirty six thousand as opposed to fifteen hundred, you know, in your membership site. All right. So it just doesn't make any sense. So that's the the way we do it. We use wish list member. Of course, it has to be tied to your shopping cart and you know, all that stuff. But but no matter what you do, that's that's the case unless you just use PayPal. But you know, you've probably heard me saying there's a stigma to only having PayPal. People think you're like a reject from eBay. So, you probably want to have a real merchant account, a real shopping cart like kick start cart and your membership stuff plugins installed on your WordPress site.

[00:06:23] All right, next question. I heard you talk about temperature when it had to do with. Advertising, and I just, you know, I was in a hurry, I couldn't. This is the question that came in. I was in a hurry. I really couldn't put it together real quick. So could you please talk about temperature when it comes to paid ads online? Ok, sure, I can. So there's three types of ads when it comes to temperature, like the type of ad that you could that you should put in depending on the temperature. And I'm going to explain that to you what temperature means of the person that you want to view the ad. So if you're just putting an ad out, that's what we call cold. In other words, the person that sees the ad has never heard of you probably never heard of you unless you're, you know, celebrity and then this doesn't matter so much. So they never heard of you. They never visited your website that you can tell they never visited your blog, they never watched your YouTube videos, nothing. That's a cold that's called a cold temperature, almost like cold calling. You know that I made one cold call my whole life.

[00:07:41] I couldn't stand it. So if you're going to put an ad like that in, there's certain things that you have to do in the ad. First of all, in the first five seconds, you want to establish credibility. You want to hold up a book that you wrote or something about the topic. But first of all, you always, of course, have to target the right people. You know, if you're if you're targeting people that love sci fi novels and you're doing a business book, well, that's the poor targeting. So you're targeting the right people, but they don't know you. That's a cold thing, so in the first couple of seconds, you just have to really do something to grab their attention and show your credibility, like hold your book up or some statistic or I've been teaching internet for twenty seven years. You know, something like that for me would be for me. So you've got to grab them quick and give them something that helps them. Most of the time, we don't even go for an opt in or give them or a freebie or anything. At this point, we want them to see us and start recognizing us. So that's a cold add now. Yeah. Some people try to go for an opt in or something on a cold, and it can work. But I'm just saying when you're when you're looking at temperatures of audiences, they're even reluctant to give you their email if they never heard of you before.

[00:09:11] You know, so if you give them some good tip or something, so they're more likely to react as you move them along, like the trust scale. The next phase of this is a warm audience. And a warm audience has. Seeing you or read something of yours or watched one of your videos or saw one of your ads or something, and this is through a process called Pixel. Now it's not the Pixel like the number of pixels in a photo. No, this is a different kind of pixel. I think of it and teach people to think of it like a cookie. You've heard of cookies where if you stop at a website, it says, Oh, do you accept the cookies? You know? You know, OK. And just that means that they recognize that you stopped, but they don't know who you are. They don't know any personal information about you. They just know that you were there. So if you set up your pixels so that let's say somebody watched one of the YouTube videos on a certain topic. Well, if you pixel them, then you can then advertise back to them knowing that they watched that video say. And so that way, you can target the ad more carefully. So instead of it being all general, it can actually say something Hey, I know you watched my YouTube video on X, Y and Z. And we have a free report that goes into much more detail than the video did.

[00:10:43] So that you can start pursuing this XYZ topic, you know, something like that. So, the pixel told you that they had seen the video and. Then you create what is called an audience of everybody that saw that video and there have been pixelated and then you can advertise just to that audience. And that's where you can and it's a warm audience. They haven't spent any money, but they have heard of you or been exposed to some of your material. So that's a warm audience. Now, a hot audience is an audience that's purchased something. And or and or been on a lot, you know, seen a lot of your stuff. So in that case, you don't have to introduce yourself to them, you know that they know who you are. You know what they've seen and what they've read of yours. And so you can go right for the sale of something or for an opt in or whatever you can do to opt in on the warm audiences, too. But you can be more aggressive in that. Hey, they like you enough that they've done a lot of your stuff. They've seen a lot of your stuff, and it wasn't like a one time slam. Bam, slam bam. Thank you, ma'am. Kind of thing. So that's more of a hot audience. You don't have to, you know, show your credentials off the bat because they know who you are already.

[00:12:13] So that's why your ad, depending on the temperature of the audience. And that's what it is. Cold. Never heard of you. Warm has heard of you in some fashion or seen something. At least one thing that you've done and hot has seen a lot of stuff or actually or customers. That's a little bit more about temperature of audiences. Ok, let's see. So one other thing that came in that with regard to paid ads is if you want to get robbed easily, go put an ad in Facebook or Google and then. Uh, let's say for five dollars a day and you start getting some success. And so you jack it up to $20 a day. You just screamed, you might as well go down to the local cheerleader, shop and buy a big mega megaphone and yell, I'm an idiot, I don't know what I'm doing. Take all my money, right? So see, no professional does something like that. And so they can actually see now, are they going to admit to this that they're just going to rob you because you're an idiot? No, of course not. But people that know what's going on know that they see that and they see that no professional ever does something like that. And so they know you don't know what you're doing and they know you're eventually going to quit because you're never going to make any money because you don't know what you're doing. And so they're just going to take all your money as fast as they can before you quit.

[00:13:45] So that's like I said, nobody's going to admit to that. You know, you get get them up on on the hill and in D.C. and put them in front of Congress, and they're still not going to admit it. So but that's the way it is. So when you are putting an ad in, don't raise your budget more than 20 percent. Every couple of days, because that's what professionals do, they want to make sure that the ad is working not just a fluke or or Facebook or Google or some other place where you're advertising, just put it in the best places to suck you in and then knowing that the people that don't know any better are going to jack their budgets up and then they're going to steal all that money when the ad starts running and just normal places or places that don't get much response so they can control all of this. They're like The Wizard of Oz. They know all. See all. You just can't believe that's what they know about you, just because what you do. Not only the fact that they've got your all your information on your, your pages and your personal profiles, you know, so so don't raise more than 20 percent. Now, that's not the only thing that's going to scream. You don't know what you're doing. I mean, so get some good training if you're going to add. But we love paid ads because you can turn them on and off at will.

[00:15:11] OK, next question should I advertise on Quora? This is another advertising question. Well, Quora is one of many places. Quora is a place where people ask questions and other people jump in with answers. And it's, you know, one of many places like Reddit. And you know, there's all kinds of places that you can do this. But and all of them can be worthwhile. But you have to test and you have to be persistent and consistent and learn their system so you can answer questions for free and just get your name around. You can be in their partner program, you can advertise on there. So it's all a testing process, but you know, don't decide that, OK, I'm going to advertise on Quora one time and see how it goes. No, that's, you know, you can't go anywhere and advertise one time and see how it goes and think that that was a valid test of that. You know, that particular company? No, you have to test stuff. I mean, you can put questions on the site and have people answer them to get your name around. You can you can have a certain ad show when people ask questions about a certain topic. So you can do that. And I and I got to tell you, you need to. If you're going to answer questions to get known as an expert, you've got to do it fast because you'll get buried thousand results down and then nobody will see your name.

[00:16:42] You're wasting your time. So. So anyway, you got to learn stuff like that about whatever Reddit or Quora. But I mean, you read it. They eat their young at Reddit, so you really need to know what you're doing at Reddit so that so that people don't start really trolling you. All right, so yes, you can advertise on those places, but you still need to give it a fair shot. Ok. Tom. What do I do with these title tags I hear you talking about? Well, first of all, you probably should listen to episode four sixty nine, which is basic SEO search engine optimization. If you're going to do any search engine optimization, at least do the basics that don't cost you anything. I mean, I'm very I mean, SEO people don't like me very much because I just say, you know, it's just something that used to be great for me. Years and years ago, I was the top of the top. But now it's just too hard and too much trouble. And you can, just like I said, you can turn on and off ads within a day or so where anything you do with search engine optimization could take months, if ever to get you anywhere. So, so so I'm not a big fan of that, but I do want you to learn the basics.

[00:17:59] Like I said, episode four sixty nine is good for that, but I will give you some of the stuff now. So title tags are in your HTML code, they're clear near the top of your page. But you know, when you look at a website, your website and a browser, you don't really see the title tags as part of your site. The only way to see them is to hold your mouse over the tab of the browser clear at the top of the screen, and a little box will pop out. And that'll be what's in your title tags for that particular page. So one thing is is don't put home, you know, don't just leave it default like home page of Antion. In fact, you never even see Antion or Tom Antion in any of my title tags. I want people that never heard of me to find me. If they heard of me, they'll find me say so, and every page is different. You know, a lot of times some worthless web designer that doesn't know any better. We'll just leave it at the default, and almost every page looks identical to Google. When they look at your website, they send their spiders out to look when somebody's searching for something so. You've got to individually each page of your website find and you prior to this, you should have done your keyword research, which is episode one and episode one hundred and thirty.

[00:19:25] And then you have the keywords ready to go to plug in to the title tag for the individual pages now. To do this used to, you used to have have a geek to do it because it was Wade buried in the code. But now you have a plug in for WordPress called Yost or the other one's called all in one SEO pack. You wouldn't have both of them. And it makes it easy for anybody to just put their keywords and it shows them up in the proper place and your in your code. Now, I don't want you going into the code and bringing your whole site down because you don't know what you're doing. So, yes, we want the title tags different for each page, and it has to make sense for your site. But an episode for sixty nine, I go into a bunch of other places while you're doing this that you don't need an SEO expert to do. Example would be putting heading one or heading to tags on certain words, bolding them, skewing the best words or the most important words for that page near the top of the site, putting them in links. You know, all of this is telling the search engines that those words are important and and don't do what one of my new students has been trying to do is load a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page that are close to the same color as the background that went out 15 years ago.

[00:20:58] You'll get banned for doing that, you know, so don't do that kind of stuff, you know? So so there's loads of ways. Like I said, I go in depth in I'm on for six episode four sixty nine. The Meh, the big one. That's like 70, 80, 90 percent of your success with search engines is the title tag. So. So learn how to get your keywords in the title tag and make sure they're different on every page. Because if if you just leave it at the default, Google says, why should I give this page a high ranking? If every page is identical because they start the spider, start at the top of the page and work down, and if they see the title tag isn't what the person was looking for and they see every page of your site is identical. That's what it looks like to the search engine spider. Then they they just put you into oblivion. You'll never see the light of day. So learn how to do that. Ok, one more reminder before I get to the really cool, cool last question here. Is please help me out on this Go Fund Me campaign to help persons with disabilities. I mean, it'll be one of the best things you ever did in your life because we're changing the lives of these people so that they can be gainfully employed or have their own business. And, you know, off the welfare rolls and, you know, all the great things that we can do for these people.

[00:22:20] So. So give me a hand on that. Check out IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Then click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You'll see UPDATE. videos as of this recording from Tammy Stephens. Charlie Collins, both, by the way, are blind and they're going through my school. So very inspirational people and you got Robbie is in there, and we've got two slots available for other people that were worth checking out. So it's a great program. It's going to do big things for people in the world and you could be proud to be part of it and I'm thrilled to have your help. All right, so last thing a question is about Tom. Tell me about this PLR stuff. Well, Pilar stands for private label rights. I went into this in depth in my email master or excuse me, e-book mastermind course, which will have another one coming up here pretty soon. Let me know if you're interested in that. Yeah, it was a 12 week course and we went deep, deep, deep into ebooks and stuff. Private label rights means that you can purchase a pre-written book. For very little money, I think the most I ever paid was $15, and I paid as little as five dollars for completely written book. E-book right now, did I just put it out under my name, which you're allowed to do? Most cases they tell you what rights you're buying private label rights.

[00:23:55] It's like my shopping cart is a division of one shopping cart. But my private label that I've had for 20 years is kick start cart. And then I add value to it, similar to this private label rights e-book. So with kick start cart, I give free training forever one on one myself or Larry or Travis, or somebody will give you one on one training to show you how to use it for totally for free. So, so I added value to the basic thing. Well, that's what happens with PLA books I buy. I might buy a PLA book and then I go in and I delete the stuff that I don't believe in. I add my own stories and my own information, and I jazz it up and make it my own. No, but no other person would recognize it as a PLA book because I put a cover on it. And and I, you know, like I said, put in all this other stuff that I know. And one of the reasons I do it, it's not that I couldn't write books on whatever the topic is, it's the fact that I'm busy. And if somebody else just lays it all out and has the chapters out there and you know, it just makes it easier on me to get started. So it saves me a lot of research and thinking, you know, sitting there thinking, All right, which chapter should be here? They're let somebody else think about that, and I might change it if I see that doesn't make sense because the chances are they're not as experienced as me, but they they get me started for five to fifteen dollars and sometimes they throw in a sales ladder and they they the all the graphics, everything say.

[00:25:38] So it's a way to get an e-book going really quickly. But I just highly encourage you. Just don't put your name on the watch when you buy one, because a thousand other people might have bought the same book, so you just never would recognize any books that I came out with as being PLA, you know, because it's all personalized with my stuff. So all you have to do to find more, I mean, you'd be sitting there all day if you just type in PLR and the topic that you're interested in PLR health books, PLR archery books, you know, whatever you can think of, there's somebody who's written a book on it already that'll sell it to you cheap. Sometimes it's called white label also. So that's it, folks. That's my ask me a question. Remember, you can still go to screwthecommute.com/resources up till think midnight tonight and 50 percent off on everything I have except protection dogs. I can't do it for them. So check it out. Screwthecommute.com/resources and I will catch you on the next episode. Catch you later.

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