507 – Another set of queries from the Grab Bag: Tom talks Ask Me a Question

Episode 507 – 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 seven of Screw the Commute podcast. We got another episode of Ask Me a Question and guess what? Episode 506 was asked me a selling question. How about that? I talked about webinar selling, auto responder selling, upselling and copywriting on that episode, but this one's episode 507. We'll get to it in a minute. Now, if you'd like me to send you big checks in our affiliate program, email me at Tom@Screwthecommute.com And I'll give you the details on how you can refer our products and services and make big commissions and and we'll send them to you anyway you darn well please. PayPal, gold bullion. I don't care whatever, but you can make a lot of money doing that and grab a copy of our automation book where you can save time. Make more money. I mean, we figured it out. You've heard me say this, if you're a constant listen to the show seven and a half million keystrokes that same, you know how much money that turned into. Because all that time and effort was spent selling instead of doing busy work. Well, hey, when are you going to make the decision to download that darn book and implement it so that you can have that same success? So pick up a copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:55] And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now we're still rolling strong in our pilot program to help persons with disabilities. We're giving them scholarships to my school. They're making great progress. One lady is totally blind, and she's already helping her husband, who's got a construction company with his website, and she's only been in the program a month. So this is really powerful stuff. We're going to change their lives for the better. We'd love to have your help. We've got to go fund me campaign to help finance this, and we're going to use some of the money to hire persons with disabilities to help run the program, something you can really be proud to be part of. So visit our school site and then of course, it'll be in the show notes at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you can click on the Go Fund Me campaign. You can see video updates from these folks that are very inspirational, and we'd love to have your help. So check it out.

[00:03:04] All right, let's get to the main event. I've got a bunch of questions here for you. Let's see.

[00:03:09] How do you make content go viral? Well, you can actually make content go viral, but may not be the way you think. You know, if you see something that's got two million views and a couple of days. Well, chances are something was caught on video that you couldn't reproduce on purpose. So quit thinking like that. Think about how can I make? My stuff go viral to a specific market who's going to buy my stuff and you don't have to have millions of views for that and two of the ways we do it or with contests and quizzes. So I'll give you the basics of it. But I have a whole book on called Kickstart Viral. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Where gives you all the details on how to do this, but the idea of making it go viral? Let's take a contest. First of all, I got I always have to give you a warning when I talk about contest. You want to be really careful. You don't break any laws. So if you just type in contest law, there was plenty of attorneys that'll tell you what to do and what not to do. What you don't want to do is accidentally become a lottery, and the feds show up at your door and arrest you. All right, so don't do that. But anyway, contests are great. So the big key to making it go viral is that you want people to share it. But see, here's the thing if you get them to share it and they get like an extra entry. If they share it, so let's say they join themselves, they get one entry and then you give them an extra entry if they share it. Well, the thing is is just getting one more entry and getting somebody else to join. Kind of negates the entry you gave them because they got more competition now to win. So the way that you make it go viral is give them 10 or 20 entries every time they share or refer somebody that actually signs up. So that way, if they get one person to sign up now, they have twenty one chances to win instead of one or two. So that's on contest and then quizzes, people love quizzes, so, you know, it's like, what, what animal do you represent? Or one of my students came up with a great thing. He's in the financial planning. He just had something that says, What sitcom does your retirement resemble or something like that? It's really funny. So, when you make it catchy like that, and then the answer can be shareable. And so people want to show their their answers. Now BuzzFeed has made a fortune doing this. Sometimes they get 50 million views on a quiz. All right, so so this is a crazy viral. If you if you really get into quizzes now, remember though, you want the quiz to match your topic. For instance, I have one. IMTCVA.org. That's my school site quiz. It's the seven college rip offs, so it's telling people what to do or what they have to be careful of when they want to go for a traditional four year dumb ification. Or, I call it, and gain all that debt and all the things that the colleges are doing to the students with textbooks and all kinds of rip off things that they're doing. I contend they'd be in jail if they weren't colleges for the kind of things that they're pulling. But the quiz tells you all about it. IMTCVA.org/quiz. And so that's exactly towards my market of people that you know, are looking at for higher education and vocations that can make them money without the traditional route. Say so. Make a quiz that that matches, and I don't have to have millions of views to make a lot of money with that. Ok, so there's a little bit, but pick up a copy of Kickstart Viral and you'll get all the details.

[00:07:23] All right, next question How do you find trending products? Well, here's the thing I don't really like the question, and I'll tell you why. See, if you get I call trending the same as a fad. So if you jump on a fad product and hurry up and create one and it's possible you could make a little bit of money in the short run, but see, a million other people are thinking the same thing. So you have enormous competition and and the other part of it that I don't like is as soon as the trend is over, you've got a worthless product that nobody wants. So I like things that you know. And frankly, I've never had a launch of anything. I hate launches because to me, that signifies flash in the pan. I want products that will last for long time. I have had some products that are over 28 years have been selling all right. Not in the internet marketing field, of course, but but in my public speaking products. So I want something that's going to last for a long time and bring in money. So that's why I don't like that idea of just looking for trending products. Look for things that you can create that are going to last you for a long time work, get paid, paid, paid, paid pay, not work, get paid and then nothing forever. So. So that's what a flash in the pan or a trending product is. And now you might say, Well, Tom, I've heard you say don't create a product in a field that doesn't have any more products in it because nobody could make any money. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about things that. That all of a sudden come on the market and then probably are going to leave just as fast. I'm not talking about getting into a golf product or a tennis product or archery or leadership or things that are long lasting saying. So I'm not contradicting myself here. I just don't want you to jump on fad or, you know, stuff that's going to be gone real quick.

[00:09:29] All right, this next question is close to my heart. What to do Tom, if your email gets compromised and that's a question that wasn't a question that came in, that's happened to many people I know over the years that have asked me what to do, but it happened to me today, even with two factor authentication turned on. Somehow they got into my exchange server, which is run by a major company, by the way, and compromised it. And people were starting to get emails from with my name on it, from me. But with with things that we had actually talked about with my personal email months or even years ago. So it's crazy. So what do you do? Well, immediately change your password and then immediately get a hold of whoever is handing in your email to see if there's any funny business that went on behind the scenes. And then they'll tell you what to do, but immediately change your password. That's that's the first thing you got to do and then be ready to answer people that you know, that says, Hey, what is this crap you're sending me? I'm sorry, I got hacked. Now, if they know you well, then you can just say I got compromised and and but and they might think, especially with me, Wow, how could you get here? You're supposed to be Mr. Big Shot. Well, the thing is is I had every possible thing taken care of that you could take care of. Two factor authentication is where if if they want to change something on my account, I have to get a text to my phone that I have to put a code in and verify. They somehow got through all of that. So it's a higher level than me that messed up on this. So. So anyway, you might ask them what the heck happened on your end to the company that's running your email? All right. And a lot of times they won't, especially if you're not super techie and know what you're doing. Other times they won't admit to anything. You know, they don't want to get sued.

[00:11:36] Ok, I got a couple of podcast questions here, I put them together, it says Tom, I'm getting lots of background noise and breaths on my audio recordings and podcasts. Are there any quick fixes? Well, the first thing you know, I don't have enough information, but I will give you some things to work on. See if your microphone is a condenser mic or a dynamic mic for most home studios. I'm also assuming you have a home studio. You want a dynamic mic. It's just as good for podcasts, but it's not as sensitive to pick up every little tiny thing noise.

[00:12:12] So that's the first thing. And that's a quick fix is switched to a dynamic microphone. Use a pop screen. That's the circular thing that goes in front of your thing. Talk at an angle, you know, instead of right into the mic. Put it like a forty five degree angle. So your breath is not going right into the microphone, but it's still here's what you say. Learn how to use noise reduction in your editing software or if you're having somebody edit, make sure they use noise reduction and then you can apply a noise gate. A noise gate is an electronic thing that says, OK, anything lower than a certain amount of sound. We're just going to eliminate. So I have like a 20 db noise gate when I do my editing and it just cuts out all the little, the little crap in the background. So all of those are fairly quick fixes.

[00:13:12] Now next podcast question is how can I increase the quality of my podcast? Well, the microphone. A better microphone is your first thing. A good recording environment is. I mean, a good recording environment is actually as important or more important than the microphone because you can have a super great microphone. But if you're you got noise all over the place in your in your recording environment or noise bouncing off a hard dry wall and or a hard floor or hard ceiling. All these things, the noise is bouncing or the sound is bouncing all over the place.

[00:13:49] So check your recording environment. I mean, it's part of my podcast course. I help you with that. Even personally looking at pictures of your recording environment and all that and telling you how to fix it cheap and then better microphone. And then next thing is compression. I know audio engineers will say this is a stupid explanation, but people seem to understand it. So compression is if you take the high frequency parts of your your, your voice and the low frequency parts of your voice, and you squish them into the middle to the middle parts of your voice. All right. That's about as pitiful explanation as I can do it. But think of hold you hold your right hand out with your palm up. Pretend there's a balloon sitting on your hand and put your left hand on top of the balloon and like push the balloon a little bit together. That's what I'm talking about. What that does is it allows your voice to be heard better on the cheap. Earbuds that people listen to them, and with high noise environments like trains, planes and automobiles that will improve the quality of your podcast. So using compression and that can be with a physical piece of equipment or it can be done in your editing software and then. That's something that allows you to raise or lower certain frequencies to make your voice sound the best it possibly can.

[00:15:23] All right, so that increases the quote. Now, the last question is kind of funny. Again, it's one that I'm just giving you from my own life here. What to do if you're having trouble keeping up with your podcast episodes? So answer, do ask me a question episodes, which I've been doing loads of them lately, why not? Because I don't have guest beating my door down, trying to get on. It's the fact that I've got a lot of mentees, a lot of work helping them, and that's big money, you know, for me, so. So it's much faster. If I just go through my email, pick out a bunch of questions and then do this. So I don't have to edit two people, just myself. So it doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing interviews. But it just means that if you're having trouble keeping up, start just keeping track of stuff on your topic and do solo episodes is basically what it is and mine are called ask me a question. So that's what this episode is about. And also reminder, you know, jump over there to IMTCVA.org/disabilities and see if you can help out on that Go Fund Me campaign. It's something you can really be proud of. These people are so inspirational and and we're changing their lives for the better, so I hope you can help me on that. All right, we'll get you on the next episode. See you later.

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