568 – Trust your gut… maybe: Tom talks Gut Instincts

Episode 568 – Gut Instincts
[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 sixty eight to Screw the Commute podcast. This is going to be a short episode because I'm a little bit worried. I'm recording this on the Ides of March. Oh, the Ides of March. You know, most of the time they're thought of is an ominous, bad time. But I read an article that said it's really not. So I'm going to try to find out with this episode. Because I think some people are not going to be happy with my idea. And some people will get rich with my ideas, so. So we'll find out if the ides of March affected me or not. So what I'm going to talk about today is gut instincts. And like I said, this episode may not make the people that teach intuition very happy. I mean, intuition certainly has its place in the world. But for most people, that would be a very poor way to try to run a business. I'm going to give you a better way in this episode. Now, I hope you didn't miss episode 567. That was podcast guesting. We're doing podcast interviews and how important that can be to you and where you find them and all that stuff, how to get them booked and whether you pay to get them booked or whether you do book yourself and all that stuff.

[00:01:49] And I highly suggest you listen to episode 211 if you're interested in being on podcast, because that's called How to be a Great Podcast Guest and that's not an OK podcast guest. It's not a good podcast guest. It's a great podcast guest. So that was episode 211. Any time you want to get to an episode back episode you, you go to screwthecommute.com and then slash and then the episode number. That's 211.

[00:02:19] All right, I'm going to jump right into this because also because I'm in a hurry, I got to go to the hospital tomorrow for physical and got to get ready for it and all that stuff. So here's the thing. Gut instincts, folks. I mean, I saw a TV commercial the other day, and I think it was for Carfax or some kind of service like that that checks the history of cars. And it was a young woman having her dad help her select which car to buy. And so there was two cars there, and they were both the same price, and the dad picked the one that had been in a really bad accident and should have cost about $10000 less right now. He didn't appear to be a mechanic.

[00:03:06] And of course, the point of the commercial is that you really need to have serious reports and evaluations and real numbers before you pick which car was the best deal. Well, it's the same with your business. You can't really have your friends and relatives making important decisions about your business based on just how they feel about it. You can't even trust your own instincts on many decisions. And I'm not saying that arrogantly, like I know all see all. All right. I'm really coming from a vast amount of experience with people. I really can't tell you how many times in the several thousand high end students I've had. Many of these students are really great at what they do. Their jaws dropped just on the key word lessons, which I emphasize very heavily words that they thought were great. We're lousy and ones they never even thought of were great. I just had to buy, had to put pads on the desk here at the retreat center when the people's jaws dropped when they saw the real numbers. Now, usually you're too close to the situation to make accurate decisions and predict how people will react that aren't professionals like you and your field, they just want to get their whatever problem they have solved, and they've got another million things to think about where you're thinking about your business and solving that problem, and you're kind of like one of those racehorses with blinders on them.

[00:04:50] You're going like crazy, but you can't see all the periphery of what's going on. And yes, intuition can be good in some cases, but it just can't be relied on consistently on every day important decisions that your business has to make. I mean, what if those experts I just referred to used keywords that nobody searched for? Do you think they would accidentally get lots of traffic? No, they wouldn't. Now, one of my original mentors said that the internet business, like many other businesses, is a series of simple math problems. Basically, it's a math problem. He said. You do something and count the results. Then you do something else and count the results, whichever gets the higher number of results. Do that. Ok. I love that simple simplicity of that. Now doing that is far easier online than it ever was. See, when people had to do this with direct mail, in other words, I'm talking about snail mail that you get in your actual mailbox at your home or office. These kind of tests took months to get any figures. Of the success of that promotion, months and months it would take. Online, the same test could be done in less than a day. All right. Literally. Now the way this is done is called split testing. This can easily be done with kickstartcart.com, you know the shopping cart I promote all the time.

[00:06:35] This can be done on sales letters on your site. It can be done on ads, on other people's sites. So it's very, very powerful. Now, this is a split, testing is, in this particular case, online with good quality tools like Kickstarter card is different than simple click tracking. So you can easily find dirt cheap or free click trackers. They just tell you how many people clicked on a certain link and you might think, Well, gee, there's the math problem Tom. Well, yeah, except that that was a little bit too simple for this. Let me give you an example here. Let's say you had an ad to an ad that you put the exact same ad, let's say, and you put it on sale on Website A.. And another the exact ad on Website B. And you're trying to see. Which website was the best place to put the ad and then whichever was a really good one, you'd cancel the other one. So you put that out there, and let's say on website, a five hundred people clicked on your ad. and on website, be only one hundred people clicked on your ad. So it looks like the first website a it was five times better than B. And so if you went on those simple numbers, you would cancel sales. The ad on sales letter B are on Website B and keep the one on a right.

[00:08:19] That's kind of intuitive, right? Well, guess what? You know, I opened this by saying, You can't count on intuition. Ok? What's the problem is, is that let's say that. Website be brought in 50 buyers or 50 percent conversion, I mean, that's crazy numbers, but let's just say that and Website A only brought in 10 buyers. So if you just went with the simple math of, well, look way, a website a had 500 people click and Website B had only one hundred. You would have cancelled the good ad, which only brought in one hundred people, but they were buyers. And you would have kept the bad ad that brought in more people that didn't buy. Ok, so that's why it's crazy to do this with the free crap, you know, click tracker tools. I mean, there may be occasions when you just need to see how many people click on a link, but but if you really want to do this correctly? You want to see how many people bought. If that's your goal of making money? And I got to tell you, getting good at this skill can make you rich. I mean, this is everybody that's rich online knows how to do this, put it that way. I mean, the guy that taught me from his father. Now you can also that was testing ads on other people's websites, right? But you can test a sales letter on your own website in a couple of ways.

[00:10:00] Let's say you're selling a widget and you write a sales letter a which is the video sales letter. And with maybe beneath beneath it is some text and then sales letter B is all text and graphics and everything. And so you can run a split test against those two to see which one of those makes the most money. And let's say it wasn't the video sales letter. Let's say it was the written sales letter. Well, then you can split test different elements of that sales letter. So maybe you run the exact same sales letter onto different pages, but change the headline. Or maybe I try to only make one change at a time because I'm not smart enough to do what they call multivariate testing. It gets really, really complicated. So this is just a simple way to do it with a good tool. And so you might do another test with the price. And by the way, here's a tip for you if you do price testing. Always test from low to high because if you if somebody buys it at a low price and then sees it at a higher price. They're happy, they're thrilled to death, but if they bought it at a high price and then day later, they see it a low price, they're not too happy.

[00:11:21] If that, if that would happen, if you'd ever get caught in that situation, just refund the difference and tell them you're testing. And if they're really, you know, crappy about it, you know? You know, block them from now on. But I've never had that in all these years. Anybody ever give me crap over that. All right, so you can test different elements in the same cells letter, and there's so many of them, I mean, and this is back to where you can't trust what you think. Even the guy, one of the guys that taught me, he had a sales letter and had a really nice testimonial near the bottom of the sales letter, which you would, you know, that's kind of intuitive for copywriters to put a good testimonial right near where somebody is supposed to make a purchase decision. I mean, that's kind of a common thing, right? But you can't trust any of this stuff that you think would work. You have to see if it really works for your people, for your product, for your service. And at the time of year that you're doing this and I mean, it's all kinds of variables. So he said, well, you know what, if that testimonial was near the top of the page, I'd probably do better with this sales letter. So he moved it to the top of the page.

[00:12:40] Guess what happened? Sales went down by thirty five percent. He moved it back to the bottom sales came back up by thirty five percent say, so you wouldn't think of that. You'd think, oh, hit him right away with a nice, nice testimonial. But you just can't tell for sure what's going to happen. And even after you've been in this for years for a particular promotion, for a particular group of people, you still can't tell for sure unless you get the real numbers, you're just guessing. Shooting in the wind. I had another guy that he had he tested. He was such a fanatic, he tested a drop shadow. Not on the page or the text around the edge of the page, and it made a slight difference, I don't remember what it was, but he was telling me he couldn't believe it himself. All right. So so you've got to test things. And you know, one simple tool that's included in your and your start card shopping cart can help you do all of this stuff. And the other thing the the one guy that taught me his best effort. He had loads of great efforts doing this. The best effort he. Wrote a sales letter and put it out to the to the public. And from the first version of it, until he got done with all this split testing of headlines and price and guarantees and testimonies, all this stuff.

[00:14:11] The final one that he couldn't get the sell anymore was sold nineteen times as much as the first one. Nineteen times, can you imagine the amount of money that adds up to over time? But most people are lazy, they you know, they pat themselves on the back just getting one crappy sales letter up there and whatever comes in, they take it and then they're off to creating some other product instead of maximizing the sale of the product you got. So if you want me to teach you how to do all this stuff, plus a million other things you need to know to be successful online, check out my mentor program at Great Internet Marketing Training. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. Nobody dares put theirs up against mine because they can't hold a candle to it. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. Like I said, I've been a little bit of a hurry today, but this short episode could make you. Rich, there's no question about it, there's millions of examples of people online that got rich by doing this rather than limped along with 19 times less sales over time. I mean, this doing this can take a promotion that either broke, barely broke even or lost money to very, very profitable.

[00:15:38] This is important for you to learn, folks, so get yourself free trial a kickstartcart.com. We give you free training on it, and that's just one of the modules that will help really make you a lot of money online. It's got all kinds of sales tools already embedded in one system at a reasonable price. That's the whole thing. There's other systems that'll do about the same thing costs three or four times as much, and I had one lady get a system. She was spending $4000 a month for a part time person just to operate it. So this is ridiculous. This is why I've been, you know, selling this, this system. I've been an affiliate for it basically for 20 years now. And you know, nobody gets rid of it because they all love it and it's easy to use. You don't have to spend a lot of money and we give you unlimited free training as part of the deal. So anyway, that's kick Cars.com. And that would be the split testing module is what I talked about today. And just that one little sliver of thing can make you and your company rich. All right, that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. Beware of those ides of March. Look it up if you never heard him. All right. You on the next episode. See you later.