570 – Take these steps to win: Tom talks 7 Ways To Beat Your Competitors

Episode 570 – 7 Ways To Beat Your Competitors
[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 570 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about seven ways to beat your competitors. Now, these aren't the only ways, but you do these seven things and you'll be grabbing business for them and from them in no time flat. I hope you didn't miss Episode 569. That was asked me a Kindle question. See, I love Amazon Kindle. It's one of the best opportunities for small businesses. And I tell you all about it on that episode now. And don't waste your time though, on Barnes Noble Nook or iBooks or anything. Kindle is the way to go and you'll learn why on this episode. Also, we have a Kindle Masterclass available. You can check it out at Screwthecommute.com/KindleMasterclass. And again, don't you think I'm so creative in the way I name Page's Kindle Master class. Screwthecommute.com/KindleMasterClass. All right. Let's get into seven ways to beat your competitors. Well, number one, these aren't in any particular order, but. But I kind of start out this way. Great products. Well, what's a great product? Well, it's a product that solves a problem for a customer and gives them lots of resources to stop their problem from happening in the future.

[00:01:50] Now, other products could entertain. They could save time, they could save money, they could motivate the person or whatever the purpose of the product is. Now what I want the customer to say after buying one of my products. Is this? I can't believe I got so much value for so little money. That way they will consume the product and come back to buy more. Now, when you build that reputation of high quality, you can have well, you can get a little lazy and not even write sales letters if your name is on the product, people know it's great. Now the word consume. Now, if they don't consume your product, in other words, read it or watch it. Or do something or use it. They're more likely to refund and less likely to buy. Anything else from you? And on a recent episode, I told you a story of how I broke down my book, which it was 1042 pages after ten years. And for auditions, I you know, people just got too overwhelming for people. So I broke it down into smaller bite sized ebooks and chunks and online courses. And people are consuming it, say. Also, every time I make a product before I release it, I stop and think, All right, what can I do to make this product better? And I might spend an extra day or two on some of the products and just research a bunch of resources that I can put in the resource section of the book and and do all this extra stuff.

[00:03:35] And some of these products have been selling for over 20 years. So, so it's worth it to put a couple extra days in and I get virtually zero refunds. I mean, I can't remember most of the time how to do a refund. And that's where the way you want to get because people don't want to give up your products and they're happy to buy the next one. All right. Let's go to number two. How do you really make sure that the product is what the people want that are in your target market? Well, what you want to do is find where they're. Well, we call it pain points are. You ask them questions to see what's their problem? What are they trying to achieve? How much time do they have to put into it? What's their budget? You know, all of these things you want to ask people when they present you with the problem. Now with me. I get people asking me stuff all the time on my email list, which I have concentrated on the whole time I've been on the Internet. So I don't have to ask a lot of questions anymore because they tell me by the questions that they're asking what their problems are and what they want. So. So find out what their pain points are. Because you could do, number one and create a really great product that nobody wants.

[00:05:02] All right. So that doesn't help anybody out. Say, might give you a pat on the back ego wise that you created such a great thing. But if nobody buys it, guess what? It ain't that great. Now, if you do ask a lot of questions. I use a thing called the regurgitation technique. I used to do this all the time in when people would ask me about coming to speak for them, they'd ask me or they would tell me something like, Well, when I was doing corporate speaking, I was doing humor in the workplace when I first started speaking. And so. People would say, well, Tom, you know, we got Mark Morales low here. There's no excitement in our company. And so I would go and make a Web page really quick. This was actually later than when I first started. Or I would make a one sheet up for them and I would change the text of it to say This program is great for excitement and it'll really give you a morale boost. And so I was using the language that they used so that my program perfectly aligned with what they wanted. So so no, it's not manipulative. It's just smart marketing to relate to the person. And it kind of proved that I was listening to them, didn't it? All right. So anyway, that's how you find the pain points. If you do this consistently, you'll be able to make products that are almost always a home run.

[00:06:38] Or you'll never have a bomb because you already know what they want. I can't say you'll never have a bomb, but chances are way, way more slim. All right. Number three, the way to beat your competitors. Reasonable prices. Yeah, you can shoot for the high end of the price range. But what I have found over many, many years is that most of the people that do that. They're mostly smoke and mirrors. They're great copywriters and they're glib. They can sell the ice to the Eskimo kind of thing. And in my not so humble opinion, many are sociopaths that will say and do anything to get your money. You might want to check out my webinar at Tom Antion webinars on the Sociopathic Mind. See, I've done extensive research on seminars, scams, and, you know, people that are charismatic, that narcissistic and sociopathic and what they'll do to get your money and what's going on in their mind. So you need to realize this because there's so many people out there that they'll say anything to take your money. Anyway. Reasonable prices. You don't want to be too cheap because if it's too cheap, people think it can't be worth anything. And not too high because then you're cutting out a part of the market that couldn't afford you. So this has worked beautifully for me over 28 years. I've been selling online and I did it even before the Internet was around.

[00:08:19] It lets people with average incomes afford to be exposed to you in a way that helps them. One of your products. And it convinces people with larger incomes that your higher priced programs are going to be worth it. So this has worked beautifully for me for many, many years. And besides the cash flow from more people being able to afford you. There's more people out there that can refer you. I've had people that could never in a million years afford my bigger programs, and they refer me because I was nice to them and I gave them great value at something they could afford. Now I say, if you want to be in business online, you can't afford not to deal with me. Right, because my program is so powerful. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com gives you the outline of it, and you've heard me talk about it a lot on these episodes. But anyway, some people are just not in that boat and they're they're happy to buy an e-book here and there, but that's 97% profit. And they get great value and they have a positive experience with me and my company. That is great for the long run to beat your competitors. So that's reasonable prices. Number three. All right. Number four is fast response to inquiries. And this is one of my claims to fame. All right. So I'm going to give you several exacting things here you can do to improve this.

[00:09:55] And, yeah, you have to put yourself out there a little bit. But if you want to beat your competitors and get that money that they would have gotten, well, you have to stretch a little bit. So first one is your cell phone. Both my Gmail and my regular email accounts forward to my cell phone and alert me when I get an email. Now the one account I keep the alerts off and I just check it regularly because it gets it's been around for so long, it gets enormous amounts of spam and I don't want to go ding, ding, ding every with the cell phone every time one of those comes in. But the other account, I hear a special sound. I know I got an email and hardly anybody uses that one except it's business customers. So so that's one thing. The second thing, and I don't particularly use this, but this is what I would use now if I was just starting is a service called Grasshopper. There's probably other ones, but Grasshopper allows you to have a secondary. Phone number on your cell phone. Maybe Google does that, too. I'm not sure. I never use that service that they have. But Grasshopper allows you to let you know it's a business call. You have a separate voicemail for it and everything, so be ready to answer people in a hurry when they're ready to spend money.

[00:11:20] If you make them wait, you know, they're more likely to go to the first person that'll talk to them and handle their problem. All right. So that's one thing. Next thing is make sure you're using sequential auto responders if you ask. A lot of people have been around as long as me online. What's one of the most powerful things ever invented for Internet marketing? It would be the sequential autoresponder. And this is where, you know, right this moment while I'm recording this episode, I have over 500 sequences of auto responders going out and helping people around the world while I'm talking to you on this recording. And that is so powerful and they can be used for so many things. Customer service, upselling after the sale. So sales come in automatically from these auto responders that are following up with people. And I have a rule of thumb with the auto responders. I want to give three at least three emails to people that just help them without any sales pitch in them, because I want them to get used to getting emails from me that that help them. And then when I do try to sell something they, they don't mind so much. So that's auto responders and of course kick start cars.com, the shopping cart I've been promoting for over 20 years and the one I use. Has unlimited auto responders among a whole bunch of other things. You probably want to listen to Episode ten.

[00:12:58] Anytime you want to go to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. Number 10 was what you should know about shopping cart systems. Next thing is chat bots. We happen to use many chat. I read an article recently that I don't think it was by the chat bot people, but it was about like 87% of customer service currently is being done by chat bot and it's going to even get more in the future. I happen to use manychat.com. Very inexpensive. You can hook it up to all kinds of things and so you've got to look into that because that gives people instantaneous results of their questions. And if it can't figure it out, it can forward it to you to pick it up personally. Say so really fast, fast, fast. Response to increase. Next one is speak pipe. This is really cool, very inexpensive. If you go to screwthecommute.com and look at the on the edge of the screen, there's a little blue thing that says leave a voicemail. Well, it leaves. You can talk into your computer or your cell phone. Leave me a voicemail right through the website. It forwards to my email where then I can listen to it in my email and I can respond to you directly from my email. People just go nuts over this and there's other things you can do with it.

[00:14:24] If you have a podcast like I record people giving testimonials and I record people that are given two or 3 minutes of expertise on the topic right off of there and then put it right into the the podcast. So very cool. Speak pipe, speak pipe. Now the next thing is, is instant chat. So this is where you can have a live person chatting back instead of picking up the phone. Because people love this also. They love it if the the person is knowledgeable, put it that way. I've had plenty of experiences with Microsoft and Dell and where there's just idiots on there that don't know what they're doing. $2 an hour people in some other country and they can't answer my question. So I end up having a call anyway. But people do love it and they will use it. And I got an article here for you. I'll put it in the show notes. It's it's over. It helps Scout, which is one of the services. But they wrote an article on the live chat tools, what you should know about them. And they give ten other ones that you can check out. But of course, they they say theirs is the best. But this allows you to to instantly chat with people. And if you go to the bathroom, you can just turn it off and it'll send people to your knowledge base so they can get their questions answered or in the middle of the night or something.

[00:15:55] If you're not if you don't have somebody watching it all the time. So anyway, that's fast. Number four, fast response to increase. Number five is fast shipping. Now, of course, this doesn't apply if you're doing digital stuff. It should be instantaneous. I mean, you would be crazy to make people buy something digital and then email them the attachment the next day or something that would just you would just look like a fool in today's atmosphere. But anyway, if you do have some type of physical thing you're shipping. I mean, it's expected to be fast. Now, because of Amazon, they're thinking Amazon, Amazon, Amazon is going to be here tomorrow or the next day. I mean, on rare occasions, the same day. So so you've got to get get busy with that. And here's an example. I ordered some specialty products and specialty products. People kind of get lazy because they say, well, there's not that many places you can get these things. So I was ordering something. I'm working on the trees near my house, and there's all kinds of arborist tools that aren't kind of mainstream. And once you study this stuff, you say, Oh boy, if I had that tool, I could really make my trees better or cut them down or whatever you're going to do with them. I ordered this from a major, major company, Husqvarna. And. They didn't even pack up the order, from what I can tell to it.

[00:17:24] More than a week after I ordered it and paid for it. And they sent it the slowest shipping possible. And this wasn't because of supply chain issue. This apparently is just their modus operandi because they I mean, there are big name companies. So the bigger they get, the slower and more pitiful. Many times they they do. And I ended up finding another supplier who had it to me in two days. So I'm never. And they sent me a survey. Husqvarna sent me a survey afterwards. Well, how did you like your service? I said, I won't order anything from you, ever. This is such pitiful service. This was a two ounce little gas gadget that they probably had thousands of them in stock because, you know, it's not like they had to have an investment of of millions of dollars to keep them in stock. Right. So. So, anyway, I'm not ordering from them anymore. So fast shipping. If you're doing some kind of shipping, you better get it there fast. All right. Number six, reputation building. You need to start immediately, immediately, if not yesterday or sooner. To keep building your reputation. Because things get so much easier when you do this. When your reputation precedes you, then. People don't quibble about the price. They just want to know, are you available? Can you help us? What do you have to help us? And they don't balk at the price so much.

[00:19:03] So. One way you do this and I've been doing this since long before the Internet started, I built my whole speaking career on what I call media marketing. I was on radio, TV and in print all the time, all the time, all around the world. And so and you have to learn how to do this. You have to learn how to pitch yourself. You have to make sure you're newsworthy and so forth. But. Those. Those are high credibility now. I will tell you, there's plenty of people that do this that suck. They're the worst, least credible people on Earth. They're shysters. But that's the power of the media if you can be on the media and they're easily duped. I mean, look at the thing with Michael Avenatti. He was in 2000 appearances, I think, and now he's in jail. The other one was Kevin Trudeau. Right. And there's current ones now. I won't name their names, but the problem is, is that, yeah, you can use it for good or bad, but you want to use it for good and it really does work. The credibility follows your media appearances, also testimonials. Now, the Federal Trade Commission came out several years ago with guidelines for testimonials that I thought were just ludicrous. They want you to put you have testimonials that are just the average results of all your customers. I don't know how anybody would ever figure that out.

[00:20:37] And since they came out with that, I haven't noticed any changes at all in testimonials and all the things that I see day and night. All right. So anyway, testimonials are credibility builders. So pursue them and get them on your website and every place and on your printed materials and all that. And then a professional website that's now I don't say when I say professional website, I don't mean fancy website because these websites nowadays will do your dishes and wash your car. And I don't know what else they'll do for you, but and the designers like all the cool stuff. But guess what? Until something is mainstream, cool stuff can mess you up. I mean, it was months and months and months before I noticed that these three little bars, horizontal bars that are called a hamburger, opened up the menu. I didn't even notice them, you know, and I do this seven days a week for the last 28 years or so. So if I can't notice it, do you think everybody else is going to notice it? No, they're going to say, I don't know how to navigate this website and leave. See, so don't do all the cool stuff, do the simple, clear stuff and make it look good enough to represent you professionally. And make it readable. I have episodes on readability and usability. I think does episode 313 and 312. I forget I'll get Larry to put it in the show notes.

[00:22:14] And don't lump everything on earth into one website because that makes you look like a jack of all trades. So. So the search engines hate you. They don't hate you. They just ignore you because they can't pinpoint what you're about when somebody's searching. Really dig into those episodes on readability and usability. And make it very clear and it's so inexpensive. If you bother to learn, you can put a world class website up for $150 now as opposed to $5,000. Yeah, I would worry about it if it was 5000 bucks. But if you can put a world class website up with WordPress and a responsive theme, responsive means it looks good on cell phones and tablets and mobile. You can have separate topics and on separate websites they so if you just lump everything in one place, well, you look like a jack of all trades. And it's not going to do you any good in front of customers if they do happen to see you or the search engines will not give you high rankings. All right, so that's number six. Build your reputation and things get easier. All right, before I give you a number seven, just want to remind you about my mentor program. It's the longest running ever in the field of digital and Internet marketing. Most successful, most unique. You have a visit to the retreat center, where I'm recording this for an immersion weekend, where you actually live in the house here as soon as totally all the COVID stuff is gone.

[00:23:50] And you have a separate visit to our TV studio where you shoot videos. My success is tied to your success, so I don't get my big money unless you make money. You get a scholarship to my school that you can either use yourself or gift to somebody. It's a $19,000 tuition, and that's just it's one on one with me and my entire staff. So you're not lumped in with people more advanced or less advanced than you. So there's just it's the longest running, most successful ever in this field. And I triple dog dare people to put their program up against mine. And nobody will do it because line four, line we just beat their pants off because I'm a crazy fanatic about helping you. So check it out. A great Internet marketing training. All right. So let's get into number seven. Frequently asked questions based on keyword research. So again, I'm a fanatic on teaching you keyword research because that's the biggest mistake I've seen in all the years I've been doing this, teaching this since 96, 97 or so. And nowadays with voice search, a lot of times people will talk into their cell phone. So you need to know the difference between regular keyword search and voice search. And so you need to listen to episode one, which is way back, but it's still good. And Episode 130 is about voice search.

[00:25:20] And then if you make frequently ask questions about them on your website, Google loves them. Because you'll even see now. I mean, it's kind of a back door way to get at the number 1/1 page of Google at the top. As you answer exactly the questions people are asking. And so if you try to type in anything, I just for the heck of it I typed in. What they type in. How to sew a tent seam. I don't know where I got that from. How to sew a tent. See, a video comes up from YouTube that belonged to somebody else. And then a bunch of these questions line up. And when you click on it, it opens up a short answer to your question and also the click to the link of the site that provided that answer. Well, they all had these on their site, those exact questions, and they got them from doing keyword research. So through the keyword research and put a frequently asked questions on your site and you will start beating your competitors that haven't done this. So there you go. There's seven things. Let me recap them for you. We've got do great products. Find the pain points so that you can make products people want. Make reasonable prices. Fast response to inquiries. Fast shipping. Build your reputation and use frequently asked questions on your website to to get to the first page of Google in a back door method.

[00:27:00] I don't spend a lot of time on SEO. But this is definitely worth it because it doesn't take a lot of time. You do it once and forget about it. You know, because we use mostly paid traffic nowadays, but these are simple things that you can do that have a big, big payback for you. So so there you go. And one other thing before we go, I definitely want you to check out greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and get in my mentor program. And also we have this super program I'm so proud of to help persons with disabilities get scholarships and Internet and digital marketing. So I want you to check that out. We have a Go Fund Me campaign helping to fund the scholarships. The people are doing great. They're so inspiring. Two of them are blind and they're doing videos. Amazing, amazing people. And hey, if you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor a person yourself. That would really be something you could be proud of. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Of course it will be in the show notes and click over to the Go Fund Me campaign. You can see their videos and and something you can really be proud to support. All right. That's my story, too. I'm sticking to it. Go out and beat those competitors.