669 – TikTok is not just for kids: Tom talks My First TikTok

Episode 669 – My First TikTok
[00:00:08] 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, is Tom here with episode 669 of Screw the Commute Podcast. This is going to be my first week on TikTok. Now, here's the thing. I'm not going to get in the argument of whether TikTok is going to, you know, capture your children and put them into slavery. I don't know any of that stuff. All I know is, I'm probably not the biggest target in the world compared to some of the people that have 22 million followers. So what I plan to do is take advantage of the cool things that TikTok has to offer to market my business, make all the money I can, and that's the end of it. So I can't imagine them making me learn Chinese. All right. So that's all I'm going to say about that. But I'm going to tell you what I did to prepare and the actual results from my first week, and I'm not claiming to be an expert, have only made a little bit of money this week off of it. But I can assure you, by the time I'm done, I will be an expert on TikTok, but it's not going to happen in the first week. And in fact, I'm not that excited about my results.

[00:01:30] But like everything else in life, success comes from persistence and consistency. So we'll let you know how it goes as we go along. Now, hope you didn't miss Episode 668. That was Marc Bullard. He's worked with me for, I don't know, 12 or 13 years, and it's the latest updates on YouTube features that you can take advantage of right away. In fact, one thing he covered you should absolutely do right away so you don't miss your chance to get this specialized name that they're coming out with. So you don't want somebody else to grab yours. Also, I want to remind you to help us out with Patreon. This is our program to help. Persons with disabilities get scholarships and it's a monthly thing for all the great training I try to give you. And if you want to go to all the training and forget the interviews, you go to screwthecommute.com/training. I think there's 200 training interviews, $1,000,000 worth of training. If I had to give it to you one on one. So our patron starts as little as $3 a month. You get all kinds of perks. Please check it out at screwthecommute.com/patreon.

[00:02:44] Now let's get to the main event. All right. So the first thing I did was I studied several advanced courses for two weeks before I rolled this out, and it's like everything I do online, it has details. One of the biggest mistakes students make and all the people I see out there is they say, Oh, I got to be on Instagram and then they start throwing crap up.

[00:03:07] They get buried with fake accounts that are hurting them and they just don't know any better because they never studied. Every one of the things that I teach has loads of details, and if you don't know them, you're just pretty much wasting your time. I just critique a thing for somebody. They had loads of followers. But most of them were, or many of them were fake. All right? They just didn't. They were bots, but many of them could have been their best friend from kindergarten. But if they're not engaging with your content, they're actually hurting you. So that's just one of the things mistakes people make. And they say, Oh, I got so many followers. Well, yeah, guess what? Instagram thinks you're an idiot, but you don't know any better. See? So that's the kind of thing we teach people. All right. So anyway, I studied for a couple of weeks, and then if you don't know these things and implement them, your chances of success are pretty slim. Now, I watched probably close to 100 YouTube videos, including ones that would tell you like you can get 10,000 followers in 24 hours, which that was mainly BS. Unless you look good in a bikini or do some outrageous stunt. And truthfully, and I know it will be hard for a lot of you to believe, I don't really look that good in a bikini.

[00:04:36] And many of the methods you see on those things were downright spam. And you would end up with untargeted followers that are going to hurt you in the long run. Again, it looks cool. Have a lot of followers, but if they're fake, you're never going to grow ever. That's the way the system is rigged. And a lot of these techniques would get you banned. And then I got some. Here's the other thing that gets you. I got some exact opposite information from very successful tech talkers. So what does that tell me? In my vast experience online, it means that you don't know what's going to work for you and your target market with your products and services and all that stuff. So so you have to experiment and that's pretty much what I'm doing. So I decided after all this study to just jump in using what I learned. But again, I consider it an experiment, especially this first week and probably the first couple of months are an experiment. And it's kind of just like when my students asked me, Tom, is this sales letter good? Is this headline good or not? And here's the thing. Your customers and your market are going to tell you whether it's good or not. My smart aleck answer. All right. I don't try to be mean, but my smart aleck answer is you may rub me if you like, but I am not a genie in a lamp.

[00:06:03] Okay, So your market's going to do it, which means you have to weather the storm of trying things to see what resonates best. So my job was to find out what pleased the tick tock algorithm, but still stayed in line with my products and services. And after one week I still don't have enough details to make any absolute decisions. You just have to keep after it until you can start seeing patterns. So here's some of the things I'm experimenting with from my studies. First is learning how to use their video editor. So I shot a bunch of sample videos and didn't put them up just to learn how to use their little editor. Some people say that you get a boost by using their editor because you're more time on their site. Of course, that's all the social media wants you on their site as long as possible. But some of the super fancy videos you see, you have to use an outside editor. But I haven't done any of that yet. I'm using the inside editor, but I practice four or five different videos. And remember, these are super short, so it doesn't take you forever to do this. Until I learned how to use the thing that my biggest hangup was my big fat fingers working on a phone. With TikTok, it's usually you're going to work on your phone as a device, they call it.

[00:07:33] So anyway, I got halfway competent using the video editor. I don't use all the things it'll do at this point, but I experiment as I go and add maybe a feature here and there and and a green screen effect they call it, which you know, in regular video you've heard me rag against green screen. Well it's different in this this is they have these effects where you can be in the front of the picture and have a picture or video playing behind you and all kinds of stuff they have, but you can't learn to use it all at once. You've got to experiment with it. The next thing was hashtags. It's a big deal. On TikTok to learn to use hashtags how many you put in. You've got to vary that and figure out what works best for you, which ones perform best for you and write in the. And that's another thing I've been doing over the past two weeks is anything product or service that applies to me. I made a separate file and I'm looking in in TikTok and it'll tell you how many times that hashtag has been used. Some of them are in the billions. Some keywords that I thought were great might have had. 150 uses, you know, So that's why you can't trust what you think. You've got to check and see what's actually working on that platform.

[00:08:52] So I'm experimenting with that sometimes. If you try to go for the super big ones, you get lost in the shuffle. So sometimes you back off to the smaller ones until you get your your your feet wet and start getting more and more traction. So you can't always just go for the big ones, but it's not worth it to go for the super little ones because nobody will see that either. All right. The length of the video, my shortest one I have is 5.4 seconds. All right, So don't tell me, folks, you don't have time for this. 5.4 seconds. And it's got, I don't know, two or 300 views. And the longest so far is 59 seconds. See? So these can be cranked out like crazy. The next thing I'm experimenting with is captions. This is where the title of the video goes along with hashtags and whatever text you want to put in there, and you can put in keywords in there. But they need you know, they should be in a sentence format and you can have a link, but it's not clickable. So I leave off the entire HTTPS, all that stuff. And I just use the text of the link like screwthecommute.com/fresh. Forwards to my affiliate link for my headline generator that that I recommend. And I also remind you that you probably should have a plugin called Pretty Links.

[00:10:15] It's a free plug in that'll take long goofy looking links and make them look nice. Not a not like bit.ly, you know, because those things have been spammed to death and they're they're frowned upon by Google and everybody else that knows any better. Pretty links will take your domain name and then a forward slash and you can make a short thing like screwthecommute.com/fresh forwards to this real long affiliate link. All right. So I would suggest you get competent and using that and you use it a lot of places, especially if you're going to do podcast interviews or radio interviews or YouTube videos where you can't say screwthecommute.com/?F=4782g. I mean, you know, stuff like that. You don't, you can't say that. So it's a handy thing that you'll use for lots of things. So that's called pretty links. The time of day that you release your videos has a big effect and your analytics inside of Ticktalk will tell you when your audience is more likely to be on. And it's I can't tell you what time. It depends on your audience. That's the experimental part that we're doing. I don't even know for sure yet on mine in the first week, you know, it just not enough figures yet. Another thing to experiment I'm experimenting with and I have to get started with this is narratives it's called or story time.

[00:11:45] So what this does is it gets your video completion rate and watch time up. See, the longer people watch your video and if they complete them, the more TikTok likes you and shows your your stuff to more people, which is one of the big benefits of TikTok. As long as you're pleasing them, you could have zero followers and end up on what they call the for you page Fyp. And I get all the time. People come up and some of them have thousands of followers. Some of them have like two followers and no video views. But I still see them because I'm interested in their topic. So this gives you a fighting chance to really build yourself up fairly fast. Anyway, time of day, you'll learn over time when's the best time to release your videos? But story time means you don't want to reveal the end people. It's like the Zegart technique or the curiosity technique from my copywriting training. People are listening to your story and they want to see, Well, how does it end? And so they stick in longer. So I'm going to do more of those other things. Pleasing the Ticktalk algorithm is the number of saves, the number of shares and the number of followers you have. So you want to increase all those over time and then it snowballs in that more. The more of those you have, the more TikTok will say, Well, the videos must be pretty good.

[00:13:16] This this creator is making. So we'll show it. The more people that aren't their followers. See, that's another what I was talking about. Your stuff gets shown to people that aren't your followers. If you've used the proper hashtags and people engage and watch to the end of your videos and TikTok likes you, they show you to more and more people and there's just a billion of them out there. Another thing is adding calls to action. You might say at the end, like follow me for more. And I have a lot of part ones and part twos and part threes, and then people are going to look for part one if they happen to pop in at part three. So that increases their number of views and watches and everything. But you want to tell them what to do. Maybe once every four videos or once every three videos give them a call to action. And then your engagement increases. Or like, maybe ask a question like. Like I did a keyword video. So what keywords do you think work best for your topic? Put them in the comments. See? So the more comments you get and make sure you answer all the comments, you'll get notified if you have your notifications turned on that somebody commented and you go right over there and respond to them. And that's what makes people want to follow you because they think you're real.

[00:14:33] Okay? You're also work on your profile. You only have a limited number of characters there and you get one clickable link there. So I use a thing called Link Tree, but there's lots of them where they click on it and then they go to a generated page that I'm able to put all kinds of stuff of mine that they can go to. So I'll tell you how many times that's been seen and when we get to the end to show you my my results in the first week, you can also I think you not everybody has this available right off the bat, but you can have a Q&A link on your profile where people can ask you a direct question. And again, you want to jump in there and answer them because it makes you look real. It makes you seem like you care about your people and then they're more likely to follow you. Now, another cool trick that I learned is called looping. I want you to really pay attention to this section, and you might have to listen to it again to get the hang of it. And then you can go look at some of mine to see how this works. But this is where the end of the video doesn't look like the end. And it loops back into the beginning of the video so that people watch your video more than once, even if they didn't realize they were doing it.

[00:15:55] It's really cool. And so here's a for instance, I'm going to slow down so that you can kind of follow with this. But again, I'll give you now the link to my TikTok is TikTok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. Takes you right to my channel so make sure you go over there. Please follow me. Please comment like crazy. It helps me and you'll be learning how it works. So looping. So here's a for instance on one of my videos. The beginning of the video is this is a quote You don't want your website to suck. This is what we call a hook. That's also what you're working on. You got to hook them because people are scrolling. If you've been on TikTok, you know you're going lightning fast. People have to catch you with the hook. So the hook is you don't want your website to suck. And then I show them a bunch of funny and stupid domain names. Then. So the beginning is you don't want your website to suck. So then I finish with the line. These people messed up and that's why I say. And that's the end of the video. I don't finish the sentence.

[00:17:17] It leads right back in to the first line of the video. So I'm going to do it here live for you. And just to remember, the words say is the end of the video. It quits there, but it's not obvious that it quits there. And you don't want your website to suck. Is the beginning of the video. So here's what it sounds like. Remember, I'm starting at the end here. Quote, These people messed up and that's why. You don't want your website to suck as the beginning of the video and less loops. All right. So I paused on the word y here, but I don't do it in the video. It sounds like this. These people messed up and that's why you don't want your website to suck. And they're already watching the video a second time. So that's a that's called looping. And every couple of videos I do that as a as a to get more views. Sometimes I use calls to action, follow me, sometimes ask questions, and sometimes I loop. All right. So those are ways you you capture more views, engagement and followers. Now, another thing you can do to get more views is to talk faster and put lists of things on your video so people have to watch it again to see them or write them down. See, they can't fast forward and rewind. They can only pause. So if it blows by them really fast, some list of things that they really want, they have to watch the video again.

[00:18:49] And then at least pause. And some of them don't even know that you can pause. So they keep watching it over and over again, writing down one piece of your list each time. You might get four or five views out of the same person. And again you say, Well, what good is that? Just one person. But to the algorithm, it looks like it must be a damn good video if they watched it four or five times. All right. So. So that's another trick. Let's see. Okay, so here's my results. So far. In the first week, I got $300 in sales. All right, Whoop de do. All right, well, 300 is 300. I'll take it. I like it. I have 25 videos. I do between three and five a day. Remember, they're super short. I've got a total video views. This is as of this morning when I'm doing this 8895 which if you started a YouTube channel it would take a long time to ever get 8000 views. All right. Profile views. This is people that click that link tree thing in my profile or actually they they went and clicked to my profile. Now I don't I didn't grab the figures of how many people click through to the link tree. I should have done that, but I forgot. I'll get it next time. But anyway, 197 people went and looked at my profile.

[00:20:14] Oh, Digital multimillionaire. Oh, his original. I was like the OG original gangster, you know, online and dog dad times four and, you know, some personal stuff. I had the 739 likes, 52 comments and 30 shares. So again, nothing to write home about, but I'm learning this is the thing that, like I said, people are in a hurry. They don't do things correctly and they'll never build. This is going to keep building as long as I keep putting out videos and learning what works best for my stuff with my market and so forth. So. So again, I'm not twisting anybody's arm to be on here. I'm just saying I'm going to take advantage of it. And like I said, if they capture me and put me in the slave labor somewhere, I'd probably lose some weight. So. So anyway, check it out at TikTok.com/@DigitalMultimillionaire. And please follow. Please leave a bunch of comments. I will answer every one of them personally. Leave me some questions if you have any. I'll answer them personally. This is how you grow these things. And then once you get to the point where you've got loads and loads and loads where you can't keep up with it, then you can farm yourself out. We just did a thing with outsourcing to the Philippines with John Jonas, so check it out. TikTok.com/@DigitalMultimillionaire. All right, we'll catch you on the next episode. See you then.