703 – Tools to help you succeed: Tom talks 5 Marketing Tools

Episode 703 – 5 Marketing Tools
[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, it's Tom here with episode 703 to Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about five marketing tools I use every day and one method to really speed up your work. All right. Hope you didn't miss episode 702 that was on Understand the ability when you're teaching something or if you have a product that you're trying to describe to somebody or writing copy, they must understand it if you want them to move to action. So that's episode 702. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 702. Now there's still time to get a free ticket to my screw the commute summit. screwthecommute.com/summit2023. There's 32 sessions now that you won't have all of them available now unless you buy the the videos from the previous ones. But anyway, you still have loads of stuff today, tomorrow and Friday that you can really, really pay off. It's free ticket so screwthecommute.com/summit2023. Also follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. They've got probably 200 or more little short training videos on all kinds of stuff on all kinds of stuff. All right. Make sure you grab a copy of my automation book. We sell it for 27 bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the show. And it really, really some of the things I talk about today will be covered in the book in more in depth. So grab it for free at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:02:10] All right. Let's get to the main event. The first one, number one is short keys. I say not so humbly that you are crazy if you don't use this program. And if you don't have your employees using this program, if you have any. This is so powerful. The fancy name for this is a macro program. All right. But all that means is, is that you can type like two keystrokes and it'll type in a paragraph of text for you or two paragraphs or 50 paragraphs. All right? And what happens is, is if you're in any kind of business, you get the same questions all the time. And so if my rule of thumb is if I get a question more than once, I make the answer into a short key and then I might say g one and then boom, it types in all that text for me and I hit go and the customer can't believe how fast I took care of them.

[00:03:11] Say, Now you can still customize the answer if need be, but it's just crazy if you don't use that at shortkeys.com. I think it's like 20 bucks one time. I've been using this since 1997 and we estimated that it saved me. We actually did an estimate over 8 million keystrokes. So so that's a lot of that's weeks and weeks or a year's worth of typing. All right so shortkeys.com. All right. Next one is roboform. I can't tell you how many people pay me a lot of money to talk to me. And then we're on the call for 20 minutes and they still haven't been able to get logged in to what they want to show. All right. This is just not acceptable anymore. There's tools to help you with this. This isn't the only one, but roboform is the one I've been using for many years. There's another thing called one password. There's other browser ones I don't know. I can't vouch for how how good they are, but this one is military grade encryption, and it does all kinds of things for you. So you can once you have let's say you log in to a site, it says, Do you want to remember the login for this? And you say yes. So it goes to roboform and then next time you want to go to that site, all you have to do is go to roboform, hit the name of the site.

[00:04:36] It goes to the site, put your user ID and password in and logs you in. So it saves enormous amount of time. Plus it has a password generator with really hard to crack passwords. All you have to remember is the one master password. Also, if you can set it so that if you're in some kind of environment where other people are around, if a minute goes by and you haven't used it, it locks itself off again so that nobody else can go get into it for you. It has a thing called safe notes. This is where I probably have over 500, maybe 600 by now. I think the last time I taught this, it was about 500, but different accounts with different passwords and log ins and and information on my suburban and and all kinds of stuff. And if you have safe combinations or your Social Security numbers of your kids or your credit card numbers all in there, very safe that nobody can hack into. Well, I should never say nobody, because it's possible, I guess, but way less possible than you putting it on a tablet or taping it up on your monitor. I put it that way. So that's an absolute. And when I traveled a lot, I could put it on a thumb drive and I'd take it with me.

[00:05:55] So if I had to use some kind of kiosk in some foreign country to, you know, for a computer, I could plug it in. Use it and then it would erase itself like it never existed, was never there. So there's nothing left on the browser for people to grab. Now you still have to be careful and well, that actually helps you because you have to be super careful at these kiosks, and especially in foreign countries where in between the keyboard and the computer, they might have put a a keystroke monitor so they can, if you typed in your password and stuff to things, well, that could be recorded. Well with this thing. No, it's just plopped in there so it doesn't go through the keyboard monitor or keystroke monitor and keeps you safer. So roboform or one password or something so that you're way more efficient. You can have better passwords and save yourself tons of time. You know, where was that password? What was it? Oh, I guess I'll do a password reset forever. Yeah, that's just a waste of time. I want you to selling things to people and taking care of customers, not fighting with your computer. All right, Next thing is Zello. Zello is an online walkie talkie. So I use this to keep in touch with my tech guy, because I can just hit a button and it's through the Internet and it's dirt cheap, and instantly I'm connected to him. I don't have to text or email or call or whatever, you know, I can hit the hold the button down. Hey, Larry, I need your you there. And then Larry says, Yeah, I'm here. What's up? And then boom, boom, I get taken care of, whatever I need taken care of. So that's Zello. You can and you can send pictures and, you know, screen captures and all, and you can text through it, too. So that's Zello. Keep in mind, that's that thing. Most walkie talkies are what we call simplex. That means Simplex means that I have to hold the button down and talk. And he can't talk while I'm talking. And I let the button up. It's basically your mouse. And then he talks, and I can't talk while he's talking. That's simplex. There's fancier ones called Duplex that cost a lot more where you can have a conversation. But this this is perfectly fine as dirt cheap. Okay, next one. Probably not going to surprise you. Zoom. So we use internal meetings. We have two internal meetings a week on Zoom, external meetings with all of my mentees or almost exclusively through Zoom. But here's another thing. My whole summit that's on right now, which I hope you run off of this after you get done, listen to this thing and go get your free ticket at screwthecommute.com/summit2023.

[00:08:55] So all the recordings for my interviews in my own sessions, I just sat in front of the computer, hit Zoom hit record and knocked out all the sessions. Didn't do any editing at all. Put them up there for you for the summit, and we use Zoom for this podcast currently. There's some new technologies coming out that I may switch to, but for now we've done over 400 interview episodes. See, for this episode where I'm not interviewing anybody, I don't need Zoom, I just go directly into Adobe audition or whatever your audio program is. But for Zoom, everybody knows how to use it. So I send them a link and then I record on different tracks. You have to set it especially to do that so that they're on one track and I'm on the other. But over 400 episodes I've used Zoom on, I happen to use an iMac for my podcast and then an episode. Speaking of Zoom that you should listen to, I just did it last week I think is episode 698 on Zoom safety. These are the all the see, Zoom has a million settings. I mean I can't keep track of all the settings and they update frequently because they're targets for hackers. So the episode 698 screw the size 698 gives you all the things you need to do to keep safe on Zoom.

[00:10:20] All right. So check that out. And the so that's the five thing. Short keys, Roboform Zello Kickstart. Oh, I skipped kick start cart. Yeah, that's kind of the lifeblood of my operation is the shopping cart system I've been using for 20 years and promoted it. You know, I'm an affiliate for them. I mean, Kick start cart is my private label. It's what it's called. But I mean, it's you know, I say that I work with every day. Well, it's working for me every day. All right. So while I'm talking to you, I've got probably about 500 sequences of auto responders going out, taking care of customers and prospects and everything while I'm talking to you. Very powerful. It's a complete shopping cart system, broadcast email coupons, auto responders, and and also you can have multiple websites. So I probably have about 77 zero different websites going through one account where a lot of these ones you're hosting service gives you. You got to first of all, they're crap. They're just trying to get you to host there. And also you have to install a separate one for each website, which is a total ridiculous nightmare. You're just a goober if you'd ever do something like that, unless it's different companies, legal entity companies with different checking accounts, then you have to do that. But but if it's all you and just different websites.

[00:11:49] No, you use you save a lot of money and do one one thing. Also when you get it Kick start cart we give you free unlimited one on one tutoring for you and your staff or whoever else is there while you while you have the cart. So and many I've got people that's had it 15 years or more, you know, and even longer than that. Okay. So one bonus concept for you is another speed technique. And it's my method that I teach people to use shortcuts. Every computer has shortcuts. All you have to do is is type into Google Windows Shortcuts or Mac shortcuts I don't know about. Linux or any of that stuff, but that's oddball stuff. So here's my method that I teach my students. I say Google Windows Shortcuts, let's say, and look through the big. There's an enormous list of them. Pick out ten of them that you think you like that you think would help you, that would use that kind of function all the time, and then take one of them and force yourself to use it all day long for three days straight. This is my method. By the end of that three days, you're going to totally own that shortcut. And then you pick the next one. To use it, force yourself and find excuses to use it over and over again for three days straight.

[00:13:17] Now you've got to by the end of the month, you'll have ten shortcuts that I guarantee will save you hours and hours of fighting and typing and copying and pasting and opening and closing and all this stuff that the computer will do. If you would just take the time to learn some of these things. And then the other one is, you know, I've been a big proponent of dual monitors for many, many years. In fact, in my other office, I have four monitors on one computer. I work a lot off my laptop and I was running into the same problems. I didn't want to haul a big monitor around with me. And they have these really expensive monitors that sit on your monitor and it comes out like a like almost like a makeup mirror on both sides. You got turns it into three monitors or two monitors. Well, those are really expensive. So Windows ten and I'm probably Mac does it, too. I just don't know about it is I can I can hold the windows key down. I can, you know, get a document or some browser up, hold the Windows key down and hit the right arrow and that thing will go to the right part of the screen. And then I can do another thing to the left part of the screen. So basically I'm putting dual monitors on one screen on a laptop, and I think you can do it as many as four.

[00:14:37] I never pushed it that far, but so now that's another massive timesaver, just like having another monitor because I don't have to open and close stuff if I'm working on a Word document and I want to take some info and put it in a website or vice versa, or, you know, all these kind of things that you end up doing, it's just extremely fast. So if you just took the time, I think it took me 15 minutes to watch a YouTube video on how to do that on Windows ten, and now it's saving me enormous amount of time. Say so. That's what I'm all about, is using these tools and all of them are off the shelf. No programming involved, none of that stuff. So there you go. So short keys, roboform, Zello, kick start cart, zoom, and then learn your windows shortcuts and learn to make it dual screen on a mac or a PC. I just don't know how to do it on the Mac now. I only use it for my podcast and don't really need it and then go sign up for the summit. Gee whiz, are you going to have tons and tons of training there for free at screwthecommute.com/summit2023 and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.