719 – Use these and increase business: Tom talks Marketing Tools

Episode 719 – 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 multi-millionaire. Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 719 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to talk to you about a dozen marketing tools that myself and my staff use all the time. So that's what we're going to get into today. Hope you didn't miss Episode 718. That was Helen Polise. Oh my God. She's got 100 million views on her content, 765,000 followers just on TikTok. And she is a hoot. So she she gave us some tips on TikTok and really cool, cool lady. And of course, anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to school the commute.com/and then the episode number she was 718. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at at Digital multi-Millionaire and also pick up a copy of our automation book at school.com/automate free. You will thank me. All right. Let's get into a dozen marketing tools that we use all the time first and websites and stuff too. First is search engine news. These aren't in any particular order. I've been subscribing to this for, I think, 22, 23 years. This is where I get all my high level search engine stuff. But they have more than that. They have all kinds of tips on pay per click advertising and how to move domain names and just they're the gold standard that everybody else copies that search engine news. Next is Ahrefs.com. Ahrefs.com Slash Backlink dash checker. This is a place you can go see if you're going to bother with SEO at all.

[00:02:04] And I don't bother with it too much anymore other than the basics, because the reason is you could kill yourself for 6 to 8 months and then get a little bit of success and then Google changes something and you disappear off the face of the earth. All right. So so we only do the basics that are the long term things that are necessary so you don't shoot yourself in the foot and make Google mad. So that's a bunch of basics that we have covered in other episodes. But this is specifically talking about backlinks. See if Google kind of knows all sees all and it sees what websites are linking to you. And so the higher quality of site that links to you, Google. Google thinks that you must be a higher quality site and raises you up in their search rankings. So it used to be you just get as many links as you possibly could. But now they it's way more important that a couple quality links are worth a thousand times what a what a thousand nobody websites or or bad websites are worth. So this will let you check who's linking to you. You can put your competitors in there, see who's linking to them, and maybe they'll link to you if you contact them. That kind of stuff. Okay. Another one I harp on all the time is short keys for the PC or keyboard maestro for the Mac. This is a macro program which allows you to type in large amounts of text, which is hitting a couple keystrokes.

[00:03:35] So what you do with this is anytime you get regular questions all the time, instead of going and finding the answer and copy and pasting and or typing it, retyping it in, which is just ridiculous. You just put it in this one of these programs and hit a couple keystrokes and it types the whole thing in for you. So that's I've been using that for well over 20 years. All right, let's see. Next is Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a really super dirt cheap, super high quality hosting service for big files. One of the main things we use it for besides backups of certain things is we put giant video files on there because if you try to put a giant video file on your own website on relatively cheap shared hosting, you're going to crash the site. It's probably not going to play well. You might get, you know, a big bill for overages from a bandwidth and stuff like that. So I mean, I think my bill for the past two months was like $18 for all the hundreds and hundreds of things I have going so really dirt cheap. Amazon S3. Now there's another one. I don't use this personally, but my video guy uses it called Kapwing. It sounds funny. Ka pwi ng. It's a it's a real simple video editor and meme generator and I know he uses it for a lot of our stuff, even though he's highly qualified to use the fancy stuff.

[00:05:13] For some things this is much easier. So check it out@kapwing.com. All right, Next is repurposed.io. Now, this is another one that I don't personally use, but my video guy uses it where he takes stuff that I have. And it ships it all to all other places like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest. And, you know, it'll take one piece of content and send it to a bunch of different places for me. So that's very handy. Okay. Next is Roboform. I've been harping on this for well over 20 years also. This is a password. Highly encrypted military grade encryption. Password generator, password keeper, safe note keeper. So you can put all your critical information in there and it's highly encrypted. And all you have to do is remember one password, which is the name of another one of these, these password things. So I use roboform. One password is one that I think a lot of people use. So that's it's just not reasonable. I mean, people pay a lot of money to talk to me and then I'm sitting there for 20 minutes and they can't find their passwords to get into something they want to show me. Right? So and this will generate all kinds of crazy passwords. And it has one click logins, which means if you want to go to eBay and you haven't been there for a year, you click the button and it goes to the login page, puts your user ID and password in and logs you in.

[00:06:53] All right. So and one form of it that I used to carry when I traveled a lot, I had it on a thumb drive. I could go to a kiosk at some foreign country and not have to type in things because they have, you know, key keystroke analyzers that can catch your passwords and everything. So with this, I plugged it in. I went to the sites I need to go to. When I pulled it out, it erased itself like it was never there. So very cool. Roboform. Okay. A teleprompter app is very handy and there's loads of them. And you can some are free, some are paid for your cell phone. So this is well, they have them for the desktops and laptops and everything else. And we have ones where we put it on an iPad and we put it over on our big camera in our studio and do do that. So that's very handy If you have things that have to be said and you don't want to forget anything and it allows you to look right into the camera lens instead of looking at notes. All right, so some kind of teleprompter app, really good. Okay. For photo editing, Of course. You know, my other guys can use Photoshop, but it's way too complicated for most of the stuff I do. So like lightning fast, I can make stories, you know, for Facebook and Snapchat and I can for quizzes.

[00:08:19] I have quiz, a quiz generator that has pictures along with each quiz question, and I can put text on them, I can resize them everything and this totally for free. I don't even think you have to have an account, but it's yp.com ipcc.com. I use that every single day totally for free. And it's lightning. Once you get learn how to use it again. I don't have to pay. I don't have to wait for somebody to do this stuff. For me, it's lightning fast and that's what I want for you all out there is be doing stuff, you know, instead of waiting and paying, you're getting stuff done. Just because you took a couple hours and learned a new program and now you save all that money and all that time. See these? When you're hiring stuff out, you always have to wait. Nobody's sitting there waiting for your one job and instantly doing it for you. All right. So it's just crazy. It's no wonder people get discouraged because they take forever and they spend money on things that they could be doing for free. All right. But there is places that I go if I need something that I don't want to do myself. And that's fiverr.com. I've been preaching. I was one of the first people ever introduced the Internet world to this fiverr.com It used to be just five bucks, but now you could spend hundreds there, right? But still, most everything starts at five, ten, $15 to get stuff done.

[00:09:50] Like if I needed a fancy graphic that was out of my league or if I needed a voiceover or, you know, all kinds of I mean, there's just a million things they have there, so it's worth checking out. All right. Another thing I keep handy is the speed test. You can I think you don't really have to keep this handy. You can just go to Speedtest.net and it'll test your internet connection. Both upload and download. And a lot of people don't know that if you're on cable system, that cable can be screamingly fast. If nobody's on it and can go as slow as dial up. If there's loads of people on like certain times of the day or if there's some big event on TV or the Olympics are on or something. So. You need to. If you are on cable, you need to know, okay, if I really need to to to be productive uploading and downloading files, what time of day should I do it? I kind of sucks to have to do that. Now I have FiOS, which is fiber optics, which is I know they're still not giving me the speed that I pay for, but still it's constant all the time and I use it in the hotels too. If I go somewhere, I have this hotspot. So I check the hotel Wi-Fi first. Now it's dangerous to be on there, so don't do anything critical on on Wi-Fi in the hotel.

[00:11:12] But if it's really fast, I'll use it. If it's not, I'll do a speed test with my hotspot. And if it's faster, I'll use it. And it's safer to use if I had to do anything critical with banking or anything. So just so speedtest.net, I think it'll come up like say by ookla or something and all you do is hit the button and it just sit there and wait and it'll tell you your upload and download speeds. And if it's in the single digits, you're screwed. All right. You got almost, you know, dial up speeds. I pay for gigabit, which is super fast here at the house, but I don't think I'm getting those kind of speeds. Um, but anyway, you should know your, your speeds at your times of day. And if you're traveling, if it's better to use a hotspot or a the hotel stuff. All right. The last one is a VPN. That's a virtual private network. These are cheap or free. I wouldn't bother with a free one because pretty shaky, but a VPN allows you to hide where your IP address and. And there's plenty of legitimate reasons for this. I mean there's illegitimate reasons to to do that. But for instance, if I was going to have a big event in Los Angeles and I live in Virginia Beach, well ads that are delivered to me in Virginia Beach are going to be different than ones that are delivered to people that live in the Los Angeles area.

[00:12:41] So I want to see what's going on in Los Angeles. So I would go to my VPN, log in and tell, Hey, give me an IP address in Los Angeles, and then I'll start seeing ads for Los Angeles. And that way I can say, Oh, this is the kind of stuff that works. This is where people are advertising for this kind of event and so forth. So, so and it does help with privacy if you're a private person. I did a thing on the Tor browser recently where if you combine that with a VPN, I don't know what episode that was, but it was very wasn't too long ago. Then you can really hide your your surfing activities now. None of this is 100% foolproof. So if you're going out and doing bad stuff that's on you, I'm just telling you that these things exist out there. All right. So there's a dozen things that we use all the time. And it's not the only stuff by any means. I could probably do another dozen in another episode, but if you started using those, wow, it's going to really help your productivity and and help you out. And almost most of it is free or super cheap to do. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'll catch you all in the next episode. Go out there and use tools that help you.