916 – Increase your reach: Tom talks Surveys

Episode 916 - Surveys
[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 916 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about surveys and how you can get media attention from them and improve your business and make money with them. How about that? All right, I hope you didn't miss episode 915. That was simple audio editing, which can save you enormous amounts of time and enormous amounts of money. So that was 915. Any time you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. 915 was audio editing and today is 916 surveys. And also make sure you write this down. Episode 463 goes into lots more depth on what I'm going to talk about today. And today I'm going to remind you and give you some of the big bullet points of what surveys can do for you. But episode 463 goes into more depth. So write that down. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:27] All right. One of the best ways to find out about your business and what products and services you should create and how to improve your business is surveys. And then the other side of this is how you can get media publicity with surveys. And you don't even have to do a survey to make money and get media attention with surveys.

[00:01:53] That sounds crazy, doesn't it? But you can do it all right. Now, one of the the big things I learned about doing surveys years ago from a guy named Ryan Levesque, who wrote the book ask, was that if you want to get really accurate results from your surveys, you don't give an incentive to fill out the survey because lots of people will just fill out the survey, won't even think twice, and just slept through the answers just to get the incentive. So he said, if you want to get very accurate results, you don't give an incentive. And what that does is the only the people that are super excited and interested in the topic will fill out the survey. Now, on the other hand, if you just want to get large numbers of people to fill out the survey, you can offer an incentive so that you'll be more attractive to major media publications because they, a lot of them, require a thousand or more respondents before they'll consider it a reasonable survey. Now, it doesn't have to be scientific at all. You see him all the time in cosmopolitan magazine and people magazine, and, you know, they'll say, well, out of 1500 women sampled, you know, 800 of them wear Hanes pantyhose or something. I don't know if you want to get the numbers up, then you offer an incentive.

[00:03:19] If you want more accuracy, you don't. All right. So let's talk about making your business better. Well, too many of us, myself included, think I'm doing a great job. I'll just do whatever I want and and take what comes, comes because I don't want to hear any bad things about my business. But that's kind of a shortsighted thing, because what matters most is what other people are thinking about your business, not what you think about it. Right? So you can do surveys to see what people want you to create in the future. That way you've got some real, you know, real numbers and real interest in in what you're doing, rather than you just thinking up something and creating it and crossing your fingers that somebody wants it. So that's a good thing. Now, the hard one is to say, well, what do you think I could improve? Or what do you not like about my business? Well, you better be ready to, to hear it, because you just opened the door to let them tell you. Now some of the nice people will not either respond or say, oh, you're doing a great job and patting you on the back, but the people that aren't as tied in to you or probably going to tell you, well, you know, I used to like you, but, you know, your podcast is too short now.

[00:04:41] It used to be longer, you know, or something like that, or you used to come out with new products every couple of weeks. And now I haven't heard from you for a year on a new product, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, they're telling you. Oh, and if somebody does respond, I remember talking to this guy that was in my speakers association. It was a press secretary, and he said when they got an actual letter from somebody about some topic or some problem in the world or in their district, they would assign or attribute 50,000 people that had that same problem that just never bothered to write a letter. That's how powerful they they felt about somebody that sat down and wrote a letter about a problem in their district or overall or in Congress or something. See, so if somebody does respond to you, I don't think you can add 50,000 people to have the same problem. Most of us, you know, I have more than 50,000, but most of the people don't. And maybe you have more. Maybe you have a million customers. I don't know, but you've got to attribute heavy weight to something like that because somebody took the time. Now, if it's a competitor trying to mess with you, that's a whole different thing. But but most of the time it'll be somebody telling you what they really feel and had trouble with.

[00:06:07] And it's chances are loads of people had trouble with that same thing. So those are two ways you can improve your business. It tells you what products and services to create and what you could improve about your business that maybe you're ignoring because nobody ever says anything about it. Because you didn't open the door and give them a chance to. They just went somewhere else. Okay, so that's that. Now media coverage. See, journalists love surveys because it does a lot of the work for them. Because you have created the the survey, you have compiled the results and you've given them. These are some of the things you should provide when you're doing a survey to try to get media coverage, you should give them charts and tables and infographics. You know, pictures of the results. And B-roll is video content they could play while they're talking about the survey and graphics and and all that kind of stuff, and make sure you're available so that you, you know, if you do get a bite that you're there and maybe they're on deadline and they want to talk to you today, and then you say, well, I'll be back next after my vacation. Well guess what? You didn't get your survey published. Now, I mentioned you can make money with survey now. Well, let's take this that part again.

[00:07:30] So you get media coverage. You can brag about. It increases your credibility. Like if you get into USA today or some major magazine, you know, even if it's people magazine, if you're selling stuff to, you know, general population, all this stuff adds up. And a lot of times they'll link back to your website, which could mean enormous amounts of traffic for you and turn it into money. Great. Uh, get you interviews, get you speeches. You know, all kinds of good things can come from it. Now, I told you you could do surveys without doing surveys. Right. And so one of the techniques is to compile other surveys and then give your opinion and then almost do like that real clear politics averages. And so they don't do anything but look at other people's stuff and average them out and report the results. And they're famous for it. See. So you could find, uh, maybe you could Google your topic plus the word survey and see all the surveys that are out there and see their results. And then you compile all those and report those to the press. So again, you're doing their work, your their work for them. Now in episode 463 I gave you much more in depth stuff here, but the kinds of questions I cover more in depth on episode 463. But you do want to keep surveys short. You want to maybe under ten questions and under two minutes to finish it out.

[00:09:03] If you want to get the most people to fill it out. But the the types of questions to categorize people and things like that help you pinpoint the results. Now you can do one survey and have ten different kinds of places to send it. But if you're doing a a book survey and you get children's books, well, you would send the results of the survey to the children's books, publications or websites. And if you had sci fi books, well, you would send the results of that one survey to sci fi sites. They're not going to. Sci fi is not going to want to hear the results from children's stuff, but it's still the same survey once you categorize the people. So I go into way more depth on episode 463 on that and what you can do with all this stuff. So, so survey your people and if you don't have enough people, you can advertise your survey. You know, if you don't have a big email list or a big social media following, advertise it to get the results. The payback could be enormous to you if you get it listed and major websites and major publications. So that's surveys. So check out my mentor program. GreatinternetmarketingTraining.com. And hey I'll respond to your survey. Send it over.