924 – Simplify and grow your business: Tom talks Three Prong Attack on a Seven Figure Income Part 1

Summary by ChatGPT

In episode 924 of the "Screw the Commute" podcast, host Tom Antion introduces the first part of his "Three Prong Attack" strategy for achieving a seven-figure income, a concept he developed around 1996. This strategy addresses common challenges his students face when building successful online businesses and websites. The three prongs are:

Website and Shopping Cart System: Focus on creating a functional and user-friendly website and shopping cart system that effectively sells products. Tom discusses common mistakes people make with their websites, such as having no clear purpose, poor usability, and broken links. He emphasizes the importance of having a cohesive system for managing sales, upsells, and customer engagement tools like autoresponders and split testing.

Database Management (to be covered in the next episode): This involves building and maintaining a robust database, which now includes email lists and social media contacts.

Product Development (to be covered in a later episode): This prong will cover strategies for creating and marketing digital products, which are less risky than physical products.

Tom provides several resources and past episodes for listeners to explore specific topics like website readability, shopping cart functionality, and search engine optimization. He encourages listeners to check these out for more detailed guidance. Finally, Tom highlights his mentor program and upcoming episodes that will delve deeper into the next prongs of the strategy.

===

Episode 924 – Three Prong Attack Part One
[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 924 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is part one of a three part series of a concept I developed around 1996, called the three prong attack on a seven figure income. These are the three things that, after all, the students I've had were having trouble with. So I boiled it down to three major categories of things you need to work on to have a successful online business, or even if you're not doing an online business so much, but a successful website. Okay. So this is going to be part one of that now. Hope you didn't miss episode 923. That was employees versus contractors. Make sure you don't get in trouble and owe the government a bunch of money, so that keeps you out of trouble there. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. Okay, I developed this concept. Like I said, I believe it was around 1996 called the three prong attack to a seven figure income. And it was to simplify the myriad of things that need to be done to have a good website, be able to sell stuff online, to be able to promote your products, to be able to create new products, things like that. So this is prong one. I'll give you all three prongs. Prong one is your website and shopping cart system. Prong two is your database, which used to be just email, but now it includes your social media and prong three is product development.

[00:02:11] Send it back in the day it was a lot of physical products, but now mostly digital products because they're less risky. All right. So today we're going to talk about websites. Now this is going to be kind of a resource for you to a bunch of other episodes that I have that cover all these aspects more in depth. There's loads of them and they'll be in the show notes. I'm going to read them off so that they're on the recording here. But, you know, I highly encourage you to go to these other episodes, go to the show notes, they'll be listed there, and then go look through the list and say, oh, I need to know about readability on my website or Link Bait, or how to get return visits, or what's the pros and cons of pop up boxes and a bunch of other stuff. So. So the first thing I'm going to refer to is there's an article and there'll be a link to that in the show notes on Antion.com on the top 15 mistakes People Make on Their websites. So I'll just go over them real quick without going in depth on them, because you can always go to that article and read the details. But here they are. And then I'm going to give you a bunch of other episodes to listen to that go into depth on all these topics or most of the topics.

[00:03:30] All right. So the top 15 mistakes, no plan or purpose for the website. Too many topics you should concentrate on one thing. No instant recognition. Oh let me go to the back. Last one. I always got to give you extra details. Yeah. Too many topics. Doesn't mean you can't have varied product lines. It just means that if you're into leadership and customer service and you sell Bibles, I mean, those are three different big things that should have separate websites. Okay. No instant recognition. People should be able to know what your site is about instantly when they hit the homepage form over function. This is where people make their site look gorgeous, but it's very unusable. And I'll refer you to episode 313 for usability and 312 for readability. Okay, anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to the screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 313 was usability. 312 was readability okay, too much navigation, too many places for people to click and they just get overwhelmed. So we go over that. And that would be under usability, no obvious opt in form that that helps build your database. And that would be part of prong two actually. But that's still a mistake on your website, not including your social media. And get off the social media that's defunct. I still see Google+ things on people's websites, and that went out a couple of years ago.

[00:05:06] But if you do have your social media, make sure if they click on it, it goes to your social media and it's impressive when they get there, because if you haven't posted anything, then you should take it off your website. The link to it. Disappointment. This is um. Oh, excuse me. Before that broken links. It screams non-professional when links don't go anywhere. So that's that's one thing. But disappointment is when you tell people to click on a link that's supposed to go X and it goes to Y or Z or somewhere else that's you're disappointing them and they won't trust you anymore. Poor sales copy. You got to do sales copy to get people to do what you want. I mean, you can't just give all the features and how great you are. No, you have to get benefits to them. And that's my copywriting course. Copywriting901.com. Slow loading. Google came out and said a couple of years ago, if your site doesn't load fast, you'll never see the light of day in our results, so you got to make sure it's not full of bloated code and all this kind of stuff. Uh, poor quality videos. And they're hosted on YouTube, so poor quality videos are bad enough. But if you host them on YouTube and just display them on your site, YouTube always makes it easy to go back to YouTube to watch some dumb cat video.

[00:06:31] So you host the videos on like Amazon S3 or some big hosting service and then display them on your website. Overpaying for services. This is when you don't know what you're doing, and you just depend on these web designers, which could have been an out of work graphic artist yesterday, and they don't really know. They can make it look pretty, but they don't know the intricacies of making a website that sells. So don't do that. That was, I think, 14 of them and the 15th one. I ain't going to tell you. How about that? You have to listen to episode one of this podcast from, I don't know, five years ago. It's still the biggest mistake people make on their website. So go to episode one, screwthecommute.com/1. Okay, so I'm going to, uh, that's for website stuff now, your shopping cart system. And I've got a bunch of places you can go to listen to the depths of this, but you wanted to I said, shopping cart system right now, remember, we're in prong one. Prong two. Uh, next episode is going to be database prong three after that's products. So we're still in prong one website and shopping cart, but I called it a system because you needed all combined. And what happened to me years ago was that people would sell me a shopping cart, and then they'd sell me these other things to go with the shopping cart from a different company.

[00:08:00] But then when it didn't work, they'd each blame each other. So it's good to have an integrated system that does upsells for you, you know, get more money out of the same customer gives Autoresponders broadcast email split testing. That's how you get rich is to test stuff against each other. Coupons. And there's like 30 different things that shopping carts should have. And I have episodes on that. And so I'll start giving you the episodes on the shopping carts. Right now it's 856. It's called shopping cart sell through. That's how you get people to buy one thing and then offer them other things. It's all technically a fancy upsell. Number 530 is shopping cart abandonment. That's the worst thing. People get in there and they just never finish the sale. Episode 519 was asked me questions about shopping carts and then also 283. And absolutely. Episode ten is about, you know, all the stuff shopping carts should do. So those will all be in the show notes. Now for the website stuff. I got loads and loads of stuff. 815 is more in depth on the top 15 mistakes I just read to you from Antion.com. Readability, I told you is 312. Usability is 313. Linkbait is 311. Now Linkbait sounds bad, like clickbait, but no linkbait is a good thing for you. 311 and if you were going to do one thing to work on your website search engine optimization, that would be it.

[00:09:36] Episode 311. Now, I'm not a big fan of SEO anymore, other than the basics, so that you don't waste a lot of money and waste six months trying to get somewhere and then you waste your money. 316 is an important one called Return Visits. How to get people to come back to your site. 328 is on pop up boxes whether you like them or not, they work okay. 352 is membership sites so you get a recurring income. 433 was how to get your website hacked or, you know, the opposite is how to not get hacked. 481 is how to develop a website. How do you get started thinking about a website? And 502 was title tags one of the most important things ever on a website? And there's more of them out there. But if you really like this kind of stuff, go to screwthecommute.com/training. And it's all our training episodes, nearly 500 of them, and it's $1 million worth of training for you for free. So so that's it. This was prong one. Next episode will be prong two about your database. But if you did all the stuff in these three prongs, you would absolutely be able to quit your job, make a lot of money online, and do things correctly at a very low cost, very low risk. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and I'll catch you on prong two. The database.