925 – Email is STILL King: Tom talks Three Prong Attack Part 2

Summary by ChatGPT

In episode 925 of the "Screw the Commute" podcast, host Tom Antion continues his three-part series on the "Three Prong Attack to a Seven-Figure Income," a strategy he developed in 1996 and still finds effective today with some updates. The first prong, covered in the previous episode (924), focused on websites and shopping cart systems. This episode, part two, delves into the second prong: building and managing your database, which includes email lists and social media followers.

Key Points Discussed:
Email Lists Still Reign Supreme: Tom emphasizes that despite the rise of social media, email remains the most effective way to make money online. He stresses the importance of moving social media followers onto an email list that you control, as relying on social media platforms means you're vulnerable to changes and policy updates from the platform owners.

Consistency and Recognition in Emails: To avoid having emails deleted instantly, Tom advises being consistent with the sender name and ensuring recipients recognize who the email is from. The subject line is also crucial for increasing open rates and should be engaging and curiosity-driven, leveraging the Zeigarnik principle, which taps into human curiosity.

Effective Use of Social Media: While Tom sees social media as a "necessary evil," he acknowledges its role in acquiring emails. He advises focusing on engagement rather than frequency of posts, as high engagement (likes, comments, shares) is crucial for visibility on platforms. He recommends posting quality content at times when most followers are online and getting rid of inactive followers to improve engagement rates.

Strategic Engagement: Tom explains that the success of a social media post largely depends on its initial engagement within the first hour. Therefore, he suggests coordinating with friends and followers to ensure early engagement, which will help the post reach a wider audience.

Additional Resources: Throughout the episode, Tom references previous podcast episodes for more detailed discussions on topics like email marketing strategies, social media success, and optimizing engagement. He encourages listeners to check out these episodes for deeper dives into each subject.

The episode concludes with a preview of the next episode, which will focus on product development, particularly digital products, as the third prong in his attack strategy. Tom invites listeners to explore his mentor program for personalized guidance on implementing these strategies. Listeners interested in leveraging email and social media for business growth are encouraged to visit Tom's website for more training resources and to tune in to the next episode for further insights on creating high-return, low-risk digital products.

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Episode 925 – Three Prong Attack Part Two
[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 925 of Screw the Commute podcast. This is part two of a three part series on the three prong attack to a seven figure income, which I created back around 1996 and is still valid today with some changes. Part one is website and shopping carts. That's what you would have heard on episode 924. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. 924 was part one of the series, talked about websites and shopping cart systems. Now today we're talking about prong two, which is your database, which used to be just email, but now it encompasses all your social media folks too. And prong three next episode will be on product development.

[00:01:15] All right. So let's get into prong two database. Well, like I said, when I first started, email was king. But guess what? Email is still king. And the only people that dispute this are the people that sell social media training. Okay, everybody at my level and above my level even make the bulk of the money on email and social media to me is a necessary evil. And guess what we use it for to get more emails. All right. Some people just want to pats on the back and they want to show you what they ate for dinner and all that cliche stuff.

[00:01:56] But if you want to make money, you need to get them the heck off of there, onto something that you control so you don't control any of that stuff. If Zuckerberg or Elon Musk turns a dial or somebody, you disappear off the face of the earth. It's not your stuff. But when you get them on an email list, it is your stuff. And the only difference is kind of the younger generation has been away from email, but they don't usually have as much money to spend anyway. So if you're trying to hit that market, God help you. You know, you got to sell way more volume to make up the same amount of money. Now I have masterclass on this, but I'm going to give you a bunch of episodes back episodes on this, but I will give you some tips here to get you started. So the number one thing that keeps your email from getting deleted instantly in somebody's inbox is that they recognize who it's coming from. So that means you need to be very consistent. Now you can have multiple lists okay. And different topics but for each list they should recognize you. For instance, my protection dog. People might not recognize my name. They're more interested in protection dogs. And I'm not known as a big honcho in that industry. See, but in my industry I am. So I use my name and it's always Tom Antion Tom Antion Tom Antion.

[00:03:24] All right. So they recognize it doesn't mean they don't delete it. But I'm just saying that's the the rule. If you want to get deleted instantly, be inconsistent in your who it's from now the other the next thing that's the most important of all is that the subject line, the subject line is so important because no matter what you do afterwards, it doesn't matter if they don't open the email, right? You could have the best sales letter in the world. You could have the best product on earth, far better than anybody else's, but nobody will know about it if they don't open the email. So subject line should be 50 characters or less, including spaces and the most important stuff to the left in almost all countries except Arabic countries might, you know, they they write in a different direction than us. But that's critically important. And one of the critical techniques in subject line writing is called the Zeigarnik principle. You probably, if you've listened to this podcast a lot, heard me talk about this ad infinitum, because it's so important. So Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian psychologist and psychiatrist who discovered the principle of the human mind that the human mind cannot stand unfulfilled curiosity. So if you and you start watching your subject lines, people will do stuff that makes you wonder, oh, I wonder what they mean, or wonder who they're talking about.

[00:04:57] You know, like super NFL star has a car accident, you know? So if you're into sports, you're like wondering I wonder who it was, you know, and you got to open it. See. And some of the biggest ones I ever had was boy does Tom did. Boy did I get in trouble. And people were wondering, you know, I got I've had as many as 150,000 people on the list. They're like, I wonder what Tom did now. You know, I got to open it to find out. See, so that's the subject line and the Zeigarnik principle. And then you can also use it again in the body to get the click through rate to your website. We the trend is shorter emails clicking through to your website where you can control the look and feel and have unlimited space and all that stuff. So. So you want to get them over to your website from the email or on smaller products. Direct purchase. Okay, so let me give you some episodes back. Episodes. These are going to be in the show notes. But 913 was the perils of too many emails. Not 899 was the force to open the email. So you force people to open it. 821 was five emails that made money. 814 was story emails. 813 was how to write sales emails and 715 was ten tips on email marketing and 701 was different angles to send out the same email.

[00:06:29] And I actually have 16 of them. And you really want to keep track of this particular page. It's much easier to remember screwthecommute.com/training where all my training episodes, nearly 500 of them are at that because there's 16 total email ones. And there's a now here's the ones for social media. After I tell you about social media, I'll have a bunch of episodes for there. All right. So let's get into social media now. This is prong two of my three prong attack. Remember we're talking about database. Prong one was website shopping cart. Prong three is product development This is prong two database people under your control. All right. So social media as I mentioned earlier. Get them the heck off of there onto an email list. That's your main goal. All right. And the next thing you got to keep in mind, it's bad to post too much so you can post too much. And the reason it's bad to post too much is because you want to go for quality over quantity. In the old days you had a post every day, post five times a day, and maybe on TikTok that might work, I don't know, but here's a word that you need to underline in blood or lipstick or something in all caps and exclamation points around it is engagement.

[00:07:53] The entire social media system runs on engagement. See, every company on earth that's in social media wants the people to stay on there longer because they can sell more ads and higher prices for the ads. That's the whole model for everyone, including Google. Everybody. So if you don't get engagement, keep people staying on. You don't get any rewards that people will see your more, see your stuff more, see if you get engagement. The social media platforms starts showing your stuff to more people. Now, in the beginning it wasn't like that. Way way way way way times 100 back. It used to be you. They encouraged you to get all these followers and likes and everything, and you'd put a post up and everybody would see it. Well, now it's probably less than a half a percent. I don't have that exact figure, and it's never exact. But you put something up and nobody sees it. But if people get engagement with you and let me tell you the the levels of engagement, a like is the lowest level a comment or a decent comment? Not like nice post. That's not a decent comment. A comment that's thoughtful. Several sentences or something is next. A share is next and a save is next, so they're worth more. Put it that way. But let me give you an example of this engagement stuff and why, especially on Instagram, you need to kick off people that don't engage with you.

[00:09:31] And I got to tell you, it could be your best friend from kindergarten who absolutely adores you but never engages with your stuff. That person is hurting you. They don't know it. And until you listen to this, you probably didn't know it. But having them on your list hurts you. So let me give you an example of how this works. So let's just for round numbers, say you had 100 followers and you put a Instagram post up and you got one engagement. So one out of 100 is 1% engagement rate. But let's say you did the stuff I teach, and you got rid of the fake ones that are on your list because everybody gets, you know, once the bigger numbers thinking they can brag about it, but it's actually hurting them. That's why bragging in that case is hurting you really bad. So you get rid of the fake ones. You get rid of the ones that have never engaged or very seldom ever engage with your stuff. And let's say you cleaned out half, and I've been through many lists where more than half were in that boat and people were bragging. I got 15,000 followers. And then I look at their engagement. It's almost zero and all those people are hurting them, right? So but they're bragging they got 15,000 followers.

[00:10:49] All right. So anyway, let's say you got rid of 50 just to be conservative 50. And you had 50 left. And you put a post up and one person engaged with it. Now you just doubled your engagement rate to 2% instead of 1%. You see how this goes. So so that's the the way the numbers work. So what do you do about it? Well, don't post as often Post consistently at a time when most of your followers are on which you can see in your analytics. Beg, borrow, steal whatever it takes for all your best friends and family to force themselves to engage with your post. And here's the thing. This is I forget what this is called, but oh, it's a micro test. That's what it's called. So if that doesn't happen within the first hour, roughly. Remember, nobody knows this for sure because it's secretive. But guys like me that are in it know this. You know, know the rough thing, how this works. So if they don't engage, if you don't get engagement on in the first within roughly the first hour of you posting, it's over. Any work you put into the post is gone. Nobody's going to see it. It's going to sit there on your account and nobody on earth is going to see it. But if you got together 1520, 25 people, that would go engage with your post as soon as you put it up on Instagram.

[00:12:24] And this is, like I said, pretty general for most of the social media is going to start showing it to way more of your people and TikTok. They'll show it to anybody. So you got to do whatever you can to get people to engage with it, like I said, and they'll help you if you just ask them. So. So that's just one example of how you could really take off if you were more strategic about your social media. And then, of course, I want some of the posts to give people a freebie or do the normal stuff to get them over to opt in with an email on your email list. That's what we're our goal is. So let me give you some episodes on social media. 181 is how I handle social media. 403 was Instagram goes into more detail of what I was just telling you. 755 is social media success. 613 is back off on your social media. In other words, less instead of more. 523, 23 and 409 are strategies. I can't remember, they might have been for different, you know, Pinterest and, you know, different ones. And yeah, so so if you like, like I said, all this stuff go to screwthecommute.com/training. And you can find all of these and hundreds I mean there's 500 things there.

[00:13:53] Okay. All training episodes all my my regular account or the regular homepage is screw the commute has, you know, 900 and what is it, 25 episodes. But that includes 400 or so interviews, which are great, I'm telling you. But if you want hardcore training, go to the screwthecommute.com/training. So this was prong two. Tomorrow will be or next episode is prong three of product development And we're mostly on digital now because the risk is low, the returns are super high. So this is the three prong attack. It's still valid today. After all these years from 1996 till today. It's just changed a little bit because of the social media. But we still have website stuff. Make sure you listen to that. Episode 925 wait a minute. No. 924 this is 925 and then 926. Watch for that. That's going to be product development. If you put all of this stuff together, listen to all those other episodes and implement it. You could quit your job, you'd be making great money and, you know, and then you can get in my mentor program and I'll take you to a higher level. How about that? But anyway, if you want help with all of this, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And you just witnessed prong two of the three prong attack on a seven figure income.