Internet Marketing with Tom Antion
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Randy: What’s up world? And welcome to REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. Radio! The fastest hour in radio, no doubt about it. I’m Randy Zachary and this is a show about real estate, about God, about life, about giving back, about being the change in the world that you’d like to see.
A privilege to bring to you Nathalie Mullinix and REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc., a company dedicated to excellence. REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. is a revolution founded on a very simple principle. We believe sellers and buyers should have choices. We have been a pioneer in the menu programs system, more on that of course a little later. Nathalie Mullinix, president and founder of REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc., averaged over 80 million dollars a year in sales prior to stepping back to focus more on building REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. Membership Network. She’s an accomplished speaker, writer, consultant, trainer, and oh, by the way, mother. She travels worldwide literally, spreading the Gospel if you will, of REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc.. And now, Natalie Mullinix!
Nathalie: Hey everybody! I’m so happy to be here this week. And we have such a wonderful and interesting show today. For those of you who are new to REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. Radio, the first half hour of our show is typically about real estate, agents brokers, buyers and sellers and second half is spiritual, self-help, motivational and community issues. This week we’re gonna do something a little bit different cause we have a wonderful guest who’s gonna stay on through the show cause there’s so much to go through and we’re gonna do the first half and the second on real estate internet marketing and how it applies to any business. So Tom Antion, who I’ve had the privilege of knowing since 1997, he’s here to talk to us today about selling our products and services on the internet. He’s not giving us a book report, he’s the read deal! He’s been doing this for years and years. Tom is an international acclaimed expert in international marketing in small businesses. He’s a fulltime professional speaker as well and he’s been featured on many news shows worldwide, including The Canadian and Australian Broadcast Network, Associated Press and hundreds of radio station and print outlets across the United States. He’s also been involved with National Association of Speakers for years with president of the capital association. He’s consistently making large sums of money on the internet. Literally. He’s got students in his mentor program, many of which are making up to $20,000 a month. He’s – I can go on and on. He’s got the largest internet magazine in over 100,000 subscribers in 80 countries. When we go through it, you’ll be more and more interested to hear more about it. Cause Tom actually trained his students, he has an internet marketing retreat center where you live and work with Tom for four days, learning the ins and outs of working and making the big bucks on the internet. He’s also – and this is wonderful, the founder of the biggest [inaudible] called the Internet Marketing Center, in Virginia Beach and it’s an independent and licensed Internet Marketing School. It’s one of the only ones in the country. You’re getting the real deal cause it’s certified by the state – so as you can tell I’m really excited to have Tom on so without any more ado I’m gonna welcome Tom Antion.
Tom Antion: Hey, Nathalie! How are you?
Nathalie: I’m wonderful! I’m just so thrilled, Tom. You’re always so swamped and to get you for an hour is a total nugget. We gotta have you on.
Tom Antion: I tell you what. You people need to get your pencils out cause I’m gonna lay it on your for an hour. But I wanted to ask you “How’s the weather?”
Nathalie: Oh my God! I’m in Hawaii right now and it’s muggy. And you’re in Virginia Beach now?
Tom Antion: Yeah, so we got a good line between us, we’ve got a really long string connecting us and I’m talking into this tin can.
Nathalie: Hey, what do you think about the hand radios? Those are the new thing now. The reason they’re the new thing is cause they’ve been around forever and I’ve just found out last week that if all our cellphones go out and we have a terrorist attack, we can still communicate through hand radios.
Tom Antion: In fact October 4th was National CB day, so 10/4 buddy!
Nathalie: Are you serious? Is it really?
Tom Antion: Yeah.
Nathalie: Oh my Gosh, Tom! That’s really too funny. When you said about having the wire connecting us got me thinking about it and I wonder if they can do that with CB’s like hand radios. I don’t know, but it’s amazing. In high school they were tricking me with the CB one day and telling me to say that my handle was something I didn’t have any idea. Everybody kept calling and calling –
Tom Antion: What was it?
Nathalie: It was terrible. They said to say eager beaver. I was only in 8th grade, I didn’t think it was stupid and I should have but I didn’t. I’m so embarrassed! But anyhow! So you are –
Tom Antion: I’ll tell you what, if anybody is listening to this show and you’re a grandparent or a parent and you want your kids to have a better chance to succeed in life, I mean there isn’t much security anymore, you gotta listen to this stuff. I’m gonna tell them all kinds of different ways that you can really legitimately can make money on the Internet. And I emphasize the word legitimate, because it is also a field that is just full of scammers and they all help each other out and they make up stuff and sales figure and they outline that lie and have no scruples. Yeah, that will give you a sour taste in your mouth.
Nathalie: You know when you mentioned that topic, [inaudible] produced a documentary about your life called American Entrepreneur, which congratulations by the way! That’s awesome!
Tom Antion: Thank you! I thought you have to be dead before they did that but I guess not.
Nathalie: Yeah, usually you don’t get – congratulations! When you say that, [inaudible] with the internet marketing and the parents and children and you see kids and teenagers going out and making lots of money so it can be done at any age. What are some things that they should look for with these scammers, because scammers don’t always look like scammers, they look like people.
Tom Antion: Yeah. Well one of the things is outrageous claims. I mean anybody that tells you that you can make an extreme amount of money in a very short period of time with no work it should be obvious but people get caught up. And I tell you one of the things that these scammers are good at is copywriting. They’re really good at writing videos that make you think that a piece of dog poop is the best in the world and you gotta have that and it’s really what it is. And so you gotta watch out for outrageous claims. I became a multi-millionaire for years after doing this. However, I worked my butt of those four years, I studied, I got training from people, I worked day and night, I was a fanatic and it didn’t happen overnight. It can but it’s not – it’s just like any other business, it takes enormous time. So that is the first thing.
Second thing is income claims. There’s two ways that people can lie about their income. One is just photoshopping fake results of their bank statements –
Nathalie: I’ve seen that before where they show you their checks.
Tom Antion: Yeah, that’s one way but the other way is more insidious. They might show you real sales figures, they might say “We’ve sold $200,000 in a week of this new super duper product” and they did. What they failed to tell you is that they spend a quarter of a million dollars in advertising. “I actually lost $50,000 but I’m gonna make it up from you because you don’t know any better when you saw this bill of goods.” So you gotta be very careful with income claims and outrageous statements. And as you’re more knowledgeable, you start seeing the patterns of the people that are just selling the same stuff over and over again with the different names and – but in the beginning it’s tough because you don’t know.
Nathalie: Yeah, because you don’t want people to shut down and go “Forget it! I’m never gonna do internet marketing” because that happens too, you know? When people, it’s a toughie. Yeah well anyone listening now – we have a lot of people that are archive listeners too. So if you wanna call in, the call in number is 347 945 5428. If you’re listening later, which most of you will do, Tom Antion will give his contact information several times through this show. Tom has – he’s not here trying to sell you. We’re giving you information, but we literally have the tools so that people can signup and learn how to do this. You can learn on a small scale or a large scale, you can do it online with bits and pieces. The amount of content you have – and you’re a pro speaker too. I’ve seen Tom speak at events and all of a sudden he’s a [inaudible] and everybody was following him. And somebody said that about you by the way and I agreed with them – this was like years ago I heard you and you’re so good and you’re the real deal. And so I’m just saying and putting that out there cause you really have a lot of information too so if somebody is a little afraid and wants to get their toes in the water but not jump in, you have everything from getting and reading and learning the information for what to look all the way up to an internet marketing school, where people can physically come in and do classroom training. So I wanted to mention that.
Tom Antion: That’s the reason why I started this school, it’s because there’s no scrutiny in this industry. I mean other than the FTT who can barely see past their nose when every day 5,000 supposed rich marketers appear on the scene. So I started the school because I knew that I would be under scrutiny. Financially I had to be very well to get the license to the school, I had to put a big amount of money for student refunds. So none of these scammers are gonna go through this scrutiny and every year I have to recertify and they can come in and any mistake I make it’s $1,000 per mistake.
Nathalie: Really? I had no idea!
Tom Antion: So that is what I did – cause no matter how good you are, you’re surrounded by these rip-off’s. So you just have to be very careful who you’re dealing with – and you can hardly look at reviews, because many people generate a false number of positives about themselves.
Nathalie: In other – ok.
Tom Antion: Yeah, they get testimonials and they get and pay other people to do testimonials. It’s just crazy. But so anyway, the warning has been put forth but that doesn’t mean that if you learn how to make money using these legitimate means ether promoting your own product or service or – and it’s not necessarily or. It can be and – promote a lot of things that you might not care about just for the cash flow. For instance I have golf sites – what’s that?
Nathalie: No, I mean as long as you believe in it.
Tom Antion: Yeah I’ll promote everything that’s ethical and moral if there’s a demand for it. I mean I don’t have to like it and my example if golf. I have golf sites and I hate golf. I wouldn’t play golf is the sweetest bikini team is holding my laptop. But people are crazy about it so why shouldn’t I take the money if I can build the site? There’s no reason. And another cool reason, Nathalie, is I’ve been really excellent at making my hobby tax deductible. Because a lot of people have money and it costs them a fortune but they get to tax write off for it. For instance I’m a tennis nut, you know what. And I thought “This racket costs $200 and you gotta have a PHD to pick up the strings at $30 and I got a ball machine and lessons.” And I started this, and I’m a pretty big guy, I have the distinction of being the largest person ever to produce and star in a tennis video. I started psychotennis.com and it’s all for big people that love tennis that learn how to beat leaner, and in better shape people by using the geometry of the court and making shots that they hate and all this stuff. So that makes my tennis stuff legitimately tax deductible because I got a website selling a video. And I’m not giving accounting or legal advice, but [inaudible] absolutely, you’ve got a business based on tennis there.
Nathalie: You make it so easy, I mean even for real estate agents and brokers, when they’re doing their internet marketing, you have to be able to get prospects in and get them into a funnel and have a way of following up and touch base. If you don’t have that connection – and that goes for any business on the internet, you’re gonna lost a lot of people, a lot of prospects. So where does somebody? How did you get into it? Cause I know you were in the speaking industry but how did you actually just slide into that with years of other training?
Tom Antion: I am celebrating my 20th year selling on the internet. I started just when the commercial internet started in 1994 and prior to that, I was selling products and services but it was hard enough in those days to sell them across the street let alone around the world. So when I saw the internet come along I thought “You mean I can sell stuff from my desktop in another country or state?” The answer was yes and I was like “I’m gonna learn this stuff!” So I just studied day and night, anything I could get my hands on and I actually made my fortune selling public speaking videos. And most people, they’re not like us, Nathalie. We’re weirdos and like public speaking but most people hate it and that’s where I made my fortune, with selling public speaking videos. I was selling them before but you had to be face to face.
Nathalie: I think that for the majority of people, you were even doing teleseminars before people were doing any of that.
Tom Antion: Oh yeah! I was doing everything around 1994. I had the longest running public speaking blog. The blog started in 2004, I have the longest public speaking speaker shop so I have a lot of firsts because I was there, doing it during all this time. But anyway I was selling some stuff that was hard to sell cause people were haring it. A lot of people selling stuff today on internet marketing, that’s all they’re selling “How to get rich on the internet!” And they’re driving broken down Pinto’s and pay their rents. But I got rich selling public speaking videos and I had good teachers. Cory was my first teacher.
Nathalie: I remember him.
Tom Antion: Yeah, he died in a tragic [inaudible] accident but he was like the 29 year old grandfather of the internet marketing. Brilliant guy and he was a good teacher and as soon as I got good training I started making money cause first two years, Nathalie, I didn’t make a nickel. I was studying and trying everything under the sun then I started my training with Cory and started making money immediately. But it was $50 a week, then it was 100, then it was 500, then 1,000 and then we regularly had 30,000 months and sometimes 60,000 months. Excuse me, weeks. So this is the real thing, but for the real-estate people you need to understand how to bring in leads. Now if real-estate is mostly local, however I want to make people think just like follow your lead that if you can think globally, do your business locally, you’ll make more money. That’s what matters, thinking globally. Cause you can sell only so many houses that are right around you, but you can sell information and knowledge all around the world, anybody that speaks English and translate to Spanish and there’s more you can sell.
Nathalie: Exactly! And with the internet, it’s so easy bringing the people together.
Tom Antion: Exactly! So all the people listening, yeah. I want you to learn local marketing and that means what we call putting on geographic qualifiers on everything you do. So Nathalie isn’t just a realtor in Hawaii, you would have pages on your site with the different cities and neighborhoods in Hawaii that cut out the rest of the realtors in the world, other than the geographic location.
Nathalie: So you’re saying make it local! So we’re in Maryland and Hawaii and we have affiliates in 50 states, you would actually tell somebody to just keep their information local, right? For their community.
Tom Antion: I would go further than just using the word Maryland. I would – there’s all the major areas in there that you service. I would have different sections on the site. Yes it’s a lot of work but I did this work 10 years ago and it’s still working for me today.
Nathalie: So you’re calling them geographic qualifiers.
Tom Antion: Yes.
Nathalie: Are the [inaudible] links? They’re seeing the links and picking them up and now it’s down more, because people usually type in a different city?
Tom Antion: Exactly! If someone is searching for [inaudible] Maryland Realtor and the search engine sees that, they’re not gonna give them a realtor in Toledo, Ohio. They’re gonna cut out all the other people on Earth except those in Maryland. So I mean it’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.
Nathalie: I have a question. For agents and brokers that [inaudible] which is internet data exchange, they can actually –
Tom Antion: I don’t know what that is. What is it?
Nathalie: It’s like the multiple service. So say we’re in Hawaii and we belong here [inaudible] but internet data exchange means that my brokerage and other brokerages will share information. So if you’re a buyer and you’re looking at our site, you can look for the portion with the IDX and see all the listings with the other brokers, etc. So that’s done through a feed and the local [inaudible], but I don’t think that’s gonna do what you’re talking about with geographic qualifying so I’m wondering if it would make sense to have like the IDX form on the site, but then with what you’re saying it sounds like you need to have a little link, actual hyperlinks?
Tom Antion: You would have pages in your site. See people don’t always come into your homepage. They’re gonna google and the other search engines will display the page that best fits what that person was searching for. So if you had a page on your site about land in Maryland, if that person is searching for realtor and land in Maryland, they’re gonna – google and the other search engines are gonna take him directly to that section of your site and he’s gonna bypass the homepage.
Nathalie: And that makes so much sense and the IDX wouldn’t do it, it’s not gonna help you in that situation.
Tom Antion: This is a total different concept from what I understand. See, I want you to get the lead on the site that you control. Then that’s gonna be the most money for you. If you go splities with people than good for you, I want you to be in control of the lead.
Nathalie: But that should actually be a text link? Is there a type of link that –
Tom Antion: These are pages on your site.
Nathalie: I understand that. So here’s the page and then you’re gonna talk about land of Maryland and you’re gonna have a random city but you’re gonna have that, but when you look at that page and you’re a consumer, what’s it gonna look like? Is it gonna be just text –
Tom Antion: It’s gonna be information about land of Maryland, about Nathalie Mullinix –
Nathalie: Years ago they would say that text and words are better if you have like a graphic or something.
Tom Antion: You’re gonna embed land of Maryland in graphics. If you have just some pitiful looking text planks, you’re not gonna compete in the marketplace just by looking old and pitiful. So you can have a graphically oriented site with nothing overboard, with these key words. What we’re talking about is that “land of Maryland” is a key phrase. And it’s embedded in your title tags and graphics and in the text of the site and they’re gonna read about you and the area, maybe some area demographics and then call to action. How to get a hold of you? That’s what we want, a direct do not pass go, do not go to anybody else but Nathalie. That’s what we want.
Nathalie: I see what you’re doing cause that’s really good. So you’re narrowing it down much more globally.
Tom Antion: Well the global part is different.
Nathalie: Is what?
Tom Antion: Well the global part of what I said is different. That is what I said what I want you to do locally. But to bring in cash flow – I know a lot of people who want to sell real-estate love to sell real-estate. Great! But they also like money coming in and it’s been tough for a lot of the people, except the cream of the crop, to make it in real-estate. So I want people in whatever field they’re in to be able to bring money in from other avenues, either related or unrelated. Once you bother to learn the internet stuff, you can sell your knowledge of selling real-estate by having a real-estate course that you sell around the world like an online course and make $200 every time someone buys it.
Nathalie: Exactly!
Tom Antion: Clean profit cause you’re selling online.
Nathalie: Yeah, we do that with products. Some of you who are listening right now – you’ve always bragged “I’m not really technical.”
Tom Antion: That’s true!
Nathalie: So someone is not technical. I remember in the late 90’s people are using Frontpage and Dreamkeeper and things like that but now WordPress has gotten so much publicity. What do you think about it?
Tom Antion: If you remember back when VHS and beta tapes were coming to the market – you’re not old enough to remember.
Nathalie: I am unfortunately, yeah!
Tom Antion: Well most people said that beta was actually a higher quality for taping, but VHS won the war, they won the marketing war so beta disappeared. It’s the same way with WordPress. There’s other things out there and other kinds of systems, but WordPress won the war. There were like hundreds of thousands and there’s – there’s probably a couple hundred million WordPress installations.
Nathalie: Probably good to go. If somebody doesn’t know what to use, would you recommend WordPress?
Tom Antion: [inaudible] love it and there’s plugins. Plugins are like accessories on a car. So you can get a plugin that makes your search optimization a lot easier, you just fill in a few things and that takes care of that. You still have to get incoming links and stuff like that but for running and operating a website with virtually no money – in fact if you want to see something that will make most people out there sick, my school site, IMTCVA.ORG, I have less than $100 in it and it rivals the University of Phoenix. It’s a universal website
Nathalie: You’re kidding! That’s amazing! So let me explain for people who have no idea about this at all. Would that be WordPress.org or .com?
Tom Antion: Well neither really. So you don’t wanna go to WordPress.com, where you can start a blog in 2 seconds because they don’t allow anything commercial. It can only be for family stuff.
Nathalie: That’s good to know.
Tom Antion: So every hosting service for websites in the world will give you a copy of WordPress for free.
Nathalie: Is it a .org or it’s just a copy?
Tom Antion: It’s not a .org. You go to hostgator and you use WordPress software on their service. They give it to you, install it for nothing. And then you pick a theme. A theme is like when WordPress was the engine to your car, a theme is the paintjob/
Nathalie: You pay for a theme or just pick a free one?
Tom Antion: There’s free and paid themes. The reason we like paid themes is because they’re supported and when WordPress updates, free themes frequently aren’t supported and they’ll go bad on you and there’s nobody to help you. But we’re only talking 60 to 100 dollars. That’s where the cost was in my site, picking a theme. The rest of it in probably a half hour tutoring session I can have anyone putting their own pictures on the site, their own content and all of that.
Nathalie: Even learn how to embed the graphics like the title?
Tom Antion: Yep! Because you put the plugin in and just fill in three lines of text and that’s it. It’s automated all this stuff and so regular mortals can operate their websites for nothing. And this is one of the things that I attribute my success, Nathalie. I probably have 2 million dollars in the websites, but I have less than $1,000 in 20 years in website creation.
Nathalie: That’s like impossible!
Tom Antion: It’s impossible because the web people want to keep you in the dark because the same thing – that site that I told you that I have less than $100 in, would be 15,000 to 20,000 if you went to a professional firm –
Nathalie: We did programming in the Philippines and paid a lot – I mean cheaper than if we had full time programming over here but the programs still were added up and now we have to redo everything because it’s archaic programming.
Tom Antion: Yeah and we don’t even use archaic programming anymore. I mean we never did, because there’s so much off the shelf stuff that you just put a plugin in and it does what you wanna do. Put a calendar on.
Nathalie: If people want to contact you and find everything, should they go, I see greatinternetmarketing.com/retreatcenter.
Tom Antion: No, just go to greatmarketinginternettraining.com and that’s my mentor program and that will get you into contact with me. And I have so many resources – I mean like this WordPress, I have this $97 course that teaches you everything you need to know and it saves you thousands of hours on web design. You know what’s worse than web design, Nathalie? Is waiting for these rotten people –
Nathalie: We still do it, cause I don’t have time to do it and I delegate it out and we got ripped off for like $10,000 because the company was doing it and two months later we had to do it again. But even now when we have other people doing things, we’re paying because when you’re running businesses you can’t run everything and [inaudible] also antion.com is another one of your site. I just wanna put that out there because it’s easier for someone to remember antion.com.
Tom Antion: Yeah and put /blog up there cause we just opened a new blog section and there’s an article right there, with the top 15 mistakes people make on their websites. So it would be the perfect place for them to start. And also it would be a great marketing technique on the page that they will lean and tomorrow I’m gonna reveal how I did it. So it’s a good place to start.
Nathalie: And there can they signup on your newsletter too?
Tom Antion: Yeah they can get on the list. I won’t spam you or anything. My policy is I won’t send you an email unless I have something to say. So many people send them three times a day and just with drivel. So I don’t have time for that nor a reputation.
Nathalie: No, you’re fantastic! So we’ve got this person listening in and they’re gonna do – would you. Ok so to back it up a bit. We use Vario for hosting private servers for years and because of what we’re doing we always need the bigger and larger priced options.
Tom Antion: I have a website there, yeah.
Nathalie: We flipped to another company and because some of the people were here before and then we also have hostgator. For example on hostgator – or when you go to signup for domain names, because I’ve been doing in a different way with the business all these years which we’ve spent fortunes really but it is what it is. And – but when people say they go and get another domain on godaddy or one of those sites and they offer you that capability, you’re saying you recommend that?
Tom Antion: Which capability?
Nathalie: The capability to have a website right away.
Tom Antion: No don’t take that! That’s for dummies. That’s just for clueless people and they’re just trying to suck you into and get you to host there. They have WordPress and every place has WordPress.
Nathalie: So don’t do that $5 website!
Tom Antion: No. Right at there you contact support and say “Listen, I wanna install WordPress blog” and they’ll say ok.
Nathalie: Ok, so you’re asking for a WordPress blog, cause I’ve heard just for the [inaudible], there’s .org and .com.
Tom Antion: You don’t have to deal with either of them, you’re gonna go to a hosting service and they’re gonna give you the software and probably install it for you.
Nathalie: Ok so you don’t want to just do it that way. You have to make sure you’re doing that step. And then what about fantastico?
Tom Antion: That’s something really easy to install. But like I said, at godaddy chances are they’ll do it for you and just give it to you. You probably don’t have to fool with that.
Nathalie: So automatically with WordPress you’re gonna be covering SEO and people need to learn how to do that.
Tom Antion: You get a plugin called the all in one SEO pack and then there’s another one called YEOST. But anyone of them is fine and it makes it easy for you to do this SEO on your site.
Nathalie: That’s fantastic! And then they also have a content management system.
Tom Antion: That’s what WordPress is. Yeah so it’s already that. Now it’s not gonna be something like [inaudible] that’s gonna keep track of who you’re gonna call and that kind of stuff. It’s not for that, this is just a website version. It isn’t something where you take notes from the people you call yourself.
Nathalie: It really sounds wonderful though because they’re actually able to get a – when I say contact management system I mean add pages and things that before we would have a web programmer do that. I’m gonna stop for a second, I think we have a caller with a question. I just want to go ahead and – Hi you’re on the air! Would you like to ask us a question? Just tell us your name. I think they just hung up. Oops, I didn’t want to embarrass them! Come back on, we won’t do that to you! So yeah. Some people just wanna listen. So they’re gonna go in and – it saves all the steps and money and that’s one of the things that WordPress has done for people out there, is covered so much.
Tom Antion: Like I said, WordPress won the marketing war so the developers are developing plugins like crazy, like thousands a day to make the site do all kinds of stuff with either free or very cheap plugins. For instance you can have a membership site for like $97. And so now you got $200 in the website where you couldn’t even talk to a web designer without 500 and get anything for thousands.
Nathalie: They all charge you so much money! And I mean it’s just like – so if somebody says “I’m gonna pay somebody $1,000 for a site” they’re telling me it’s gonna be PHP or HTML open source or whatever.
Tom Antion: Absolutely not! No, because what they’re doing is they’re trying to make it too difficult for you to actually operate it so that you have to come back and pay them for a monthly maintenance. I just consulted with a place that spent $42,000 on their website and $1,500 a month for absolutely nothing. The site was nothing more than a WordPress site with a couple plugins and I guarantee they didn’t have more than $100 in the site, the actual developers and then $1,500 a month for what?
Nathalie: What if you don’t have the time to do it and you say to the guys “I can do this site for $1,000” and you’ll say “But it’s not WordPress.” I want it in WordPress. What would you charge me to do all the pages in there? The labor part.
Tom Antion: Here’s the flaw in that thinking. I am as busy as anybody on this earth. Two TV shows, documentaries –
Nathalie: I appreciate having you today.
Tom Antion: And everybody claims they’re too busy. Well here’s the flaw in that thinking. By the time you find a [inaudible] firm, pay them a fortune, explain to them what you want, when they don’t do it right, go through revision after revision you could have spent an afternoon learning how to do it, get a bit of tutoring and be done for 100 less money. So don’t tell me you’re too busy to do this!
Nathalie: I agree with you totally! I’m gonna take it to a new level, just the questions cause a lot of people – I wish that called would – I feel badly when someone wants to hang up but whatever. Some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Say you need database programming. Now that would be something that you would need to hire someone to do some other coding.
Tom Antion: That’s right. You would have that added on for the site and you’d still operate the rest of your site and then you would demand that that database program had a shell that you could operate yourself.
Nathalie: So you tell them “We need a content management system that we can operate ourselves so that when we hired you -” and you have them sign a work for hire agreement so they don’t come back and say otherwise. And then when they say – so it’s kind of like accessories. You’re going in and buying your clothes, your suites and outfit and you’re getting accessories. So you’re looking like you’re having the WordPress with either site, you can do the database separately and still make sure you have full control over it. You recommend that they actually do the work so they can see it online instead of working locally on their computer?
Tom Antion: Yes, you always want to review what you’re doing but let me ask you what kind of database are you talking about? Cause if it’s just email.
Nathalie: Well for us it would be real estate databases, because for example they have the [inaudible] feed and populating different searches so it’s definitely when you would need database programming.
Tom Antion: Let me tell you the warning on doing that, Nathalie! I had something very similar to that. I think it might have been real estate but it’s been a few years and I can’t remember. Came to me, they charged her $4,500, they dragged her out for six months, my people here duplicated what they did in 15 minutes for nothing, for free. Because what they did is they went to a webmaster script site. There’s places like tucow and they took an off the shelf script, they probably played video games for 6 months, holding off of this lady’s money, finished it off, gave it to us. It still needed a little tweaking but we still replicated it in less than a half an hour. For free!
Nathalie: No, it’s really scary! There’s different – people have to – that’s something I think WordPress cause I got into this in the 90’s as well and it’s just an amazing amount of money that we ended up spending for years, cause you didn’t have the plugins and software in a box type of thing. So – we’ve got about 20 minutes left and I wanna ask you, you also have a fantastic shopping cart you use called kickstartcart.com. Now can that cart work seamlessly with WordPress or is it something else?
Tom Antion: The answer is yes, it will work with anything because of the nature of the cart. See the cart runs on it’s own server so you don’t have to install it on any one of your websites. It links from your products back to the website or to the cart and it has forms where someone can put their email address in and it will go to the cart and store it for you so you can broadcast to those people or have auto responders so automatically if they signup for a freebie or buy something they get a series of emails automatically. So it’s a separate system. I probably have 70 different websites going through only one cart and if you’re on this website, you have no idea I have all these other websites.
Nathalie: I’ve heard, cause I’ve been checking into – we’re changing a lot of stuff to WordPress and I could never get back to the thousands of dollars and I’m from the old school and still paying a lot for the servers, but we have people monitoring and I like that, 24/7 support and it’s free. But I’m looking at WordPress and I’m wondering, some of these guys say “No, you need to have a plugin.” There’s this thing called [inaudible] and I was looking it up and it’s not very good and it’s taken a lot –
Tom Antion: Yeah that would be ridiculous for you to –
Nathalie: Well I think it’s taken off like you said a half an hour ago.
Tom Antion: People don’t know any better.
Nathalie: Exactly! Well look at zillo, and I don’t wanna get sued but for the real estate agents and brokers who are listening to this call, everyone is thinking “I gotta be on zillo!” The statistics are messed, they are not valid statistics, the things are skewed but they had plenty of money to throw out to the market.
Tom Antion: Yeah we see this a lot and people do a public offering, they get a bunch of cash infusion and they market to people that don’t know any better. That’s why you gotta have someone who knows what they’re doing and it’s not gonna be a geek. Let me tell you that. If the geek was so good at making money, why would they be working for you? So when a geek tells you “We gotta use Droople cause it does this and that.” Well I bet you they’d trade bank accounts with me. They need money but they’re geeks, technical nerds and they never made any money. You have to deal with people that know how to make money but I’m still telling you keep your cost low! And that’s what I specialize in, low cost, high returns.
Nathalie: Now do you recommend on the websites people using AdSense and putting those ads on there? Do they receive money that way or is that a thing of the past?
Tom Antion: Well that doesn’t make sense for most people trying to make their main income because you’re gonna be sending people to your competitors when you get 20 cents and they get a big contract. I do it on sites that I don’t care about, like the golf sites. So any money that comes in, I don’t wanna talk golf with anybody, they just click on the link, I get a commission. But on your own sites it doesn’t make sense, because you’re clicking out for 10 or 20 cents and sending somebody –
Nathalie: You’re right cause I guess the way for people who are not familiar with how AdSense works, is say you’re in real estate, if you put it on your real estate site, it’s gonna put ads that are related to real estate. So what Tom is saying is you’re gonna be throwing them to your competitors and it doesn’t make sense for a small piece of the pie when you want to have that customer. Gosh, you have so much information! I knew this time would fly by and – you know, I wanna also ask a couple more things. I want to give your site antion.com. I’d do a google. So the antion.com and the IMTCBA.org and then – yeah. And greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And if I put great internet marketing.com at least –
Tom Antion: Yeah I have that too, but that was my old training site where great internet marketing they can watch a video about my joint venture program, they can download a learning brochure that has examples of lots of sites and revenue streams. Like we have 9 different revenue streams we pull in so it gives you examples of all of them.
Nathalie: I just want them to find you so they can get on your list and get all your information.
Tom Antion: Go to antion.com/blog.
Nathalie: Cause you’re amazing! What you’re doing is amazing. No, really. Cause I’ve known you for years and years and it’s just nice. I’m gonna give the number too in Virginia for the retreat center which is 757 431 1366. We only have about 10 more minutes left and I wanted to ask you. You have a method of creating a one page sales letters that are very lucrative because that’s another thing out there where you can google one page letters and you have to have – and you’re gonna get so many websites and programs. “Buy this program for $2,000!” So there’s different sites with memberships that they offer it. So elaborate on what you recommend on this.
Tom Antion: Well first of all a one page site is never gonna get traffic from google. You’re always gonna have to drive traffic to it. Basically it’s just a sales letter and google hates one page websites because they don’t look substantial and google wants substantial sites. So you’re gonna have to drive traffic either by a radio show like yours, or by paying advertising on Facebook or google AdWords or you might have a TV show or a newsletter. So it’s basically a sales letter which brings me to my number 2 thing – actually they’re concurrently important. But what I claim that has made my fortune is what we call copywriting. This is not like protecting your work with the Library of Congress, it’s about writing words that make people give you money. I have a site called copyriting901.com that teaches me how to do this and this has made me over $20 million and this is high profit stuff. In real estate if you did $80 million sales – yeah but this is 90% profit. So copywriting – so basically you’re making a simple page that doesn’t have navigation on it, with a headline and testimonials and all the things in a sales letter and you drive traffic to it.
Nathalie: So how do you make the page – if you’re a novice, how do you make the first page?
Tom Antion: Well when you’re in WordPress, first of all it does not have to be the homepage. The page that made me the most money in my career in just a page within a site that nobody knows about unless I tell you. So all you do is you go into WordPress and you go to pages, add new. And you’ll add a new page and if you don’t tell anybody it’s there, nobody will know about it. And it always has an address on the top so when you send it to people, you send them directly to the sales page. They don’t even know the rest of the site, they’re just going directly to the sales page. So you can do it that way or start an entire site by yourself but basically, if you just did that, you’d install WordPress, add a page and then make that page the homepage. I mean it’s that easy.
Nathalie: So you actually have to install WordPress for that one page – ok.
Tom Antion: If you were gonna do it on a site by yourself. But many times I’m just doing it on another page within a site somewhere.
Nathalie: Ok. Wow! This is just so much information! I mean you have a simple three prong attack of internet marketing and you basically are saying you just care to teach people where to click to make money and to teach your students the exact techniques you used to pull 75,000 or 20,000 in a month from your home office. This is amazing! So you really take the nuggets, you know it like the back of your hand –
Tom Antion: People get confused cause there’s so much stuff. With the three prongs, there’s only three things you’re doing. You’re working on your websites or putting ecommerce or a shopping cart on it. Prong two is a database of emails to people and prong three is product development. So no matter what you do, it’s in one of those three. For instance, everyone is going crazy for years now on social media. Well guys like me, here’s what we think about social media. Big, enormous waste of time! Unless you get people off of social media to a site that you control and get them on the email list. Because people just burn an enormous amount of time fooling with the social media and never making money of it. Look at what Facebook did to us. Facebook played the whole world by getting you to kill yourself to get fans and likes and now if you don’t pay, nobody sees anything you put up there. So less than 5% of people see it unless you pay. So you wanna get people off social media and somewhere you can control because Facebook can change the rules anytime they want and you’re screwed! So get them off of there and on to an email list. But that’s in prong 2 with the database. So everything you do falls in one of those three prongs.
Nathalie: Wow, it’s really hard to know who to trust! It really is because it’s so easy to see it [inaudible] because you’re working on the site and doing product development and it takes time.
Tom Antion: My bottom line is if you don’t get in a hurry and you take time to learn things correctly it will be worth it more than anything you ever did in your business life. Because you can reach around the world from your desktop at a very low cost and sell your products. But if you want to get rich quick, God help you! You’ll go down like everybody that refuses to learn.
Nathalie: Wow! So with your techniques you really have them focused around their main business because that’s what brings the money in first and then they give it to everyone else. Yet you actually tie in affiliate programs so people learn how to network and what other people but it can bring them money back and forth.
Tom Antion: That’s right! That’s called joint-venturing and affiliate stuff. So it’s ok if you already have somebody in your database and you recommend some non-competitive product that they’re gonna buy and get a commission. In fact this is how I legitimately say – and this gonna sound like hocus pocus, but you’ve been around me and you know you’re not. I couldn’t stop the money coming into my checking account if I tried. Couldn’t stop it! And the reason is I recommend other services and I get paid as long as you stay in that service. So if I recommend a service to you once and you keep buying it every month, I keep getting paid every month and I only recommended it to you once. So if I just quite everything today, fire everybody and just sit and watch tennis all day I would probably bring $300-400.000 a year in just doing nothing, because of these things. So they are real.
Nathalie: We’ve got to jump through a couple of things that you – so in addition to someone doing their own business, I know you have wedding and eulogy sites.
Tom Antion: Yeah, once you learn how to use these techniques for your own business, there’s no reason that you couldn’t sell this and that. Like I have eulogy books that bring in 40,000 a year, wedding books at 70,000 a year.
Nathalie: Wow!
Tom Antion: These are eBooks. The money goes into the checking account automatically, they download it and I just sit here getting an email saying you just made money. And it sounds hocus pocus, but it’s basic eBook, it’s a digital product. eBooks are going crazy now, I was selling them even when it wasn’t cool, back in 2001. But this is all doable. Everybody has knowledge in their head, if they get it into a sellable format, people will buy it! They will give you money for what you know but you have to go through these steps to make it easy for them to do it.
Nathalie: And you teach all of it, what to charge – it’s like you take the learning curve away and make it so easy. And I think it’s just like you mentioned before with people having a fear of speaking and they won’t do it but once they get over it they go like “Wow! That wasn’t that bad.” And that’s what I think you do with the internet marketing. Is get people to see this is easy, it’s not so [inaudible].
Tom Antion: It’s easy when somebody holds your hand. If you go and try to figure it out on your own, yes, you will get buried. And I can’t do it all by myself. That’s why I keep young people around, because if I want something done on my smartphone, I can’t figure it out. I give it to the girl and it comes back and it’s done. You can’t do it by yourself but you can do it. That’s the bottom line.
Nathalie: Wow, you’re amazing! So these sites can be just so [inaudible] I’m just so shocked.
Tom Antion: Well WordPress is free and a theme is no more than $100 and also I forgot to tell them about Fiveer. Do you know about Fiveer?
Nathalie: Yeah, go ahead!
Tom Antion: Yeah it’s a place – It’s Fiverr.com. It’s a place where thousands of people are telling you what you’re willing to do for $5. And you can get custom graphics. I got world class voice over work with 25 year old radio veterans for $5.
Nathalie: Was that like Elance?
Tom Antion: I don’t hardly bother with them anymore but it’s great. There’s some funny stuff in there but there’s people that will fix your blog for you, they’ll install it, put custom graphics –
Nathalie: Well it has been wonderful! Thank you so much for taking so much of your time.
Tom Antion: I’m just getting warmed up, Nathalie!
Nathalie: I know! We’d love to get you back when you’re in between your schedule or something. I wanna see you when I’m on the East Coast.
Tom Antion: I’m heading to California for two speaking engagements and working on my TV show for a couple weeks so I’m gonna be closer to you.
Nathalie: I’m gonna be in Irvine in the first week of November but I think you’re going at the end of October.
Tom Antion: I’ll be home by that time yeah.
Nathalie: Well tell us one last point and we’ll get off here. We’ve got about 40 seconds.
Tom Antion: This skill is probably the best thing you can do for your business or if you get your children involved – we’ve had kids at 8 year olds writing books and selling them.
Nathalie: It’s amazing!
Tom Antion: If you wanna give your kids a heads up on something that they make their own way, this would be it.
Nathalie: Tom, thank you so much! And I hope to see you sometime soon. I wish you peace!
Randy: Thank you for joining us on REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. Radio! Our hope is that you were enlightened, encouraged and mobilized to be an agent of change. REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc. is on Facebook, join us there. Follow us also on Twitter@REALTY UNIVERSAL, Inc.. And for more information, you can go to RealtyUniversal.com. Make it a great day!
