5 Quick & Easy Ways to Automate Your Business So You Work Less & Make More! With Tom Antion

We’re promising your listeners MASSIVE, and I’m talking massive with a capitol “A”, massive increases in speed and productivity.  That’s the main thing.  So that they can sell more, faster, automatically.

You can either make more money, or make way more money, in the same amount of time, or you can make the same amount of money and cut your time down tremendously, ten times or more, if you use the business tools that we’re talking about today.  A lot of times you can do both too.

The way that I kind of developed this, I’ve always worked out of my home.  I’ve been in business, formally, for over 40 years, never had a job, always worked out of my home.  I was always averse to a lot of employees.  Now it has changed, but I got to $1.2 million a year with one part-time temp person.  This was, at the peak, about 150,000 subscribers asking me questions every day and 30,000 customers.  So, these are the business tools, what we’re going to talk about today, that allowed me to do that with only one temp person.

Here’s the thing.  When I started hiring people, that’s when my accountant called me.  He said, “Hey Tom, you’ve got too much retained earnings.”  I said, “I’ve got too much retained earnings?  That’s good right?”  He says, you’re going to have to pay more taxes now because you’ve got too much retained earnings.  I’m thinking, “I’m keeping my nose clean.  I’m not buying yachts, airplanes, and everything else, and now I’ve got to pay more taxes?”  He said, “Yup.”  So, that’s when I got mad.  So I started hiring people.  I thought, “I’d rather hire people and take a load off of myself, instead of buying bombs.”  That’s when I started hiring all of these people.

Speed

The first thing is, I’m a big stickler for speed.  Speed to market and speed with customer service, because I’ll tell you now, people hardly want to fill out a form anymore because they feel like no one’s ever going to answer them. They figure it’s going to be two months before they get a reply.  So I’ve built a lot of my fortune because I just Boom!  I really hit and take care of customers really fast, and prospects really fast, because nobody else will.  So, they’ll buy from me because they get really fast service.

One of the tools, that I have been using since 1997. I don’t know how many years that is; that’s 19 years.  We figured out the other day, just an estimate, the best we could. It has saved me 7 million keystrokes in that amount of time, and carpal tunnel for sure! The name of the program, for a PC, is called ShortKeys.  This is the first class that I teach at my big mentor program because I don’t want people fighting with their computer.  There’s only so much psychic energy in a day.  I want you to use it to create products, write sales letters, and talk to customers, and all of that, not fight with your computer.

I was crying about, “I have to type the same crap over, and over, and over again.”  So, my young geek, Ilya, the little Russian kid that I recruited out of high school.  He’s a little smart-aleck too.  He’d say, “Shut up,” and then he’d go, and he brought back ShortKeys for me.  Basically, it’s called a macro program.  Now, for the Mac computer, the Apple computer, it’s Keyboard Maestro.  But what it is, I can make a little keystroke combination, like G1, and that’s GreatInternetMarketing.com.  It doesn’t have to be just a website link.  It could be “War and Peace,”, or anything that you type a lot.  My motto is that if I get the same question more than once, I make the answer into either a short key, which I use a lot.

Anyway, ShortKeys and Keyboard Maestro will save you just an enormous amount of time.  There are days where you will be tired, and cross-eyed, and trying to get your work done.  Well, the short key is going to type the thing properly every single time.  In fact, we make our employees use it because I don’t want to be paying them an hourly fee to just type the same stuff over and over again.  So, you should have your employees use it also.  ShortKeys and Keyboard Maestro.  That’s your first tip.  We’re only talking $20 for this thing.  A one-time fee!  It’s crazy!

Signature Files

The next one is right in front of your face, and I use it even more than I use ShortKeys.  It’s called a signature file, or a “sig file”.  Everybody knows that’s just an appendage to an email that has your name, and email, and a blurb about your stuff, but that’s not all you can use it for.

If you have a program, or an email client, that will have unlimited signature files, I have probably 200 or 300 stock answers to things.  Even if I had them in a file, where I had to think about it, “Where was that answer,” and I had to go find it, copy, paste… No, I just lost my train of thought.  But, if you email me a question that I’ve heard all of these times, I can go “Reply > Insert Signature > Pick it Out of the List > Hit the Button > Boom!”

That’s the speed, and people can’t believe it.  They can’t even believe that the email got to me and they already got their answer back.  That’s impressive to people.  In today’s atmosphere, when nobody gives a darn about anything.  “We’ll get back to you at our convenience in 48 hours.”  I could be dead in 48 hours.  I don’t have time for that.  I’m old!  So, signature files.

Gmail only gives you like 4 or 5, but Outlook… If you have Outlook, for Mac or PC, you have unlimited signatures, and it will do all kinds of other stuff for you.  I don’t know of any of the other ones.  I just know that if you use that function, it will totally transform your business at speed to market, and taking care of people.

Automatically Selling

Up-Selling

The first thing is called “up-selling”.  When you buy one product, they offer you fries with that, right?  But, that should be automated.  That should be, “Bam, Bam, Bam,” and if you do it right, you’re going to make 30-50% more.  Every time I do it, 30-50% of the people take advantage of the upsell.

I’m just going to mention the upsell theory that I go by to get that result.  Let’s say that Daniel was going to do a speech, and he wanted to buy a new suit.  He went down to Today’s Man, and he’s going to pay $600 for a suit.  He goes in there, and they say, “Hey Daniel!  Anybody that buys a suit today is going to get 2-for-1 on shirts and ties.”  Thirty to fifty percent of the people will go for that deal, but here’s why.  Daniel already had a $600 price point in his mind, and the deal that they offered him was a lower-priced product.  It was related to what he was buying in the first place, and it was a deal.

If you do those things, a lower-priced product that’s related to the initial product and it’s a deal, you will always do 30-50% more business.  Of course, I can’t guarantee it, but I can’t remember one that I didn’t at least do 30%, and I’ve been doing this at least 24 years.  A lot of times, 50% of the people will take that deal.

Now, you need to automate that with your shopping cart system, or whatever you happen to use.  That’s called “point of purchase,” by the way.  So, you automate the “point of purchase upsell”.

Thank You Page Selling

There’s also “after the sale upsells”.  This is a very little-known one. It’s right in front of you.  It’s called “thank you page” selling.  Anytime you sell something, you should have a “thank you page”, right?  If you do, why just say, “Thank you for your sale. Goodbye,” you know?  No. The easiest person to sell to is the one that has their wallet out already. Click To Tweet  Of course, they call it, “Do you want fries with that?”  This is almost like  Columbo.  Do you remember Columbo?  He knows the killer, and then he walks away, and the killer is relieved, and Columbo is like, “Oh!  One more thing…”  That’s what “thank you” page selling is like.

On that page, I might have, “Thank you for dealing with Antion and Associates.  Why not check out these other fine colleagues of mine.”  I might have a Daniel Hall affiliate thing on there, or something related to what they just bought, where if they click and go buy something, I get an affiliate commission.  That’s all automatic.  You’re wasting that “thank you page” if it just says “thank you”.

Add Finance Options

Also, you must add finance options, automatically to your sales, or to your bigger-ticket sales.  But, when I say bigger ticket, I think we sold 700 of my WordPress courses for $97, or that was the price if you paid it all at once, but 180 people took a 3-pay deal at $39.  In some places, the economy is tough, and you’ve got to realize that.  They paid a $17 spiff just to be able to pay in three payments.  Let’s say that if I didn’t have the finance option, I still would have gotten 100 of those people.  I still would have lost 80 of them.  If you multiply 180 times $117, that’s would come out to another $18,000-$19,000.  If I didn’t have the finance option, and people were holding tight to their credit card, they would have said, “No, I’ll just wait.”

You must have a finance option.  But, when I first did this, before I had the shopping cart, I was so disorganized.  I would take the first payment and then lose the paperwork.  Then, I’d find it six months later, “Oh God!  I was supposed to charge this guy $99 a month, and I didn’t do it.”  Now the shopping carts will do it automatically, every 30 days and pound them to death if their expiration date goes bad, but all of this is automated so that I don’t lose any sales because of it, and it makes more sales.  So, you’ve got to get your selling automated, and then we can kick into auto-responders, which is selling after the sale.

Auto-Responders

Let’s talk about automatically selling.  Auto-responders, obviously, are one of the most powerful things ever invented. Click To TweetIf you ask a bunch of marketers that have been around as long as we have, it’s just crazy-powerful.

My philosophy is I give people service, service, service emails, so that they’re used to getting emails that help them.  Then, when I ask them to buy something, they’re not upset.  You see?  Auto-responders do that for you.  This is just a smattering of the things we use to automate the business.  There are tons more of them, and a lot of them are cheap or free.  You just have to implement them.

You know, you get one or two additional percentage points in sales a month, that adds up over a year.  That can be a car payment.  That can be saved for your kid’s college.  I mean, it’s clear money.  It’s money that was there, and if you didn’t go and pick it up, it’s your fault.  That’s especially true if you’re new at this.  The better you do these things right from the beginning, the faster you won’t be new anymore.  The faster you’ll be a respected member of our community, because you know these things, and you implement them, and you’ve got money in the bank.

A few More Tips to Automate Your Business

There are all kinds of things that we use to format things correctly.  I’ve got 20 or 30 of them in this new book I wrote.  It’s a 60-page eBook that outlines all of the stuff that I cover in my mentor program that people pay like $8,000 to get. I was sitting down one day and thinking, “I’ve been teaching this for years to people, to increase their productivity, but I never turned it into a product.”  The book is called: How to Automate Your Business. Another thing is, I used to have a book called Click that kind of dominated the speaking industry for 10 years.  But, it got so big that it was 1,042 pages.  By the time I did it in one part, the other part is obsolete, so I am trending my business with more and smaller products that I can get out fast, and edit fast, so that if they change I can fix them fast.  However, there’s another important concept here called “consumption”.

At 1,042 pages, I was overwhelming people.  Especially in the early days, I was the only guy around.  With all of this stuff that you get hit with, from JV Zoo, and Warrior Forum, and all these places, you just get buried.  So, 1,042 pages were just too much.  I started doing very tightly laser-focused books, but not little crappy 10-page things, though.  These are like 60 pages and illustrated, and they teach you things like how to maximize your cell phone.  There are a bunch of cell phone tricks that people just haven’t been taught, like how to go way faster with your cell phone.  I just came out with this, and people are loving it.  It’s making them go way faster, and it’s giving them the time to work on the stuff that brings in revenue.  That’s the important stuff.

Connecting with Tom

The main website for my big mentor program, that has all of my contact information and a downloadable learning brochure that has lots of tips in it, and there’s a video people can watch.  That’s at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.  The other thing is, I invite everyone to attend my variety show at 10 pm EST on Sunday nights via Facebook Live.  I’d like to warn people that it can get a little bit out of hand, though, because one of the sections is “A-Hole of the Week”.  So, I get a little bit mad at people who do some bad things, but then there’s a hero of the week too.

I also give a professional speaking tip, and internet marketing tip, a self-defense tip; that’s because I have a site called Brutal Self Defense.  I’ve been a lifelong martial arts type of guy.  We also have a “Fake Sponsor of the Week,”.  That’s where I show you a place that’s definitely not sponsoring us.  So, it’s a lot of fun.  That’s at 10 pm EST, Sunday nights, at Facebook.com/Antion.

Resources

Tom’s Book: How to Automate Your Business

ShortKeys

Keyboard Maestro

Real Fast Results Community

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Filed in: Cool Tools • Get More Done • list building • Marketing Strategies • Productivity
Tagged with: automate business • business tools • make more • selling • Tom Antion • your business