Monday, July 7, 2025
SUMMARY BY CHATGPT
??? Episode Overview
Tom Antion simplifies key online marketing metrics—open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion rates—and explains how understanding and improving these numbers can significantly increase your income. This episode is tailored for beginners but emphasizes foundational concepts that drive real business success online.
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?? Key Concepts Explained
1. Email Open Rate
o Example: If 300 out of 1,000 people open your email ? 30% open rate.
o Not inherently good or bad—compare to previous campaigns and always aim to improve.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
o Example: 10 clicks from 300 opens ? 3% CTR.
o Indicates how compelling your email content and call-to-action are.
3. Conversion Rate
o Example: 1 sale from 10 clicks ? 10% conversion.
o High-value products (like a $9,000 course) can make even low conversion rates very profitable.
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?? Improving Results
• Use split testing (A/B testing) for:
o Subject lines ? improve open rates.
o Email body copy ? boost CTR.
o Sales pages ? increase conversions.
• Always be testing and improving based on data.
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?? Beware of Scams
• Avoid “get-rich-quick” ads that promise money without effort or knowledge.
• Tom calls out misleading marketing tools and products with poor service or deceptive limitations.
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?? Promoted Resources
• Free Automation E-Book (v3.0): screwthecommute.com/automatefree
• Mentor Program: greatinternetmarketingtraining.com
• Digital Marketing School: IMTCVA.org – Offers 50% scholarships for military, law enforcement, nurses, and first responders.
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?? Final Advice
Even basic math—open rate, CTR, conversion—can dramatically improve your online business if you:
• Test everything
• Avoid gimmicks
• Stay consistent with real effort
“Simple math is all you need to make serious money online. But you’ve got to actually do the work.”
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Episode 1010 – Online Math
[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 1010 of Screw The Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about online math and don't tune out just because I said that. Okay. This is about as simple as it gets. But simplicity can make you a lot of money. So hang in there for that. Hoping to miss episode 1009. That was college is a mistake, I have no question about that. For only a limited number of people really should be going to college, and those colleges are ripping people off like crazy. And it's not just me talking about this because I have a school. It's because people inside the system are saying that if you don't believe me, check out screwthecommute.com/anticollege. And there's tons of books written and YouTube videos and everything about how a college is ripping people off and the kids are studying, or even going to class, studying and preparing for class eight hours a week. The rest of the time is partying, uh, drinking, eating and shopping. And this is not me saying this. These are insiders talking about this. So save yourself a couple hundred thousand bucks and devour that page. And don't let your kids get in that debt and just learn how to protest. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It's free. Get version 3.0. Because version 2.0 is now obsolete. Uh, you know, it's still a lot of good stuff in there, but version 3.0 brings you up to current standards, so go to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And anytime you want to get to a back episode like college is a mistake at 1009, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number 1009 and check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org.
[00:02:28] Okay, let's talk about some simple online math. There's only three little things I'm going to start you out with. Maybe I'll have you know more advanced ones in future episodes, but this is like where you should start when you see things like open rates and click through rates and conversion rates, it's probably makes your eyes glass over. I get that. And when you hear the numbers, guess what? No answer is either good or bad. It's just what it is now. I guess if it's zero, That would be bad. But the point of all this is for you to find out what it is and then improve it for your products, your services, your market all, all that, your price range, your product line, all that stuff. Okay, so the first little simple math we're going to talk about. So so our hypothetical situation here is that you have a product and you're going to send an email out to your list to promote that product. All right simple simple simple. So let's say that you have 1000 people on your list. And you send the email out promoting this product with a link to your sales page.
[00:03:46] And let's say 300 people open it. So the simple math is 300 divided by 1300 people opened, 1000 is how many got sent out Equals 0.3 or a 30% open rate. Open rate. All right. You got the email open. Like I said, it's 30%. Good. Well, what if your last one was 40%? Well, then this one isn't as good. What if your last one was 10%? Well, this one was way better. That's what I'm saying. It's either. It's what it is. It's not. Is it good or bad? You're always trying to improve it. But let's use this. Go forward with this example and we'll say you had a 30% open rate, 30% of the people that you sent out to open that email. Beautiful. So the next thing is called a CTR is a click through rate CTR. And let's say out of the 300 people that opened that email, ten people click through to your sales letter. Now ten divided by 300 get your calculator out is 0.03 or 3%. And you might say, well, oh, man, we sure took a dive there, didn't we? 3% compared to 30%. Well, when I get to the end of this, maybe 3% was great. We don't know yet. But you're always trying to improve that. However, one thing it could raise some flags with you is you say, okay, if my open rate was 30%, that was I must have had a pretty good subject line to get people to open it.
[00:05:34] But then once they got inside, maybe my copy, my email copy was terrible and that's why I only had 3% click through rate. These are how you start to evaluate what you're doing. Okay. But let's continue with this. So let's say those ten people went to your sales letter. And out of those ten people, one of them purchased. This is called conversion Version, right? You converted one out of ten people. All right. One divided by ten is 10%. Point 1 or 10%. And you might say, well, that's not you know, overall that's not great. Well all right, hold your horses there. What if you had a $9,000 mentor program and you got one out of ten? You just made 9000 bucks from that promotion? Okay. Now, in my case, then potentially 50,000 on the back end out of your profits for my mentor program. Nobody else will do that. That for you is give you a chance to make money. And they don't get their big money unless you make big money. That's the nature of my program. All right, so you say, wow, I made 9000 bucks. Okay. That's good. And pat yourself on the back. But let's say you wrote a better sales letter, and you got that just from one out of 10 to 2 out of ten. Now you just made 18,000 bucks plus, you know, in my case, potential.
[00:07:11] Another 100 grand on the back end. Okay, what if you went back and got more people to click through and wrote better copy in your email and got 30 people instead of 300? You know, those numbers just keep going and adding up, and maybe you ended up with 30 people seeing the sales letter and three people if you just had your 10%, you got three people. That's $27,000, right? So these are the things you have to consider. All right. What happens during that? Mail it out. See how many people opened. See how many people bought. And then always try to improve it. All right. So that's your simple simple math. Now how do you improve it as a question. Well that's the topic of split testing I'm sure I have other episodes on that, but split testing is where when you send your email out, maybe you have one subject line or two subject lines and you see which one got the highest open rate. Maybe you have different body copy and so you send part of your list one body copy part, the other body copy, and you see which one gets higher. Click through rate. And then maybe you have a different sales letter and you run them against each other. Half the people see one half to see other. And then you see which one makes the most sales for you, you know? So this is how the people get rich.
[00:08:42] The problem is, is people get lazy. They get inundated with. Now I want you to avoid these kinds of ads, the kinds of ads that claim do nothing. No, nothing. You don't have to know anything. And you'll make 768 and dollars and $0.63 a day. I mean, it's total bullshit. It's total bullshit with people that are good copywriters and take advantage of people that don't know any better. There's no way that this is legitimate. All right. No way on Earth. I've been doing this 31 years. There's no way on Earth that that can be true. Say so. And they make it so cheap, you say? Well, I'll just try it, you know? Now, my job is to try some of these things and see if there is any value to them. Some there is, most there isn't. Most. I got to get a refund because it's bullshit. You know, they limit you to. They say, oh yeah, you can make hundreds of videos and then you buy the, the, the beginner product and say, oh, you're limited to two videos a month. You know, or crap like that. And there's from some foreign country and they, uh, they have no service and they have terrible servers. So it takes I had a, I tried one the other day, had a nine second video. It took 40 minutes for it to render, right? So this is bullshit.
[00:10:07] So don't get sucked into that. You have to know something. And this simple math that I just outlined in this episode is enough to really, really get you going. All right. Simple math. How many people opened? What was the click through rate and what was the conversion rate? And if you see big dips in one or the other, then you probably work on that. However, like I said, it depends. You might get a big open rate and a small click through rate because the nature of the product is going to be very expensive. And they can tell even if you don't mention the price there. And so that knocks out a bunch of people. So again it's you have to get experience with this and test with your market, your products and services, your price range, all that stuff. And you have to do it forever. You know, there's no way I can predict the success of any promotion. After doing this 31 years, over a billion emails sent out that I can predict a specific promotion. What's going to happen with accuracy? Yeah, sometimes I get lazy and I don't bother to split tests and just take whatever money comes in, right? But that's not how you should be doing it when you're first starting. And you need every nickel that's coming in, say so. Or that could come in if you did this properly.
[00:11:31] So anyway, that's a simple, simple math. It's not calculus or simple calculator or even in your head. A lot of you could do this math. Avoid those crazy do nothing, no nothing type of things. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and check out my school. IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's licensed to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. And you can't find another independent school like this run by a multi-millionaire. And we update our curriculum like crazy, where you're lucky if a big school has a. Little e-commerce course that they even know a lot of the stuff that I teach. All right. So there you go. Check it out. IMTCVA.org and we give big scholarships. A 50% scholarship to military and their families, first responders, law enforcement and nurses. So check it out. You can email me. Tom@screwthecommute.com if you want to talk about it. There's no high pressure here or no machine gun nest. Pretending to blow you away if you don't sign up. All right. I'm just going to try to help you. All right. We'll catch you later.