15 Amazon Influencer Videos in 15 Minutes | Live Demonstration & Q&A | TJ Walker

Welcome. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. We are live. It is January 25, 2024. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. This channel is all about helping you become more successful by communicating more effectively and more confidently. I take your questions about communication. We do demonstrations. We have a free for all. If you have the link, you can join us and talk to us live. I see that we have Janice and Bono with us. Barb is with us today. So we're going to have a lot of fun. And quick note, later on in our live session, I'm not going to talk about the Amazon Influencer program. I'm actually going to do a demonstration and a challenge. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but what I'm going to attempt to do is to make teen Amazon Influencer videos and photos promoting various products where I don't just talk about how to do this. I actually demonstrate it. Soup to nuts. So I'll pick a product, I will come up with a concept script in my brain, record it on video, upload it, label it, submit it for approval for 15 different product reviews that ideally any one of them, and ideally all of them, can be profitable for me and Amazon. Now here's the challenge. Here's the degree of difficulty. I'm going to try to do all 15, all of those things for 15 different videos and pictures in a total of 15 minutes. I don't know if I can do it, but stay tuned and we'll go into that later today. We've had a lot of questions submitted today. I'll be answering all of your questions. If you're nice enough to submit questions in advance, if you post them here right on YouTube or Twitter or wherever you're watching them, we'll try to get to those as well. And certainly if you join us live, we give preference to anyone joining us live. So thanks so much for that. We have several people have joined us. Let me just switch over to We've got a new studio here. So I'm working out some of the kinks with the audio and the different camera angles and the mixers. So I'm very happy that we're joined by Bono and Janice Santiago and Lei and Bono. I very much appreciate the comments you've been giving in our community group lately and on YouTube and wanted to give you a sort of a special hello and thank you for joining us. Wanted to find out what you're working on and if we can help you in any way.

Thank you so much TJ, I bought some courses from Udemy about 4 years ago, just before the pandemic. When, when the pandemic came, I did some coaching with someone and I didn't. I wasn't motivated enough to do my Udemy courses. But I found your one and I feel really motivated. And Barbara's been giving some free coupons, so I'm feeling motivated. But I want to ask you about how to stay motivated.

So you're motivated to make an online course for Udemy or other platforms but you haven't started yet, Is that it?

Yeah, I guess I'm really afraid of starting a business because I don't know how to do it. That's the main thing, so.

Well, some businesses are harder than others. Starting a semiconductor company is pretty difficult. You need to first of all go out and raise billions of dollars of venture capital. I have no idea how to do that. I wouldn't be good at that. One of the beauties of the modern world we live in with the Internet and Internet video, it's really easy to do it. You don't really have any capital cost, presuming you already have an Internet connection and a cell phone. You really have all the tools you need. The rest is really the biggest investment. The risk is your time. And if you're picking something you enjoy anyway, there's not much of a risk. So let's not overcomplicate it. So many entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs obsess over things like, oh my, gotta get my logo right, my trademark right and my business line. No, Gary Vaynerchuk says, and I endorse this philosophy is focus on getting customers do that. All the other things will fall into place when it comes to an online course. Focus on getting the course up and out there and sharing it with people, getting people talking about it. So what's the topic you would like to teach for your course?

The topic for me, tj is mainly personal development. Because I love personal development. I love reading about it, I love engaging in it. That's my top thing.

And then which aspect? I mean, personal development means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Lei, one of our guests with us today, her particular niche is mindfulness and they are know niches just on breathing and exercise and diet. All of these things relate to personal development. Do you have a particular narrower niche you could focus on?

Yeah, the main niche for me that would draw on my expertise would be post traumatic growth.

Okay, so that's very, very specific. Now we're getting somewhere. So what I would recommend is give yourself either a quota on a daily basis or an overall deadline. Say, look, no matter what, I'm going to get this course up in a month, or no matter what, I'm going to make one video lecture per day until it's finished. One of those two things will get you to the finish line. And the important thing is not that this course is perfect or that this course makes you a billion dollars. The important thing is you get in the arena. You know, people have heard me talk about this before. It's not really something I'm proud of. But I started online courses in 1998. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for 15 years before I really gained some traction. Fortunately, it all came back. But it was 15 years. And even on the Udemy platform, I launched with five courses 10 years ago, and the first month I made $0. The second month I made $5. Now, it took a while, but it did become lucrative. But if I had just said, oh, let me do one, and if it's perfect and works out well, I urge you, just hop in. That's my biggest piece of advice.

Thank you so much. That is so extremely helpful for me, and I will certainly do that. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Santiago has joined us. And Santiago, I believe we missed a video you posted on YouTube. And Barb, if you're with us, can you pull that up? Otherwise, Santiago, if you want to share it, I'm still a little bit out of sorts with my new setup, so I can't even easily pull it up. But, Barb, are you available for that?

I'm here. I found his video. But just give me a couple minutes to pull it up, okay?

Okay, we'll come to that in just a moment. Meanwhile, Janice, if we could reintroduce you if you'd like to come back on. And then le, we're going to be addressing a question you wrote in with earlier this week in more detail. So I don't want you to think I forgot you your question about the best way of really getting more speaking gigs at conferences. But, Janice, give us a quick update on other projects you're working on.

Well, the Amazon Associates, I. I figured out how to actually get that URL that links to my associates account, and then I started attaching those to the video descriptions on YouTube. So it's been a learning curve and I really appreciate the support from Barb and her team and the constant encouragement. So thank you very much, tj. I'm looking forward to seeing how you're doing. This today, later on.

Great and full disclosure, I am going to have a little bit of help. My wife Joanne has just walked in. She's going to do the camera work and take the pictures with the cell phone to just save me a little bit of time. Because when I do these Amazon influencer videos, I don't do any editing. Even for me to walk up, hit record, and step back and start, you'd have to edit that part off. And the part where you're walking up and turning it off, I want to save time on there. So we'll be doing this. And again, those of you just joining us, I've given myself a challenge. Can I make 15Amazon influencer videos and photo post, create them, concept them, script them, produce them, upload them, label them, and hit submit? Can I do that? Anyone can do that, but can I do it in 15 minutes? That's the challenge. That's what I'm going to be trying to do later on in our time here together. Barb, do we have Santiago's video?

Yes, I do.

And I'll put the on screen here.

I just didn't want to interrupt with you, so hang on just a minute. Come on.

And I see that Karima has joined us. And also say hello to Muhammad, who is an expert on all aspects of technology. So if you see anything you like in the backdrop, if you like anything more about any of these angles, if you like a little variety of what we're trying to do here, it is because my colleague Muhammad, who's just joined us has been guiding me about seems like 12 hours a day for the last two weeks as we get our studio set up. Okay, so Barb, let's go ahead and play Santiago's latest video.

Okay.

The Dunning Kruger effect. The concept explaining the confidence of incompetent people. Once we learned about it, we quickly learned how to point our fingers and to explain what's wrong with the world. But the truth is, we all live within the Dunning Kruger effect region from time to time, overestimating our abilities. Yet few, if any, use the Dunning Kruger effect knowledge constructively. Before I explain what I mean by that and how to use the Dunning Kruger effect study purposefully, let's examine the study. In 1999, two social psychologists, Justin Krueger and David Dunning demonstrated that incompetent individuals tended to overestimate their abilities. It's these findings that later became known as the Dunning Kruger effect. In four studies, Krueger and Dunning evaluated their subjects domain specific abilities and Compared the test results with how the participants perceived their performance across the four studies. They found that the worst performers consistently overestimated their own abilities to a much higher degree than the other participants in the first study. The worst performing participants placed themselves in the fifth.

Let's hit pause there. Okay, Santiago, I'm really liking how clear you are. I mean, you've been good for a long time, obviously, but it's even clearer. I like the energy level. I know before we occasionally had some issues with the framing. Seemed a little bit distracting. I didn't see any distractions this time. So I'm seeing improvement all the way. And this is a topic I've obviously heard of and it is interesting and forgive me for cutting you off. Can you fast forward to in like 30 seconds? What's the one way people can benefit the most? Themselves? Because it's easy to spot someone and I could talk about a few in the national political life here in America, but we're not political here, so I'm not going to tell me in a nutshell because now you've aroused curiosity, which is what you always want to do when you are giving speeches and presentations. How can someone actually use this to.

Their benefit instead of using it to finger point and highlight other people's faulty or mistakes or faulty perception? Self perception. I think it's important to use it as we can use it as a self assessment tool to more or less evaluate where we are in the knowledge curve and act upon that.

And then what's the fine line between someone being so arrogant and overly confident versus the other problem of people second guessing themselves and thinking, well, until I have a PhD in that, I shouldn't talk about that or put myself out there because certainly it's obvious when people are just blowhards and have no business talking about something. But the more everyday problem among millions, if not billions of people, I believe, is when they hold themselves back and say, well, I don't know enough about that. I mean, I had people at UDEMY say tj, can you teach a course on soft skills? About five, six years ago, I'm like, well, I really just teach about public speaking and media training. I'm not an expert on all the others. But I said okay, I did a little research, did a course, it became a wildly successful bestseller. Is that an example of me doing this Dunning Kruger thing and I shouldn't have done it or is that an example? What is that an example of? And how do you really know where you fit on this spectrum of being in way over your head from versus second guessing yourself and holding yourself back.

Yeah. As I explained in the video, it's a very nuanced topic. So it's not that we can take specific, isolated examples and be certain that we are within this dunning Kruger effect region. It's just a little bit of an. What I talk about is an. A litmus test. You can know and you know more or less where you are depending on your. On how confident you are. And I think that something that is very interesting is that. And that something that also I experienced during my academic career is that the more you know, the less you think you know. So. So to take for example, an example, that if you. You might have a lot of hidden skills and abilities that you don't think you have, but you keep. You keep comparing yourself with others. And that's why you always feel a little bit of this imposter syndrome. You feel that this is not enough. Other people know more than I do. So it's more in a comparison with others. So the first study of the Danny Kruger effect was in the relationship in association with comparing yourself with others. I hope it makes sense. So you're constantly comparing yourself with others and then you feel that. No, but I'm not good enough. Because probably people already know about this and things like that. Because the more you know, the less you think you know. Because you see all the gaps.

Yes, that. That can relate to the curse of knowledge too. You get deeper and deeper. Thank you. No less. But then when you try to talk about it, you've lost people because you. You're so deep into the weeds. Santiago, you're. You started off a very good speaker and from what I see, you're getting better and better and better. Really appreciate your perspectives here. Please stay with us. I want to get your opinions of others as well. And Leigh, I want to address you, if you don't mind coming back because you were nice enough to write a very detailed question and I want to go into some length on this answer. You write. T.J. i've been looking for conferences to present about mindfulness and yoga, its benefits and the necessity of it in the world today. I have presented about this 4 times so far and I have another one soon. Do you have information about such conferences or seminars? So this is something that a tremendous number of people can really relate to. And I do want to go into a little more advanced suggestions on. On how you can do that. So what do you do if you want to speak at more conferences, conventions, trade associations, this typical. The Typical way of doing this is you go to the Internet, research all the conferences, you research who is the event organizer. You write to them, you follow up, you send them videos. The old days, you'd send them VHS or DVDs. Nowadays you're sending them links, you're checking in, you're maybe writing handwritten notes. All of this to lobby. Maybe you find someone else on the board of directors of that organization to nominate you. That is one way of doing it. I don't think that is the most effective way of doing it in 2024 and beyond. The most effective way of getting speaking engagements, seminar engagements, at conferences, events, trade associations, is to be speaking every single day on social media. And I'm going to adjust my microphone. We're in a brand new setup here and we're trying to adjust the technical things. I hope that sounds a little better. The best way to get more speaking engagements is for people to see you speak every day and to build a fan base. The old way was you do a demo tape, you have a dvd, you're mailing it out to speaker bureaus and lobbying them and sending them postcards and maybe a Christmas present. The new way is to essentially have your demo reel changed, updated every day, and in front of more people. Time is valuable, Leigh. Your time is extraordinarily valuable to you. It's really your number one asset. So I would not recommend that you spend a lot of time going through all these trade associations, conventions, websites and learning about that. Instead, build a following. Create videos, if not every day, at least every single week where you are demonstrating your expertise, and then post it on YouTube, Facebook, whatever social media outlets that you like. And you think people who care about the stuff you do would, like, post it out there. Build a community. When you have a community of people who like you, who respect you, who care about you, they become your army. They become. They knock on doors, they demand that their associations, their event planners hire you. And in fact, many of them may actually be that person who makes the decision. So if they already know you, they already like you, if they've been watching your videos on a daily basis, then you don't have to sell anyone. That person already knows you. You're at the top of the list. You already have mind space for them. That's really the most effective way. That's how comics get bookings these days. They're no longer calling the owner and the manager of, you know, this comedy strip and Caroline's. What they're doing is they're doing their own Podcast, they're doing their own YouTube shorts, they're posting their jokes on Facebook. They're trying to build a following. And if you've been to a stand up comedy show lately, and I go to them a lot, they're always saying, please follow me on Instagram, please follow me on YouTube. They want to build an audience because that's how they get more bookings. And when they do get bookings, that's how they fill the room. Because it's one thing to get on the docket of a mindfulness conference or personal development conference, but if there's eight different speakers going on all at the same time and nobody knows you, maybe your room is empty. So what have we really accomplished? Not much. So my advice, you want to speak more, you want to speak for free, you want to speak for a little pay, you want to speak for a lot of pay. The single best way of doing it is speaking today on social media in a video format and building your audience. Gary Vaynerchuk was not a famous speaker, author, expert or anything. He was a guy who started speaking a lot about wine every day. And then he morphed to other businesses and business advice and marketing advice, started getting invited to speak for free at business conferences. But the demand for him speaking went up so high, he could start charging $10,000 a speech and then 20 and then 50 and then 100 and then ultimately $200,000 a speech because he's so well known, because he reaches 170 million people a month through his social media. So that's how he gets his speaking gigs. Now, we can't all be Gary Vaynerchuk doing 89 videos a day and having a staff of 27 people following us around. But you can make video at least once a week, post it and build an audience. So, Lei, that's my advice on. Really, the best way I think you can get more speaking gigs is just start speaking now in front of your own camera.

Thanks.

Okay, I hope that was helpful. Now, I did that in part because I wanted. I know so many people care about that issue and ask me questions all the time, that I wanted to sort of make it in a way that our editors and one of my editors is with us right now. Muhammad, I'm hoping you're thinking that that would work. And ideally the quality of that was. Was good too. Okay, we have a bunch of questions that people were nice enough to write in that I have to hop into. Does anyone else have something, a burning issue they want to talk about? And again, I Want to thank Bono, Santiago, Leia, Karima and Janice and Muhammad for joining us. But if you don't mind just sort of staying put, I'll stay as long as anyone wants to talk today. I'm having a blast. But I do want to go and answer some very specific questions that people submitted on forms for this event today. Terry writes. Terry just sends a nice comment, says I've learned so much from you and want to have more time to learn about this topic of presentation skills. So Terry, hope you're watching this and I hope you're getting a lot out of it. And Puneet writes in is going to join us today. Raj writes in, does not have any particular questions and sometimes people just rsvp. Here's from Olu who writes how can I overcome my fears? And each time I'm standing towards my audience to address them, am I to look above their heads, to their faces, to the ground or focus my attention towards something else or what? So although I'm so happy you asked this question because there is a lot of advice out there. What do you do if you're nervous? You're standing up in front of people and all of a sudden you see all these faces. It is completely normal, it's completely rational to inside feel your stomach tense up and feel like you're shaking. Even if you're not, what do you do? So there have been some so called experts who say, well don't look at them, look over their heads and that way you won't get nervous or look at the clock on the wall or imagine people in their underwear. Horrible advice. Well, or imagine people naked. You know, depending on your audience. That's either too exciting or too disgusting. So I do not recommend visualizing your audience in the underwear just because you're nervous. Let's step back for a moment. What is the cause of actually being nervous? The cause I believe is we're nervous about the fact that we are worried we might bore people, we might waste their time, we might not be interesting. Well, here's the problem that might be a legitimate concern. So the first way of solving this problem is to make sure you actually have something interesting to say to your audience. If you do that, that alone can calm your nerves a great deal. Now let me go over a few more tips on exactly what I mean by that. You're nervous because if you're standing up and you see these people like oh, what do I do now? You need to have planned in advance something interesting for them, something useful to them. Most audiences are prepared to be bored. Because most speakers are, in fact, boring. So if you can stand up knowing you've got something interesting to say, you're way ahead of everyone else. Now, the big question. Where do you actually look? You've got several choices. The worst possible thing is to stare at your feet or look over everyone, or turn your back and read the PowerPoint slides. Because then your audience feels ignored. Well, human beings are. Human beings do not like to be ignored. Imagine talking to your spouse or your best friend or someone, something important. They ignore you, and they're staring at their cell phone. It makes you feel slighted. It makes you. You're like most people. It makes you annoyed. One moment for a technical issue. I see my mic has popped down. We're still learning how to do all these tech things, and we're trying to get it just right. But the microphone should not be showing in the shot. So where should you look worst of all? Situation? Staring at the floor, making it obvious. Because human beings, they react to people. There's a reciprocal relationship. If someone says, hey, I hate you, buddy, and punches you in the face, it's only normal to recoil back or defend yourself and punch back. Someone's rude and ignores you. The audience has a perfect standby reaction. It's to ignore you. The audience, if they see you're not looking at them, they can pull out their cell phone and oh, let me check. Text. Oh, I see. My wife sent me a text. Oh, oh, Muhammad wrote to me on what's. They're ignoring you. So that's the big problem with looking above people's heads or at a clock or the floor. Because you're nervous. You need to look people in the eye. Now, there's several ways of doing that. What a lot of speakers do, especially nervous ones, is they're looking at the whole room the whole time. They look like water sprinklers. And when you're in the audience, you never feel like the speaker's actually looking at you. Therefore, you feel anonymous. Therefore you feel like, well, this person can't really see me. Let me check my email and text and sports news. So that's not good. You don't want to do it that way. Now, there's a better way of doing it. The best way of all is look at one person in the audience while you're speaking and hold the eye contact for a thought, couple sentences, five seconds, and then go to another person in the audience and look at them for one thought, couple sentences, five seconds, and then go to someone else. Do this randomly throughout the room. It's not like this. You don't want to seem like a machine. You're not just looking at the friendly face. You're not just looking at the best looking person. You're not just looking at the CEO decision maker who could sign a check for you. You're giving everyone eye contact a little bit, but it's not weird. You're not staring at any one person the whole time. It's just five seconds or so. It's not the quick eyes floating that will do several things. It will make you appear to be supremely confident. It will also actually make you more confident because you're not having to look at this whole giant audience now. You're just having a conversation with one person and that is how you can calm your nerves and come across really comfortable when you have to stand up and face an audience. So, Olu, thank you so much for that question. Let's go to the next question here and we'll come to anyone else who's joined us live very much appreciate it. But last week I missed some of the people who were nice enough to write questions and I, I don't want to get in the habit of doing that. So here's another question Dr. Sharmila has written in with this question and is how to practice a script and deliver its contents without a chit. I guess you mean by that a mistake. So the way to practice if you do have to use a script, you need to really make sure it's something you're comfortable with. The best way of doing it is you've got to do it out loud. Record it on video. Now, if you're doing it in a video format where the final thing is for YouTube or Zoom or something like that, you may actually want to use a teleprompter. I don't recommend it for most people most of the time because it takes more time to use a teleprompter effectively. But whether you're using a teleprompter or not, try the script. Read it out loud so many times you're really comfortable with it. And you've got to make sure the script is now edited for the ear, not for the eye, because plenty of things look good on a script or on a screen. But when you're saying it doesn't sound good at all, you've got to make sure it actually follows normal speech patterns. That means a lot of short sentences. It means repetition, sometimes sentence fragments. Because if it's written that with a long sentence, you're going to gasp for breath, you're going to run out of air. So you've got to practice it out loud. And that's the problem with so many speeches that are scripted is people say, well, I don't have time to practice. There's always time for anything that that is important. So you're going to need to practice it. Let's step back for a minute. The important thing is to ask yourself, why are you using a script? There are good reasons to use a script. If you are the president of a nation, if you are the head of a Federal Reserve, anything you say, if it's off a little bit, could cause a crisis, could cause an economic calamity, could cause a war. So there are certain circumstances where getting everything just right is important for legal, political reasons. But let's face it, for most of us, that's not an issue. Most of us are not presidents of countries or are that important. The number one problem most of us face when we give a presentation is not that we get a word wrong. The number one problem most of us face is nobody remembered anything we said. So I do want you to really question yourself whether you need to follow a script. Now, if your boss says, follow the script or you're fired, okay, that's a good reason. But otherwise, I urge most of my clients to use a simple outline, not a script. And then you can glance down occasionally at the outline. Thanks to Rose for saying hello with a leg and with a whole bunch of hearts. So thank you so much. And now I just realized I've not looked at our. Our other chat room. There are a number of chats. So Bono wrote in, karima said hello to everyone. Leia wrote, says, sorry something's happened to your computer. So feel free to keep the chats going. If you do watch this on YouTube, please leave comments there. If you're watching this on LinkedIn or Twitter, please leave your comments there. I try to respond to every single comment. We've had some other questions come in as well, and I want to respond to anyone who was nice enough to write in with questions. Oh, thank you. Karima says, love the suit and, and the set. Well, the set is a work in progress. We're actually getting rid of this bookshelf and I have a whole bunch of floating bookshelves that just arrived we're going to try to install this weekend. And my wife and daughter have been instrumental helping me design this and keep the look good. And we've got pictures of family back here. So it is a work in progress. Thank you for liking the suit. I, I don't know when the last time I, I do know, a year ago, I went to a funeral. I wore this suit. So you may remember a week or so ago, I asked all of you, what should I really wear? Because in all of my YouTube videos, the ones where I'm wearing a suit from a long time ago had 2, 3, 5, 8,000 views. Others where I'm more casually dressed, not so many. So it was decided that I would just go ahead and, you know, wear a suit and actually dress professionally in part because, you know, I'm not a young kid. I'm not trying to be young and hip. So the idea is this is really more appropriate with what audiences expect. So I'm glad you like the suit. It is now more than probably 12 years old, but it is tailored and I'll give a quick plug to. Well, I thought I had their label here, but it's Shafer, which is a very old, old school Savile Row tailor where they make everything by hand. And it is a great suit that has lasted a long time. So, Karima, thank you very much for noticing that. I do appreciate that. Let's go in with some other comments and questions we have. Kayla has written how to master communication skills. What are the best perspectives to be confident as a speaker? Well, Kayla, that's what this entire channel is all about. If you want to become more confident as a communicator, I'm really hoping you not only subscribe to this channel on YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter, wherever you are, because I'm trying to come to you live. We've been doing it live once a week with three videos every single day, seven days a week, two short videos, one long video. Once I get the studio entirely set up, we're going to be coming to you live every single day, having essentially a workshop on how to become a better communicator, how to be more successful in any aspect of your life, whether it's professionally or personally, through enhanced communication skills. So that's what this is all about. So you're on the right track, Kayla. I'm assuming you're a student of one of my courses, taking courses, but practicing on video and these days are the number one way of becoming a better communicator. Costs nothing, could even make you money, is to speak on video every day, put yourself out there and get feedback from people. That's really the best way to get better and better and better. If you look at Mr. Beast or any top YouTuber when they started 10 or 15 years ago versus today. They almost seem like completely different people because their communication skills grew so much. It's not because they hired me, sad to say. It's because they spoke every day and they got better and better and better. Lei writes, love the idea of live every day. Thank you so much. And Bono says, savile Road, London, where I am. Yes. So those tailors would came to New York City a couple times a year. They would measure me and is it really worth it? I mean, what you pay for when you use a tailor is you have buttons that actually work. They're not just sewn right on so I can unbutton this or button it. Why I need to button or unbutton the suit, I don't really know. But that is one of the things you actually, you do pay for. But fortunately, I think I have enough suits. I haven't worn them out too much, especially in the last five years, especially here in Florida. They aren't, they aren't needed that much. Although I guess I'll be wearing them every day right here. Let's see if we have any other questions that have come in. And I do appreciate everyone writing questions. I think we got most of them. Stay tuned because in a moment my wife is going to help me and we're going to make not one, but 15 different Amazon influencers videos and pictures. And I'm going to try to do it in 15 minutes. Whether I can do it or not, I don't really know. And Barb, I know you have to go shortly. Would you like to. I'll give you an opportunity and either way is fine. Would you like to give people? Because the only reason I know about Amazon Influencer is you. Would you like to give people sort of a 30 to 60 second overview of what Amazon Influencer is? Why anyone would care about it.

Tj, forgive me, but I've got an.

Emergency behind the scene going on. Okay, understood. So let me give a quick overview of what Amazon Influencer is. Amazon obviously knows how to sell product and they've had an affiliate program really ever since they started. If you have a blog and you review a book and you put a link there and someone buys it, you get a commission. And that's what influencers do. The problem for 99% of the world is that if you don't have a huge audience, you can spend all day long doing this stuff and never make any money. You make $0.02. What's unique about the Amazon Influencer program is if you're accepted, you can make a video and. And then they put that video on the product page on Amazon. So if someone goes to a really popular product for a fancy TV and they watch your video and then buy it, Amazon gives you a commission. So there are a lot of influencers out there who've never made any money in any other platform, really don't have a huge audience that are making good money money on Amazon Influencer. And it's kind of a way of getting into that game. Barb was nice enough to tell me about it a month or so ago, and I've been experimenting and I'm about to try to rev this up. The reason I'm so excited about it is for years and years I've had so many of my students come to me and say, tj, I love to speak. I want to be a motivational speaker. I want to get hired as a speaker, I want to make money as a speaker. How do you do it? And it is a tough chicken and egg situation for most people. That's what's interesting about this Amazon Influencer thing, is you can just make video reviews, post them and start making money. I'm not promising it's a spigot that just automatically going to go on like crazy, but it's a way to get in and do work with brands, get in front of audiences where you don't have to deliver the audio. That's what's different about it and unique about it, and why I'm experimenting with it because I want to show a lot of you how you can make money through speaking and presenting. So I wanted to do something a little different today because I know a lot of you and a lot of other students are interested in this whole influencing game. How do you get started? Because we can't just all get up one day and say, I'm Kim Kardashian. She was really famous before Instagram even started. How do you go from really not having an audience to getting in front of people and making money by speaking on video and not having to have 10 billion subscribers on YouTube the way Mr. Beast does. So that is a question I hear from a lot of people. So that's why I'm sort of going through this myself, so I can give you advice. So the basics are you do a review in a video format of a product you actually own that you bought, could be from Amazon or anyplace else, and you just share what you like about it. You post it. So you're not following an advertising script from a company you don't have to be in a suit and tie. You can be in your pajamas at home talking about it. You don't even have to show your face. You don't even have to speak. There's a lot of different ways. And you post the video. And again, if someone watches your video or looks at your picture before they make a purchase, you get a commission. So here's what I want to do today. My wife has been nice enough to come and help me out with this. We are going to make some Amazon Influencer product reviews. And I kind of just picked these three randomly. So I'm going to do a review of three products I like and really believe in and have recommended to people. One of them is a book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. One of them is a Sony headset, just an absolutely fantastic noise canceling headset. I like them so much. I've had, I bought two, actually about three. One was stolen and one is a simple lip balm, Burt's Bees. So I picked three products. When I do a product review of something, here's my typical sequence. I take a vertical picture, a horizontal picture. Each one of those is a separate post. I then do a short vertical video of less than 30 seconds because that can appear on this TikTok like function that Amazon has where it's just product reviews in video format, in the vertical up and down that people look at on their phone. And then I do a relatively short horizontal video and then a longer, more thorough horizontal video. I don't do any editing on mine. Am I telling you you should never edit? No, it's just my style. I'm trying to have my basic positive presentation skills win the game. I also don't want to spend the time doing a lot of editing. I want to get more product videos out there. So I'm going to take you sort of behind the scenes, show you as much as possible about this and I apologize in advance. The one thing I can't show you is my actual Amazon Influencer Insider page because that's breaking the rules of Amazon. But I'm going to show you every step of the process other than that. And so for starters, I'm going to ask my wife. She's not going to be on camera, but if you could come stand right here. I use, I use a separate plug in microphone because I'm doing these on an iPhone. It just makes it simple, easy. So going to ask her to plug the receiver into her cell phone. I'm going to put these products over here. I'm now going to Use a different microphone. This is working just for my iPhone. It's not the one you'll be hearing from. I have to remember to turn this on now. You don't have to use a separate microphone. It's just a way of building up the production values a little and all things being equal, having a nice. I see the green light is on. So that means this microphone is on. So let's, let's hold me accountable. Here's why I'm doing this. My theory is if I can do 15 posts in 15 minutes, anyone should be able to do at least one. And if you can in fact do 15 posts in 15 minutes, then if you just spent 15 minutes a day, in a year you'd have about 5,000 posts. I do think, I'm not making guarantees here. The Amazon Influencer program could disappear tomorrow. It could be so glutted that no one makes any money. But I do think there's a good chance Anyone who does 15 a day and ends up with 15,000, excuse me, 5,000 videos, it's probably going to end up making at least a couple thousand dollars a month. Again, it's not a guarantee. It's just a hypothesis at this point. Okay, let's start the engine. I'm going to let the record show that we are right at 11:33am Eastern time. I'm hitting go. All right, the first thing I'm going to ask my wife to do is to just take a vertical picture. And she's standing in front of me with the, with the phone as a vertical. And then actually for the vertical, well, we should do it that way. Now take a horizontal picture. Okay, so I'm not an expert on photography and typically most people say that you make more money from the videos than the photographs, but it's something you can have as a part of your story. Now let's do the vertical short, less than 30 second video where I'm, I say it's scripted. I'm just going to say the first thing on the top of my head to try to make it interesting for something I think that the average person shopping for something like this would find useful. Are you tired of your lips getting dry and flaky? You may have tried a lot of lip balms. I know I have over the years. This is my favorite. I've been using Burt's Bees lip Balm for 15 years. It just feels the best. Okay, so now I'm going to ask Joanne. Do we get that? And now we typically would do a quick check. Can we just make sure I turned on the microphone. We'll play it back. And she's nice enough to come here today. She's standing right next to the camera. Okay, so there it is. Am I going to finesse over this and say, oh, it could have been a little better. This word? No, I'm just going to get these down. So. So we got the vertical one. Now I want to do a horizontal one that's a little bit longer. Are you looking for something that will keep your lips moist? There's a lot of products out there. I've tried them all. Nothing really works better on my lips than Burt's Bees. I've used it for about a decade and a half. It's really the only one that. That I'm brand loyal to. If you want lips that are not dry and not chapped, you really can't go wrong with Burt's Bees. Okay, so that was the sort of shorter one that's horizontal. Now we're going to do a longer one. Do you want your lips to feel your best and look your best? If so, I highly recommend Burt's Bees. Hi, I'm TJ with the TJ Walker Success Channel. And I've been in front of the camera for decades, whether it's being a spokesperson for TV ads or being on YouTube. And I remember about 15 years ago, a makeup artist took me back and said, tj, I only use Burt Bees. For all of my clients, I get the most expensive makeup available. This is really what works best for clients. Because you put it on, it just doesn't seem to dry out. An hour later, you're not licking your lips, it stays longer. And that was the first time I experienced it. I've used it ever since. Now I buy not one at a time, a box at a time. That's what works for me. Okay, so that one was a little bit longer. Let's see how I'm doing on time. I forgot to hit the start button. I thought I did what someone can type up when I said we were starting. Because I do want to hold myself accountable. Let's quickly go to the next product. Photo. We're doing the vertical photo, and we should probably do one like this. Now we're doing the horizontal, and since I have two pairs. Okay. And it just occurred to me, I forgot the exact name of the headset, but I know I have it because it shows up in. Oh, I changed the name. It's. I believe It's MX or MD 1010. But I don't have to say that for the ad. So let's go ahead and do the short vertical video now. Baby screaming behind you on an airplane will never bother you again with these Sony headphones that cancel the noise. I've had several pairs of these. It makes every plane ride pure relaxation. That was the short one. Now let's do a horizontal one. Imagine being your stop. Do it over. Now that you may have noticed that's the first time I sort of called a mulligan. No one's perfect. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. But what I try to do when I make a mistake is just stop as quickly as possible. Hit delete, no editing. And then we just do another one. Okay, let's do this one now. Do you ever feel like being in your own little world? Well, these Sony headsets will take you there. You put these on and I hear virtually nothing except the music I want to listen to. They are absolutely fantastic. I can walk into a crowded airplane, there's a baby crying behind me, and I put these on, put on my Elton John and all is right with the world. If you want really high quality sound or blocking sound, you're going to love the these Sony headphones. I love them so much. I've had not just two pairs, I've had three pairs. One was stolen once they're that valuable. Okay, so that was the longer one. What's it.

You need to get a long one.

That was the short ver horizontal. Now I'm going to do a longer horizontal. Okay. And I don't have any one set length in mind when I'm doing these. I'm just trying to make them. First one is under, under 30 seconds for the vertical. The others a little longer and then the third one. Really anything I want to say that I think might motivate someone to buy the product? Okay.

Two, one.

Once you put these Sony headphones on, you're not going to want to use any other headset. You put them on and it does a fantastic job of blocking out noise. There have been times when I've been in a restaurant, it's so noisy and I want to just relax and read. I put these on, put some light music on, everything is fine. I've been on airplanes before. People are yelling, there's a baby crying, everyone's in a bad mood. Oh, this is going to be awful. It's not bad for me. I put these on, put on the music I want or a podcast, and I hear nothing else. It covers the ear, it cancels the noise and it's very, very solid. I've had three pairs of these for more than a decade. One of them I use so much, you can see. I took the time of taping it together. I got another pair. Everyone in my family sort of fights over them. We've had three pairs. One was actually stolen because people know how good these are. If you really want to go top quality and get the highest level quality of sound in your ear and blocking the worst sounds from your ear, I highly recommend these Sony headphones. Okay. All right, now, next product. And we took the pictures for the head. Yeah. Okay, so the first thing we'll do is picture. So we're taking the vertical picture now. And now my wife is taking the horizontal picture. Okay, now we'll do the short form vertical video. Atomic Habits. It's been on the bestseller list for what seems like a thousand years. Is it worth the hype? Actually, yes, it is a short one. Okay, now we'll do a horizontal one. James Clear's Atomic Habits is truly something for the ages. It's been on the bestseller list now for years and years and years for gold. Good reason. I've read hundreds, if not thousands of books on personal development and habits. This one really does stand out. How do I know it? I. I judge a book quite often by how many pages have I marked down and written notes on? And I've got hundreds of pages. Almost every page, I've pulled the corner down and highlighted. This is a book that transcends the genre and really has gotten to the level of stoic philosophy. It's that good. Okay, now I want to go one more and a little bit longer.

3, 2, 1.

James Clear's Atomic Habits. Is it just hype? I'm often skeptical of a book that everybody says you've got to read. I'm skeptical of books that have been on the New York Times bestseller list for years and years and years and years. Maybe it's just a marketing machine. Well, I'm here to tell you, this is one instance when I'm really not a snob. I think the people got it right. This book deserves its status as the most successful book of the last decade. Maybe the last 50. 50 years. When it comes to habits, James Clear has written in a way that he lives up to his name. He's clear, he's memorable. His examples are so resonant. He brings the absolute best of science research and the common touch to make real habits meaningful to people and your ability to change habits. Very few books, let's face it, really end up with people changing behavior well, this book has changed my life. I have underlined comments, insights on almost every single page. There are some books I read and I look at it and I haven't turned down a single page or down a single underline this one. It seems like every other page. There was some nugget in this book that I said, wow, that's either so profound, I've never heard it before, or he took a profound idea and he explained it in a way that made it so simple and memorable. I've never heard it that way. So it is destined, I believe, to be a real master of the genre that people are going to be talking about and reading for decades to come. So if you want to improve your habits, if you want to boost your own personal development library, you can't go wrong adding atomic habits to your library. Okay, so I've now and Joanne, I'm going to need you to go ahead and upload those to my YouTube channel. If I see. If I were really smart, what I would do is I would just add it right up from my phone. But I'm not. I'm not good at typing on my phone. So what I do is I upload it to my Google Drive and then I download it to my computer and then I upload it to Amazon where I can type it. Where are we with minutes? Because someone. I said do. It's nine minutes since I touched it, but I think I lopped off the first four minutes. So can anyone tell me when we actually started? If you want to type that in. And maybe I'm not actually going to get this uploaded and listed, but I do hope that you see this doesn't have to be that complicated because all of those videos are usable. I'm going to make some money. I can't promise you how much money, but I now have 15 different pieces of content that I can monetize, in theory, forever. Did I get everything perfect in one take? No, there was one of those, you may recall, that I messed up and I just did it over again and there was only an investment of an extra 15 seconds. So that's what we're. We're doing. Barb. Barb had to leave. So, Barb, we appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, 33 minutes past the. Oh, 33 minutes past the hour was the start time. So it's now been exactly 15 minutes. So I did fail. But in my defense, not only did I make 15 pieces of content, I kind of was telling you what I was doing and why and trying to Give some insight. So I hope that that counts for a little. So what is going on right now? And Joanne, I'm going to ask you to email me the photo so you'll upload the videos. Email the photos. This is not, I'll warn you, this is not going to be the most exciting, riveting TV or YouTube live with what I'm about to do, but I am going to actually show you how to do this in real time of what I'm doing. So it's not me talking conceptually about how to make money speaking and how to be an influencer. I'm actually showing you behind the scenes. So I hope for some of you this is useful. Harmon writes, I joined late. I just woke up, but next time I'll be on time. Well, Harmon, very much appreciate you being with us. I'm gonna, I guess since I already failed the 15 minute test for doing everything, I'm gonna stop the clock for a minute and I'm gonna bring Janice on. And also Karima is nice enough to join us today. Let's take a quick time out while we're uploading those and I, I will say since the videos are short, it typically only takes a minute or two to upload them and it just takes often 30 seconds to download it and then I have to hit a button to upload it. And the whole thing is, is pretty seamless. So maybe if I weren't trying to do three things and talk to you and all this, maybe 15 minutes was too ambitious. But I do think probably 25 minutes and especially if I finish the first part, upload, go to another task or answer an email and come back, I do think the whole thing could be done in 20 minutes or less. Janice, let's check in with you. Any reflections on what I just said? I hope are just demonstrated. I hope it was mildly useful, if not particularly riveting.

What I really liked, tj, is that you really like the product and it shows. So, and, and you showed the product. A lot of times people talk about and they don't demonstrate. So what you did was very clean and concise. You were convincing as well. So clean, concise and, and convincing. So I've learned a lot from your tips. So I'm going to be watching the recording and then taking better notes.

Oh, thank you. Well, here's the thing about the Amazon influencer program is you get to pick what products you want and I'm not that different from most people at this point. I have bought, you know, thousands and I'm going To take this microphone off, I bought thousands and thousands of products. So if there's a. So if I have a product that I bought and I don't really think it's that good, I just don't make a video about it because I'll be honest, there are some people who are so naturally gifted and they have such silver tongues. The proverbial they could sell iced Eskimos. Guess what? I'm not one of them. If I don't believe in something, it's not that I'm so much more ethical than anyone. I'm just terrible at selling that thing. When I was a kid and I had to sell magazine subscriptions for my junior high school, I was awful. When I had to sell peanut brittle and cookies for the Boy Scouts or bird houses, I was awful at it. Worst around. So it's not that I have any natural skill to just sell something I don't care about. The beauty of the Amazon Influencer program is you. You don't have to sell products you don't like. You're not hired as an announcer for a radio station and just handed a script. The beauty of this is that you don't have to follow the script from the product, the brand. You're not sitting there with a director and the representative from the company yelling, you do this one or do it over. Do it the way you want. All you have to do is share with people what you like about a product and focus on why you think other people could benefit. Now, are there nuances of doing this that could make it a lot better? Sure. I'm still new in this game. And if you talk to someone who's been in the Amazon Influencer program for a couple of years, they could go into tremendous detail about the ideal length and message points to hit and all sorts of other things. But you don't have to to do it that way. You can just start. And what I'm hoping a lot of you do by watching this is it motivates you to get started because it's not that hard. Memorizing a script is not a confession here, Janice. I've been hired before to be a spokesperson for a TV commercial for some product detecting, I guess, cancer through blood. And it was a set script. I couldn't memorize a 30 second script. It was awful. They had to put up cue cards and frankly, it was so awful I think they ended up scrapping the commercial. So I'm not someone who is just naturally gifted at memorizing a script. The words I said in Those ad, I mean, if we just did three products, three videos for each one. So there were nine separate videos we just did. I did eight of them in one take. One. I messed up after two seconds and did it again. It's not that I have a good memory because I wasn't remembering anything. All I did was ask myself, what would I tell a friend about this who wants to know about it? And in fact, pretty much everything I said, whether it was about this, about, about this or the book, are things I've actually said to friends and family members. So I'm only talking about products that have already recommended to other people. That's what makes it easy. Now as you get into this, people who are really good at it may actually buy a product because they see it's moving, they see it's popular, they don't really want it themselves, but they think, I can talk about that and promote it. I'll buy it and then I'll sell it to someone else afterward. There's nothing wrong with that. But why not start with the easy way? Just talking about products you already like and that you've already used and that you've recommended to people before. You know, I'm a big believer that if you've got an easy way of doing something and a hard way, why not start with the easy way? Especially if it is more effective. And this can be effective. Janice, I just misplaced my mouse. I'm trying to bring you back on Janice, and I can't do it without. I guess I can do it the old fashioned way with a. The mouse pad, but I just wanted to give you an opportunity. You encrypt. Oh, here's my mouse right in of front of me. Sorry. Any comments you have about that or any other thoughts.

I like what you were saying. It. I. I've written in the chat box. If it's too perfect, if it's scripted, then the authenticity drops. You're not an actor. You're not quoting Shakespeare. You're T.J. walker and you communicate. So I really like what you have. It's real you.

It's a thanks. I mean, I'm trying to be me now. I am wearing a suit and tie. The vast, vast majority of people doing Amazon influencer videos are not wearing a suit and tie. I don't know if I've seen anyone doing that. So I'm not recommending that. It's just that happens to be sort of the brand image I'm going for. Now you might make the case that it's going to work against me. Because supposedly the reason Amazon and brands like this Amazon Influencer thing is that they don't look slick. They don't look like they're being done by professional pitch men and pitch women. They like average people dressed in average, ordinary clothes at home. So I think I may even be doing it the wrong way.

But that's how you're doing it, the right way. Because tj, you are communicator and you've been doing it for decades. And you, you can afford those microphones, those headphones. Sorry, it's my dog. I have to go.

Okay, Krama, join us. Join us back when you can. You're right. Now these are, if I recall, these were maybe $300, which that's a lot of money. Is a lot of money. But if you use it for, you know, everything is relative. If you use it for 10 years, as I have on countless airplane rides, and the difference between making every airport, every airplane ride really pleasant, listening to a movie the way you want versus screaming babies, it is worth every. I would pay 10 times that amount for them, frankly. But it's not for everyone's budget. There's no doubt when you are making an Amazon Influencer video, you're not supposed to ever mention price because they change the pricing all the time. And you can't say it's on sale because they want something that, that can be seen anywhere, anytime, even if it's not on sale. So you may have noticed I didn't mention the price for any of those things. I missed a few people's commenting and Rose was nice enough to say, love your appearance and your voice. Well, thank you, Rose. And Malikara says, looking good. Thanks. Someone else and I can't see the name attached. Right. What tool do you use to video and record? Right now we are in the Streamyard system and you can just go to streamyard.com check it out. I have recently updated the whole studio and we've got a lot of, you know, expensive Sony cameras and thousand dollars Sensheimer microphone. I'm hoping it sounds good. You don't have to have that. The videos I just made for this Amazon Influencer was a cell phone. So that's really all you need. Whether you're thinking of doing Amazon Influencer, whether you're thinking of doing your own YouTube channel or TikTok, I beg you, do not let your equipment needs or your lack of equipment slow you down. Just start, get in the game. You can always upgrade, you can always build up. I just spent a lot of money building this whole new studio. But you know what? I've been on YouTube since 2005. I've been making videos at some level, depending on how you define it, certainly since the. Had a syndicated TV show since the 80s, and I did my first video to be seen by a thousand in 1975 when I was in junior high school. So I'm. I'm trying to ratchet up the quality here. But if you have not been doing video for 40 years, don't hold yourself to the same standard. Just grab a cell phone, hop in. You don't have a good cell phone these days. You could probably get a webcam. You can probably get a webcam for free. When people are moving and they're trying to get rid of junk out of their house. On Facebook Marketplace, they would probably pay you to just take away a few old webcams. So do not let the technology side of things prevent you from communicating on video. That is something I'm begging of you.

One thing that struck me, sorry for Karima here. Like, for example, I can't use my camera at the moment because I don't want anyone to see the way my hair is or whatever. By you putting the suit and tie on before you started, you were ready to go. You were. You didn't have to think about, how do I look? Or do these colors go together? Or you're already groomed, you've already done the work on your background, but you're on yourself. You didn't have to worry about brushing your hair or fixing your makeup or I don't even know if you use makeup.

By the way, my wife is laughing when you said, she's right next to me here. She's laughing when you said, I don't have to worry about brushing your hair, because I know what she's thinking. She's like, yeah, you don't have any hair, but, sorry, go ahead.

No, that's all. I have to be careful because if I leave the mic on for long, this dog might bark. So. Okay, that's. I just. You were ready, and I agree very much with Janice. Authenticity. You are very authentic. So you're prepared and you're authentic. And I think they would go for probably 75% of. Of the message.

Okay, well, I very much appreciate that, but. And I should point out, there are Amazon influencers who don't show their face at all. They just. Their voice. I mean, you have a fantastic voice, very resonant and accent that's very responsive to. To certainly a lot of American audiences. And one caveat, we do have a lot of of regulars from India, Africa, around the world. And Amazon, to my knowledge, is only making this Amazon influencer program available to people in North America. So people in the US And Canada, I think they're going to start rolling out to other countries, but most of the world can't participate. But certainly if Amazon figures out a way of making money from it, you can bet they're going to roll it out to the entire world. So you might as well get ready for it. I appreciate your kind comments about looks and stuff. I did have someone say I looked a little bit orange today with my makeup. So, Janice, are you noticing anything? Because I do have. And just in the, you know, for full disclosure, since we're making this kind of a workshop, I'll just show you what I do. Because, you know, part of the premise of this, when I'm going to be coming to you live every day, is really kind of taking you behind the scenes of not just communication skills and, but how to do it, how to refine it in different formats. So what I do is I put on, when I'm doing makeup, I give my eyebrows a little extra definition because it's not just here that's falling out. So I give my eyebrows a little definition. And by the way, nobody on tv, no celebrity, no beautiful person or ugly person you've ever seen on TV doesn't have makeup on. So there are still some people who think there's a stigma to that. I then have a foundation. This is something I used to long before the days of influencers. Like 20 years ago, I had my own makeup brand for men, for television. Didn't know that there, but it actually says the TJ Walker. I don't sell makeup anymore, but it just happens to be one I have up. So I take this cream, I put this under my eyes to even out the skin tones, get rid of some of the dark circles. I put it over here to get rid of the five o' clock shadow. And you could argue these days I should have a beard, because most men do. But it just doesn't look good on me, I gotta tell you. And then the final thing, and this is all simple I do myself, is I just put a mosaic pencil powder on a mosaic, meaning different colors. You want something that doesn't change the color of your skin. Sometimes people, you see people with powder on, but then it's ten times darker here than it is here, or their hands are ten times lighter and it looks weird. So what I'm doing is I'm just. All this does is it gets rid of the shine because it can make you look kind of plaque. And I already have some on, but I'm just showing you how I do this quickly. And what I do is I actually do it at the top of my head. It's not because it's going to make me look like I have a thick, beautiful head hair, but it reduces the shine. And all I'm after is I'm not trying to radically change my appearance, but everyone wants to look their best and remove distraction. So that's. I mean, it only takes really a minute to do the makeup. So I do that now, especially now that I have really upgraded my cameras. The cameras all record in 5K. Excuse me, 4K. You're not watching this live in 4K, but when we repost it later, it'll actually be higher quality. By the way, I missed a few other comments. Someone asked, are the commissions worth the effort for Amazon Influencer? I don't know yet. I mean, I can tell you without breaking the rules, I am making some money. It's not a lot of money. I can also tell you, my first two months on Udemy, I only made $5. And that's turned out to be, you know, a very nice business. So, like with so many things these days, there's a low barrier to entry, but a high barrier for big success. And you just have to hop in. In and try. Let me check in with my wife a moment. Have we uploaded the videos? Okay, fantastic. So here's what I'm. I'm gonna. This is gonna be a little bit boring, frankly. But I do wanna show you what I'm actually doing. Part of it I can show you. I'm gonna go to the public part of my Amazon page and then I'm gonna have to take it off because I'm not allowed to show you the. But I do want you to see basically what I'm doing, how to do it, and that it could be done relatively quickly and easily. So I'm going to share the page. And Joanne, thank you very much. If you need to go, because you get to hear my stuff all the time. You need to go. Yeah. All right, great. Let me make sure I actually receive the pic. So, again, she took pictures of me. This is stuff I could have done all myself, but I'd have to walk there. And it's a little bit harder taking pictures of yourself. But you don't. Again, you don't even have to show your face. So I see all the Pictures are there. That's great. So the first thing I'm going to do is show you my screen and. Oh, let me hit the right page, see what others see. Okay. So I'm going to show you my public page. So this is the page that any is completely public. Anyone who goes to Amazon and searches my name or they just go to Amazon.com shop tjwalcom.

Success.

They'll see my page. So these are videos I did where I wasn't wearing a suit and tie. I just did these at home where I talked about other earbuds. Coffee machine that I do love but got rid of. TV stand. That's great. I did one. Here's an example of a mistake. I did one for this iPad protector because I love it. I've had for 10 years. I no longer break and I did it. I also love the color. It's so sort of loud and gaudy. It serves as a fantastic protection because I've never had to worry about anyone stealing it. I've left this. I've left this. You can see it there. I'm holding it up in the top on the right. I've left it before accidentally in restaurants. Come back a day later, it's still there. So for that reason alone, I love it. You know what, that product was discontinued. So that was a complete waste of time. But I only invested about 60 seconds of my time. So that's, that's how I can rationalize that and not worry about it. So let me show you more of the page. So you need. You see where it's going so someone can come in. But I mean, this isn't where people see the videos. No, no one's going to my page. Although you're more than welcome to do so. They're going to the actual product page. So, for example, I have a review of Ali Abdul's book on productivity. So how would some. And I've sold 11 of his books. I don't think that's confidential information, but let me just show you again, this is all consumer stuff that anyone would see. So I don't have a huge following on Amazon, but ali Abdul has 5 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. He launched this book a couple of weeks ago and his book became a New York Times book bestseller. So that means a lot of people are looking for this book. They are reviewing this book. I may have done the digital version only. And by the way, they can change things all the time what they decide to. To highlight. Let me do the hardback version so you, you could Put your picture and you can see right there, there's proof. I actually bought it. So I only do reviews of things that I actually bought and paid for. You don't have to. You could do a relatives or a friends. Okay, so here are videos for the product. So here's a review from Michelle Duprost. But the next review is one of mine and then one after that is one of mine and the one after that is one of mine. So I have three videos of differing lengths. One was a vertical, two were horizontal. Now I'm not wearing a suit and tie and I'm not in a studio here. Where am I? I'm actually on vacation in the Catskills in New York. It's a couple days after Christmas. But the book came out. I did read it, I did like it, I was excited about it and I wanted to sort of test this whole Amazon Influencer thing. So I did the three videos and for a while, the only videos, the first two weeks, the only videos promoting this book were mine. And now we see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Oh. Interestingly now, this woman is a superstar of Amazon Influencer. She has an entire YouTube channel about how to be an Amazon influencer. And I don't have the audio. So she's by all accounts a very successful. She's got thousands of of product reviews on Amazon. She's basically turned it into a career. And you may want to bookmark her. It's called H I T X Reviews. You can search for her, but if you go, if you go to YouTube and just type in Amazon Influencer, you will see her. And I've watched a number of her videos. She really knows a lot of what she's doing. But she's not some, you know, best selling author or a network TV executive, talk show host. She's basically, I don't mean to sound negative anyway, but she's like a real person and she's just doing this and seemingly making a nice career out of it. So I would urge you, don't just look at my videos. Look at any and all of these that you see. Okay? Now what I'm going to have to do is stop sharing. Because what I am going to do, for the purposes of our little demonstration, even though I failed at doing it all in 15 minutes, is I am going to go into my Amazon account and I'm going to show, I'm going to have to tell you exactly what I'm doing to give you a sense of really how simple and clean and relatively easy and fast. It is. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to my page, I'm going to hit a button that says create Content. And I apologize for not showing you this, but Amazon is supposedly very prickly about their terms of service and their terms of service say you're not supposed to show anyone publicly the insides of your page. And Barb, I know you're busy doing other things, but if you do hear me saying anything you think is in violation of Amazon's terms, you know, yell out or send me a message to stop as I don't want to get myself in trouble. So I hit a button that says post Create content. So now my wife sent me the three pictures of, well, she took a total of, of, let's see, we did three products. So she sent me, she should have sent me two pictures for each one. But it looks like we have some duplicates. So I'm going to download the best ones. I see, I just hit download. I see two of those I like. So I'm downloading the emails again. For people who are more sophisticated than I am, you wouldn't need to go through this trouble of downloading and uploading and doing all that. You would just do it all directly from your phone. Unfortunately, I'm a little more or old school, I guess. I'm not going to type on my phone unless it's absolutely necessary. So I'm now on another PC. I have three computer screens in front of me. I am in front of my computer and what I'm doing now is simply downloading the pictures that she sent me. So I'm opening the email and I see, Oh, I hope, I'm hoping I got the vertical ones and the horizontal ones. At least one of each. So I'll do, I will download all of them and then I can make the final judgment as I upload.

That's interesting, the, the horizontal and the vertical because I had all kinds of, I still haven't 100% figured out my, which, which way to use the, the, the cell phones which I use for taking my videos and photographs. So it's good that you know what way is horizontal and what way is vertical.

Part of it is guesswork. Well, I mean I know that holding something like this is vertical and this is horizontal. I'm not really a big techie, that's for sure. But I do know that different people like to watch different ways. If someone is only consuming content from their phone, people are used to holding their phone in this vertical way. So that, that does make it Easier. But also a lot of people at their shopping are looking at, on an iPad, on a desktop, on a compute bigger computer. I know when I'm shopping, most of the time I'm on a desktop or a laptop or an iPad or tablet. So that for me is, is always easier. And so that's the beauty of this is you just give people choices. So I'm doing something a little bit different because I am trying to continue having a conversation and I'm looking at people's comments. So I'm not quite as efficient at this as if I were doing it on my own. But what I am doing is downloading now the nine videos. And so I'm. I'm opening the emails that my wife sent to me because she uploaded them to drive and then I'm opening it and then I'm hitting the download button and it's just going right into my download folder. So they should all be in one simple place. And I'm just doing them in complete chronological order. I can see, you know, if an email is no longer dark black, it means I've already opened it. So that's really the only organization I'm doing. I'm not taking the time to, to label the video file. Now in YouTube, there's certainly a school of thought from some experts that say you actually need to use your same keywords in your file name as you do in your title and your thumbnails and everything else. I have no idea if that does make sense for the Amazon Influencer program. And for now, certainly in the interest of speed, I'm not going to do that. So I'm just downloading them and I'll be uploading them with the same, with the same name, which is just, you know, IMG7009. But I'm continuing to download all of these videos. And again, in my defense, I would be faster at this if I weren't on camera trying to talk to you, seeing who else is popping in. But I can see now that I was perhaps a tad overly optimistic when I suggested that I might be able to do this whole process in 15 minutes. That may have been biting off a little more than I can chew. But I hope that you're willing to forgive me, because I do, I do want to get you excited about it. I see I missed a comment. Barb had written in for Amazon Influencer Program eligibility. Amazon reviews your social media account to determine if you'd be a good fit. It takes into consideration the following the number of followers on Instagram, YouTube or Facebook Amazon does not disclose an exact number of followers. They look at your engagement levels on channels, post count, consistency, location. So Barb was nice enough to post that. My understanding is they also do look at TikTok unless that has changed and Barbara is. Barbara's up on the the rules more than I am. But that is my understanding that they also consider a TikTok account. And there is a school of thought among a lot of Amazon influencers that TikTok is the easiest way to get a thousand followers and to really get going in that game. But double check that before you do it. Okay, so I'm still downloading these videos and what ha. What may have happened is that I got a duplicate. So Instead of downloading nine, I may actually be downloading 18 because I am seeing that little one in parentheses sign a couple of times. So. But I'm almost done with these and I see now I didn't even have to. I hit archive. That's not what I wanted to do. So there's probably a faster way of doing it. But I am opening each one and then hitting the download button, then I'm hitting save and then it's telling me that it happened. Then I back out. I go to the next email, I open it, but it seems like I'm seeing duplicates. So that may be what is taking what is seemingly more time than needed to download just nine. But I have just a couple left. That one. I'm hitting download. And I may need to close some of my pages because it's. My computer appears to be slowing down because I probably have too many pages. Plus it is downloading. So that one is loading. And Karima says it's good to see mistakes in real life. So, yeah, I make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. And Barb writes, yes, Tick Tock is approved. Now there's also select Amazon influencers in Africa. Our. Our friend Brigitte. I should have remembered that. Yeah. So Brigitte is one of the superstars on Amazon Influencer and she is based in South Africa. So my last one, and excuse me for a minute. I am in Florida and I'm not used to wearing a suit and tie. I'm suddenly. I'm just going to be revealing everything for you behind the scenes. I'm walking over to get some tissue because I'm finding myself perspiring a great deal. So if you can bear with me. And I realize the audio is now going to sound muffled because. Because I'm now further away from the mic. So. Okay, great. So we've got that. So I'm hitting save for this. I believe I have just one more. We're going to do that. Believe. This is the last one. Hitting open, hitting download and hitting save. Okay. Yes. Karima says at least you didn't strip off the suit. Oh, now I do. See, now this is interesting. I see makeup smears. So for some reason my color was a little bit off today and so that now tangibly looks awful because I look tangibly tangerines. So I got. If I'm going to wipe off makeup, I've got to be even with it because that, that ended up looking streaky and that looks weird. I don't want to look weird. I want to look non distracting. Okay, so now I'm going to go back to my Amazon page and Barb, again, I'm not showing them anything. I'll show the sort of the finished product. But I want to tell people what I'm doing in part to motivate people so they can see if even a non techie old klutz like TJ can do this. Maybe anyone can do it. So, Barb, I'm not going to show them inside the account, but I'm going inside my account now to actually upload these Amazon influencer pieces of content I just made. So I'm hitting create content. It gives you a choice, post, video or photo. An idea list. And I, I still don't really know if I know what an idea list is. So Barb, you're gonna have to fill me in on that and a live stream. I'm not going live today, but we will be doing that soon. So I'm going to hit video post. That's interesting. I got a. Sorry, something went wrong in our end. I've not had that happen before. I will hit an update. Actually, I'll just back out and I'll try another page. Maybe it's because I already had one page open or I had too many pages open. So I'm going to click down on those and I'm just going to open a new browser and I'm going to go once again to my Amazon page. And I do really appreciate those of you staying with me on this and especially if you're watching it on demand too, because this is not super bowl football and it's not must see tv. But I do think that if you're not quite sure about how this Amazon influencer thing does, it's helpful to see it demystified. So that's. Well, Barb, I've never seen this happen before. When I hit click to create. It says something. Sorry, something went wrong on our end. Please go back and try again or go to Amazon's home page. So Karima says maybe it's Bar protecting you from yourself. Yeah, so. So again, this has never happened before, but this is a part of dealing with any outside technology company. It's. It's their tool. Things can go down. Things can. You know, I really don't think Amazon's going out of business anytime soon. But you can't really control anything that isn't 100%. 100% not your own. I'm just going to try a different browser a minute and see if that makes any difference. That took me to the main Amazon homepage, but I want to go to my own page and I'm going to try to now. It's letting me do it. So. So, Barb, I'm not sure what you want me to say or don't say. If you don't mind posting one other comment. I don't want to overstep, but. But I can't imagine what I'm about to say would bother anyone at Amazon. So I'm going to. I'm just uploading a video and I don't even know which one it is yet. Honey. I called Barb Huddy accidentally. That means we. We talk more. I've read the terms of service a thousand times. I just, I don't. I can't internalize every single thing. I've never seen anything that said. You cannot describe that you're hitting a button that says upload. I just can't imagine how any they could possibly construe that. But it's not. The terms of service do not spell anything out to that level. Unless I'm reading a completely wrong terms of service. But at this point I feel like I've read the terms of service a thousand times. So this, this is another situation that's a little odd. I've hit upload and I'm getting, as happens in any website, happens in YouTube, it's telling me it's having time and it may be the fact that I'm streaming and I'm causing too much extra tension on my bandwidth that something has happened. And now I have something telling me my anti. Antivirus protection has expired. So I've got to get rid of that. That. So let's do this. I do want to be useful to all of you and I'm not afraid to roll up my sleeves and show you the nitty gritty. But I also don't want to waste your time. And I do feel like, you know, every once in a while, you know, you need to restart your computer or something. I can't do that while we are live. Karima says this is very useful. So thank you. And Karima, I would urge you to take a look. You're in Ireland, I believe, so perhaps you're not eligible yet. But do look at what other influencer are doing and you will see a lot of them. They're holding the product, but their face isn't shown. Because if you don't want to get dressed up for it, you don't have to. The main thing they want is to see the actual product and, and you're planning it for the future. That's great. So I don't want you to feel intimidated. Like you've got to get all, you know, makeup and everything. You can just use your voice. And in fact, I've seen a number of people. I don't know if this is following the rules. I've seen a number of people do it where they didn't even speak. They just showed a video of the product and their videos are on and presumably they're able to. To get some traction from that as well. So I'm going to hit. I'm going to try to start over there. I'm going to hit by my create button again. I'm going to hit select. Oh, I know what it was because it was a video. Let me. So it may. It may have just been uploading properly and I was impatient. Probably not the first time that's ever happened. So let me start simple and just upload pictures because pictures are just much smaller. So let's, let's try that. So I'm going to go in. It's really like uploading anything else. I'm going to look at for something that is not a move file, but that is a jpeg. So if it's a JPEG that I did today, I know it's going to be one of the products. Okay, so this is a me holding the Burt's bees. This is a picture of me when I was holding this. And now that I'm looking at the picture, there is a picture of my book in the background, which you have to be very careful. You cannot show an Amazon logo. You're not supposed to show anyone's license plate. But I don't think that that is actually a violation of just showing another product you have. So I've uploaded the picture. I'm now going to. You have to tag the product so it knows what product you're promoting. I'm going to look at my order list because Amazon being well organized, they know everything you've ever bought from Amazon. So I'm just going to type in lip balm. So the beauty of this is I don't have to remember the exact serial number or code or. And it pops right up. So I see the product that I bought, I hit click, I tag the product, it's tagged, I hit done. And then it asks you to write a caption. Now, there's a whole philosophy of the best way of writing captions and one of the philosophies is it doesn't really matter, the picture is going to sell it. So I'm just going to type really the first thing that comes to my head. This flip bomb really gets the job done. I do want to make sure I obviously didn't spend a lot of time on that and this is the sort of thing where you want to spend an extra 30 seconds. Chat GPT would probably do a great job of helping you come up with a title designed to maximize. Yeah, Karima just pointed that out. Chat GPT would be great for something like this, but in the interest of time, I'm not going to bother with that and I'm going to hit submit post. So it says post submitted, thanks and it's going to tell me they'll let me know when it's approved. So it really is that simple. And I could be a lot faster doing this if I were number one, sitting down. I just again take you behind the scenes. I, I bought a new desk that is a standing sitting desk and it goes up and down as I want, but I personally am more effective on, I think when I am sitting and typing. So those are the basics. There are other things I did want to go over with you today for our live time, a number of things in the news. So I'm going to finish this little experiment with these three products and these 15 posts as soon as we finish. So I don't think it'll really take me more than 10 minutes, but I don't want to take your time doing that. So I failed in my experiment to do everything soup to nuts in 15 minutes. But I do think I showed that it's possible to make 15 completely different pieces of monetizable content in 15 minutes. I'm pretty sure I did that within the time frame. Now some other comments have come in. Mosama writes, thanks for your time and effort, teacher. I came here from one of your UDEMY courses. Well, thanks so much for coming. And Karima says same thing. Mo, if you don't mind, type in what course you're in and if you could do me a favor and that is leave a review on the Udemy course because it really helps send the right signals to Udemy. Hey, keep this course, promote it, keep it in. And in order for a review to really help, it can't just be five stars and leave. You need to write a couple of sentences about how you benefited from it. That's the real value of a review because people see it, they can relate to that. So I would recommend if you could take really an extra 10 seconds and write two sentences of why you think I hope a great course and leave that review. It would be very, very much appreciated. There's some other things I, I really wanted to talk to you about today. And we are now closing in on on closing in on two hours here. So I appreciate those of you who are still with me. And if you are watching On Demand later, I appreciate you watching this this much later too. But there have been a number of stories in the news. This is not primarily a news channel here, but I do like to talk about news stories that relate to us as communicators and as presenters. And there have been a number of NS marketers and there have been a number of stories that do relate to that. So I want to take a moment and talk about that. There's been tremendous news coverage lately about so many firings in the news business, mass layoffs, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post. If newspapers are not laying off people, chances are they're actually going out of business. A lot of bad aspects for democracy because of that. But you know, it does mean more opportunities for you and me, those of us who like to communicate but don't want to be, you know, full time reporters down at City Hall. It is an opportunity because people are shifting from reading local news to watching videos on YouTube. Now that's not always good news or the best situation for society, but it is something that is reality. We all have to take that into account. So there's several trends I see that all feed into an overall thesis that, that I and a lot of other people have been advocating for the past few years. So one of them is more and more newspapers and full time professional journalists are losing their jobs. I feel bad for them. It's sad, but it is real. Why are they losing their jobs? Because they're losing jobs. Ad revenue. Why are they losing ad revenue? Because people are not Watching them. They're watching you and me on social media and YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. So we have to be aware of that. I mean, when I was growing up, the, you know, the most prestigious publication you could be on the COVID was Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated in the news this week because almost everybody was fired. Sports Illustrated, that's the pinnacle of sports journalism, or traditionally it was. Now it's, you know, barstool sports. It's people who have developed huge independent followings through their podcast and YouTube and other places. Those are the ones making $85 million. And the people who used to make 85, a hundred thousand dollars as a journalist for Sports Illustrator now making nothing. They're getting fired, sadly. So this has been going on. CBS has fired people recently. Pretty much every network has had to reduce staff. Companies are going out of business. They're shedding traditional jobs. So that's one piece of the zeitgeist I think is important for people to realize. But there's a whole nother story that really grabbed my attention. Macy's, they bill themselves as the largest department store in the world. They recently announced mass layoffs and they're closing five stores. Why is Macy's closing? It's because they're not profitable. Or at least those five stores are not profitable. Why are people not buying as much from Macy's? Because they're buying it on Amazon. They're buying it directly from. From people who create it, either on their websites or through an intermediary like Amazon. The intermediary of creating something and then shipping it to Macy's and then Macy's putting it in front of you to let you see it and buy it isn't needed. Now again, I feel sorry for the good folks at Macy's. And it is a store I like. For 10 years in my life, I lived right across the street from Macy's in midtown Manhattan and had lunch there as recently as three weeks ago when I was there in the city. So I don't wish Macy's any ill will. And I love their. I just realized, full disclosure, they were a client of mine in the past. I did a media training for them once, so I had forgotten about that. I do try to announce to you any conflicts I have of past clients, but that had been like 20 years and I just remembered. So the problem for Macy's is exactly why there's a huge opportunity for you and me. Because the money that used to go in Macy's pocket can now go in the pocket of an Amazon influencer. And it goes, some of it goes into Jeff Bezos pocket, let's not kid ourselves. But it can also go in my pocket. Your pocket? It's going into the other Amazon influencers pockets as well. The world is changing. I have no interest in going and getting a part time job at Macy's. I have no interest in becoming a full time school board reporter for the local Bugle. So as much as I'm sympathetic to the people losing their jobs there, there's not much I can do about that. Audiences are shifting, tastes are shifting and things are moving towards creators who can operate without this huge giant infrastructure of a newspaper with trucks and printing presses. It's moving to people who can sell products without the gigantic infrastructure and the rent of a Macy's department store, which I don't know if they own the building or they still rent it, but it's, it's seven floors. It's hundreds of millions of square feet of prime Manhattan real estate that either way has to cost a fortune. You and I want to do something from our home. To market a product doesn't cost us anything extra. Now I am in a student, this is not my home. But I use this for running my business and everything else. There's no extra incremental cost to me to do this and to be a part of this whole marketing game. Whether I'm promoting a fashion that might be in Macy's or a coffee pot or electronic product or anything else. I don't have the holding cost. I'm not storing it, I'm not shipping it, I'm not doing all of those things. And you can make the case that that's unfair to the people who are losing their jobs. But that is the world we, we live in. It's more opportunity for other people. And I know a lot of you are looking for opportunities to make money, demonstrate your expertise and share your insights with the world. Now earlier today I did a video promoting this book, Atomic Habits. And I do like this book a lot. I meant everything I said about it. But if I were purely motivated by profit, most people, I think Barb would concur with this, would say don't spend time on books. It's not expensive enough, the margins aren't high enough. They don't generate sales the way certain kitchen products might or certain electronics make. The reason I bring this up is there is another reason why, why some of you may want to get into this Amazon influencer game. And it's a part of my motivation too. It's not so much That I think, oh, I'm going to make millions of dollars from my ad. My review of this product. Part of it is I see myself as someone who really cares about personal development. I have about 50 different courses on personal development that have nothing to do with communication skills. So I really have a passion for personal development. I also want to further burnish my reputation as someone who knows about personal development. So part of my goal is to review because I've got 500 or 1,000 books, not just this little stack, but throughout this room, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of personal development books. Am I going to do a review of each one? No. But I certainly want to do a review of the top 50 or 100 because I actually think people will benefit from reading them. I also want to further cement my own reputation in people's minds with being someone who knows about personal development and can speak about it with discernment. Another goal, frankly is I don't mind getting in front of the publishers who do books like this and the publicist do. I want them to start thinking of me and knowing about me, knowing who is this guy. Arouse a little curiosity because I have published books before with major publishers. Wiley, the largest business publisher in the world, I published with small ones, self published. I've published a lot, but I haven't published lately. And I do plan on publishing books again. So part of my agenda here is not just making a quick buck by getting an affiliate commission, it's to build relationships, to build awareness with people in this publishing space. So that may appeal to you as well. One of our students, and she was with us earlier today, Leigh is very interested in mindfulness and yoga and she teaches courses on it. She lectures on it. Well, one way of burnishing her reputation, perhaps building a following is if she reviews top 50 mindfulness and yoga books that she personally likes, respects and already recommends to friends. And does Amazon influence her videos on them? I'm not saying she'll make a lot of money, she might not make any money, but it will be yet more credibility for her, more ways for her to burnish her reputation. So that's something I want you to think about. To me, what's fascinating about this influencer world, because in the past I sort of poo pooed it. To me that was just about sort of vain 19 year old girls taking pictures of themselves trying to look hot. That's what I think of when I think of the term influencer. But when you step back a minute and really look at what is influencer, well, that's what Martha Stewart is. And at one point she was a billionaire because of it. That's really what Tiger woods is. He doesn't make his money 90% of his money from golfing. He makes his money by influencing people to take a look at a Buick or a Nike product. So influencing has been around forever. You could make the case that since the Magna Carta, the British Royal family is really a bunch of influencers. They're not really governing, but they get paid a lot of money to promote British culture and British tourism. They are influencers. So you could certainly make the case that being an influencer is not anything new. It's been around for thousand years. But when you look at a lot of surveys today of people, of young kids, what's the number one career aspiration? It is to be an influence. Either a YouTuber or an influencer. So it is something that is real. Now a lot of statistics show that 97% of so called influencers don't make more than $3 a month. It's, it's a low barrier to entry, but it's a very high barrier to actually be successful to the point where you're making an income. And I don't want to make it sound like, oh, this is so easy. Get rich quick. It's not get rich quick. And I am not successful as an influencer in the sense that I have these giant brand deals and sponsorships or people just say, oh tj, here's a hundred thousand dollars a month to mention us on your show and your YouTube channel. No, that's not what I'm doing. My revenue sources are primarily from online courses and people hiring me for a day for in person training and speeches and things like that, and small amounts of revenue from book residuals and things like that. But I see no reason why I can't have a whole another revenue stream through this influencer vein. Which is why I personally am excited about this Amazon influencer thing. It's a great way of sort of starting trying. It's an entry point and a way of doing it that I perceive as relatively unrisky. It's not like saying, oh, I'm going to start a restaurant. How do you start a restaurant? Well, you go out and you sign a five year lease and you'll buy a whole lot of equipment and then you hire a whole bunch of people and then you spend a bunch of money on ads and before you know it, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a restaurant and you go out of business in two months and you've lost it all. This is infinitely less risky than something like that because it requires little or even no capital. It does require time, but the time you put into it, I would argue you'll get a return on your investment. Maybe not in short term financially, but you get a return on your investment because it's virtually impossible to do this without learning public speaking skills, communication skills, technology skills, marketing skills, copywriting skills. Those are transferable to anything else you do, even if you just go get a job with someone else. Those are all highly valuable skills. Those are skills that will help you if you just want to volunteer more for nonprofits and be a bigger asset in your community. These are skills that will help you if you're just trying to sell junk from your house because you're moving. I mean, I know that firsthand. I had some of you may remember I used a giant 85 inch TV on a rolling rack for many years as a backdrop. I don't use it anymore. And when I rearranged my studios, I got to get rid of, I don't have space. So the very same skills I used for the Amazon Influencer program, I used to sell my TV and rolling stand on Facebook Marketplace. And in fact I sold the TV last weekend. But I was able to, I think I even reused the same video that I made for Amazon. Now before you think, oh, you're selling this because you don't like it and you're trying to tell other people to get it, that's not quite it. I love these Samsung 85 inch TVs so much. I had two of them. I still have one at home. I had one right here in this office. But now the whole trend with YouTube is to have a real office with real depth and not have the fake stuff, the imagery. So I did sell it, but again I was able to and I didn't get rich from it. The TV would only cost 1500 new and the rolling rack was a stand that was very stable. That was about 400 so new three years ago was 1900 bucks. I was able to sell it for 500 bucks, which I consider pretty good for use stuff. I was able to do that in part because the same videos I made that I used to put on Amazon I could put on Facebook Marketplace. Thinking about how to summarize it for Amazon Influencer helped me summarize it for Facebook market. And I say I did it, my wife did it on Facebook. But we used the same videos, the same style. So that's the Other thing I want you to think about is, is at some level, all of us are marketers, all of us are promoting something. I don't say that in a cynical way. If everyone's out for themselves, everyone's just trying to look for a. But I don't mean that you may want to devote your life to marketing the concept of people being more environmentally sensitive and driving less or switching to non carbon fuels. That's an idea you're trying to sell because you think it will help save the planet and humanity. So we're all trying to persuade people of something. We're all marketing something, an idea, a cause, a product or service. So I'm a big believer that we simply grow as human beings and we become happier, more productive, the better we get at these communication skills. So that's really what this whole channel is all about. And I look forward to spending more and more time with you right here. We've had a couple more comments come in. Mo says, I've actually enrolled in 31 courses made by you on YouTube. Well, thank you. Finger, finger red number one. I don't really know what that means, but sounds like you like something that's great. And you're right. You are really an amazing human being. Well, thank you. Appreciate that. And that does bring up one point. I touch on it from time to time. But, you know, it's nice for me to feel good and you saying nice things. One of the reasons people don't put themselves out on YouTube and video is they are afraid of negative comments. And I won't sugarcoat it. If you're out there long enough doing enough things, you will occasionally, occasionally have people say mean, nasty things. And my advice is ignore it or laugh at it. I do recommend, at least initially read it because someone might have three nasty comments, but then have one good comment that's valid. Like if someone had just turned in, tuned in half an hour ago and said, tj, I hate your voice, your plant looks stupid, the lights are the wrong color, and you have streaks all across your forehead. Well, the makeup's weird. The normal human reaction to that would be, this guy's just making cheap shots. Delete, no validity. I would listen to all, all of those and say, I don't buy the first three. But his fourth comment is valid. As you may recall, I actually did have streaks from makeup because I had wiped my face and I didn't do it in a smooth way. So my first challenge to you is always listen to criticism because there may be something in it that will really help you get better. I do. No one likes criticism. I don't enjoy it, but I do try to read all of it. But, I mean, recently I've had some guy fixate on saying I have the worst teeth in the world. His theory is basically, tj, you should be so ashamed of how you look. You should go hide in a dark hole somewhere and never show your face in public because you have the worst, ugliest teeth in the world. And I don't particularly find that useful. So. And then the guy started going on and on. It was clear that he. He is a bit of a disturbed individual. I don't know how else to decline to decide it because he starts getting nasty and obscene. And at some point, I don't really like to ban people, but you can strike certain comments. Here's the thing I found about trolls, that is. Invariably you click to see their profile. They never show their face and they have no followers, they posted no videos. They're always people who lurk in the shadows. And I do believe that Gary Vaynerchuk has the right approach. He says, imagine how awful someone's life has to be with all the opportunities going on in the world, all the good things, all the fun things you could be doing. They actually spend their time lurking about writing nasty comments, trying to make someone feel bad. He says, I have nothing but pity for someone like that. I do think that is the right approach, is they deserve our pity. So, again, as much as I know, thank you so much for your compliments. And you're saying you mean you're number one. Well, thank you. I do appreciate the compliments.

Tj, your turn in Irish. I. I have tried to leave I don't know how many times in the last 10 minutes and you're me hooked. So after two hours, that's a good. That's a good complaint to have.

I appreciate any time you could spend the Irish.

Goodbye. I've been trying to. But just as I'm ready to stop, you come up with another point. That was fantastic about the trolls and Cream.

I would never mention this the first time you joined us, but I've only been to Ireland once. I went to do a media training, a public speaking training in Dublin. Took my. We went for a whole week and I gotta tell you, there was not a cloud in the sky for a week. All my whole life I've been hearing, oh, rainy Ireland, rainy. It was beautiful, blue, sunny skies every day for a week. And we had a blast and went to the, you know, the Guinness factory and all the sites and just had a wonderful time. So I do hope I get invited back. I have a relative who for many, many years lived in Cork. My own ancestors are from Cornwall in. In England, so I guess not that far away. But as far as I know, I don't have any other ties to Ireland, but would certainly love to get invited back sometimes.

Yeah. Well, whenever you're coming, let us know.

Great. Well, thank you.

We'll search it out.

Great. Well, Karima, thanks so much for joining us today. I want to thank everyone for joining us. Remember, and Kareem, if you could do one thing, this video is going to go on on demand. And it's a little disconcerting sometimes to do this. And we have, you know, sometimes hundreds of comments. Then the video goes from live to on demand and there's like, the video starts over again as far as there's 0 likes and 0 comments. So if you could just maybe check back in a couple of minutes, the video should be up. And if you could put a like on it and a comment, get things stimulated would be very.

I'll do. I'll do what I can.

Yeah, great.

If not in the next few minutes, certainly within the next 24.

Great. Thanks so much. And Barb, I know you've been called off in a million directions, so I'm not sure if you could hear me. Bot. Thank you so much for all your help, as always, and coordination and organization and leadership. Thanks so much. I'm tj. This is the TJ Walker Success Channel. I hope you are successful in all you do and in all your communication. Thanks. See you later.