Teleseminar Overload?

Is it just me, or is everyone getting a flood of "free teleseminar" offers in their inbox nowadays?

Now, don't misunderstand me. I think teleseminars are a powerful and lucrative way to tap a new profit center for just about any business. And even though it seems I get a half dozen of these teleseminar invites a week (and steadily increasing), they all have a few things in common:

• Most have to do with making money. That's not surprising, because I subscribe to a lot of marketing lists.
  
  
• Some pitch their products and services, and some claim to be "pitch-free." Hint: Pitch-free are the best for content, but don't expect to not be solicited. Even if they don't hawk their pitch on the call, you may get a follow-up email with one or more pitches). I don't claim this to be a bad thing. It does tends to add to the inbox clutter, but it may be just the thing you're looking for!
  
  
• They all follow similar business practices. They require you to opt-in, then you'll get the dial-in info. So it's not exactly "free." But a lot of times trading your email address for great content is a no-brainer. Besides, you can always opt-out afterwards.
  
  
• There are always a limited number of lines, and you have to "act now" before they fill up. Well, this is takeaway selling, of course. And it's very effective.
  

Now I'm certainly not knocking these practices. I've used them myself very successfully.

But it occurred to me the other day that lots of folks are leaving money on the table. Let me explain.

While it's true that a lot of online marketers use teleseminars effectively, many offline folks do not, and many businesses with a target market other than marketing don't use them effectively (again, savvy marketers are the exception).

For those of you who don't know what a teleseminar is, it's really just a "value-added" conference call. Except teleseminars can be done as a lecture, where only the hosts talk, and everyone else listens. It can be in a question and answer format. It can be a combination of the two. And then there are moderated sessions, interactive via email or website, where the questions are answered by the hosts. You can do marketing hotseats, joint ventures, whatever you want. It literally can be a virtual seminar, if you want.

In fact, there's so many ways to use teleseminars, I'm not going to cover them all in this post. I'll talk about some other strategies in the future, but for today, I want to talk about two great ways you can use teleseminars to boost your business.

I've been doing them for a good 20 or more years, going back to the days when only large corporations could afford them. Nowadays it's very cheap to do one. In fact, there are several providers that offer these services for free. Just Google "teleseminar" and you'll see what I mean.

Ok, the first thing I'm going to talk about is using a teleseminar to test a market. Let's say you have an idea for an info-product. Or a physical product. Or a service. Whatever it is, you want to see if there's a viable market for your widget.

So what do you do?

You create a squeeze page, also known as an opt-in page to collect email addresses. At this point you want to see if there's a market for what you're selling. So your opt-in page promotes an upcoming free "mini-course" via a phone call (for non-marketing niches, it's usually better to phrase it differently than a teleseminar, which might confuse folks).

And when you get them to opt-in, you ask a few questions. A short survey, if you will. At this point, you are gathering information. You want them to ask you their most pressing questions. Or tell you what it is they want most.

On the call, you deliver pure content. By the way, always record it. You never know when it may make a good info-product on its own.

Now you've built up a modest list. Rinse, and repeat.

After several times of doing this free teleseminar, you should have 2 things:

1) You have a list of hot prospects.

2) You have info directly from your list on what they want.

Now you can decide whether to enter this market and create an info-product for this list.

You see, it's almost always more time-efficient to get the market first, then create the product. Don't waste time spending a year creating and polishing your product, only to find that your market is weak. A little late now, right? Don't fall into that trap.

Ok, the second way to make money (and this is a beauty) is to sell a full-blown course via teleseminar. Have one freebie up front, then charge for a six-week course, all conducted via teleseminar. That way you get the money up front, before you even create the product. You can get experts in your niche to participate and pay them a percentage.

So you'll make money up front, then do the "course."

But it gets even better...

Now you record each teleseminar with people who have paid to attend. Now you can package it together and sell the course as a collection of CDs, include it as a package, you get the idea.

So you were paid upfront to do the course to begin with, then you make even more by selling the recordings (hint: you can charge much more offline for the physical product, like John Reese, Michel Fortin, David Garfinkel, Jeff Walker, and countless others have done).

A few resources, and then I'll close:

KDPress is a printing company that will create short-run books, manuals, etc. Lulu is another, and they do CDs and DVDs also.

DigitalCDR.com also replicates CDs and DVDs.

Disk.com is a fulfillment company that will handle all of your shipping, refunds, etc. John Reese told me about that one, which he uses now that iFulfill went out of business.

You can literally set this up as an automatic "earn money while you sleep" enterprise, much like you can with strictly online fulfillment. The difference is in perceived value: you can usually charge much more for physical products than downloads.

I'll have much more to discuss on the subject of teleseminars coming up. I'm in the middle of working out some of my own joint ventures using teleseminars at the moment. If you have a story to share or want to give your own feedback or success story, I welcome it! Please feel free to add your own comments.