The internet is abuzz with them. Interviews with gurus. Words of wisdom from whimsical wonders. Make a million through Teleseminars! So what are they Who thinks them up And how can you make some money with them, too
There are many types of teleseminars. My topic today is an Ask campaign. I learned about the Ask teleseminars from Alex Mandossian. He says that the best marketing genius you can have is your customer. If you want to know what they want, just ask!
The Ask campaign does just that. Say you are a public accountant and you want to acquire more business. So you set up an Ask campaign with the question, What is your biggest question about your 2006 tax returns and you send out emails to all of your clients and prospective clients. The email has a link to your Ask page, and they fill out the question, along with their name and email. Then they are taken to a Thank You page that has some sort of little gift, like a free report on the top ten deductions that people often forget about. If it is something really good, theyll tell their friends about it and some of them will sign up too.
Then all of those questions go into your database. When you have enough questions, you read them to find out what questions keep getting asked over and over again. You pick out 7-12 of them, depending on how long you want the teleseminar to last, and you create your top questions about tax returns.
Now you send out another email to all the people who asked questions (and anyone else you can thing of) and tell them when the teleseminar will be, and what the top questions are. They click on another link to sign up for the teleseminar. In exchange for their name and email address, they get the call-in number and the secret passcode.
With the most common type of Ask teleseminar, the expert (thats you!) gets interviewed by someone who is good at doing teleseminars (like me!) The interviewer asks the same questions that you got from your ask database, and you answer them as thoroughly as you can in the time you have.
The point of this example teleseminar is to get more accounting business, so you want to be knowledgeable and honest. If someone wants to know how to get the best deductions for the house they bought this year, you would go over points and the interest they paid on the house, and what forms they have to fill out. Anyone who was thinking about hiring someone to do taxes for them will know that you really know your stuff, and anyone who bought a house this year and was planning on doing it themselves will have to think about all that paperwork!
It is always a great idea to record your teleseminar. Afterwards, you can send an email to all of your current and prospective clients telling them that if they missed the call or want to hear it again, they can listen to it on your web page. This will bring them back to your website, and get them thinking about what a headache it is to do taxes every year.
This particular form of Ask campaign and teleseminar has many possible uses. You can do several different teleseminars on different but related topics (like real estate taxes, home business taxes, etc.) then create a set of CDs that you can give away as a special gift to your clients, or even sell. You can also have them transcribed and put together a book.
Teleseminars can be a great way to market your business, product, or service. If you have a product that you can sell on line, you can make a great deal for it during the teleseminar and create a feeding frenzy by telling people how many orders you are getting while they are still on the phone. Or you can use a free teleseminar to give your prospects a preview of an in person seminar you will be holding later on. You can even teach a class or sell a content only teleseminar.
Teleseminars are a way to really connect with your customers. People buy from people they know, like, and trust. Giving them a content rich teleseminar lets them get to know you from the comfort of their own home. The Ask campaign will let you find out what your customers greatest needs are for much less than a marketing survey, and you can address those questions directly and immediately.
So consider adding teleseminars to your marketing toolkit.
Tania Baildon is a Personal Coach and Teleseminar Leader. Her coaching specialties are life changes and growth, and small business creation and promotion. One of the most important things Tania brings to her coaching is the ability to break people out of their own thinking habits and brainstorm new possibilities. Coaching:
Tania also does professional teleseminar interviews and teaches tele-classes. She and her husband Michael are The Teleseminar Techs and creators of The Teleseminar Nuts and Bolts series of tele-classes. Teleseminars:
The end of the free ride for email marketing looms on the horizon.
The days of building up or buying a big email list and freely using it to market and sell online are numbered like the dinosaurs heading for an ice age cold snap.
The technical and time costs of dealing with email traffic (primarily driven by rampant illegal spam) will soon break the back of both Internet service providers (ISPs) and online email services.
Major online players like AOL and MSN are currently wrestling with two solutions to the problem, but I personally think the almighty dollar will win out in the end.
The two solutions proposed to stem the tide of commercial spam once and for all revolve around either white listing email senders or charging a toll (typically .25-1 cent per email message) to allow email through.
Currently, ISPs and email providers can either maintain their own white lists, as in the case of AOL, or the can share one.
In the old days, companies could (and still do) subscribe to black lists (like SpamHaus.org) which exclude email senders based on reports of spamming and other factors.
Though the black list method rates the least accurate, its currently the most popular simply because it requires the least effort by companies trying to block spam.
However, as spammers get smarter, black listing has proven an ineffective spam deterrent and ISPs must get proactive if they hope to survive.
However, an inherent weakness in the white list system makes charging for commercial email inevitable.
Since white listing requires effort on the part of the ISP or email provider (they must ultimately pay real people to manage the list), this means additional cost.
Unlike a relatively inexpensive subscription to a black list service which gets implemented automatically by software filters, white listing requires people to do work which carries a real world cost.
Bottom line: most ISPs and email services will not be able to create, maintain or implement a white list for very long without charging.
Yet, consumers tired of the avalanche of spam are demanding effective protection by those they pay for Internet and email access.
Thus, any service hoping to survive long-term must adopt a hybrid of both the white list and toll booth approaches.
This means not only evaluating the legitimacy of every commercial email senders methods, but also charging them for the email they send through a particular service or network. Its inevitable.
Now, the cry that immediately goes up at this point sounds like this, What about the little guys who cant afford to pay the fee or the family newsletters that arent commercial What about them
In a perfect world, their email would go through.
In the real world, their email will get lost even more frequently in the future than it does now in the existing tangle of email filters and inconsistent white and black listing.
The hope of survival and prosperity for the little guy lies squarely in the hands of blogging and RSS feeds.
Since blogging and rss feeds enable consumers to subscribe directly to information using an RSS reader, they completely bypass the need to send email.
This eliminates the middle man of an email provider and puts control over what content gets received squarely in the hands of the consumer.
Though this technology has existed for several years now, awareness by mainstream consumers of what RSS feeds are and how to subscribe to them has been relatively slow.
The biggest contributor to the slow adoption in the mainstream has been the absence of a universally distributed RSS reader on every computer (similar to how Outlook or Outlook Express on every Windows PC helped make email universally understood).
But that should also change shortly as more RSS readers get included in Web browsers and email programs in the near future.
So while the big guys will push their messages to consumers by paying what will surely amount to an ever- increasing toll to get their emails through, the little guys will pull consumers to them with subscriptions to blogs and RSS feeds.
Whether it happens this year, next year, or the year after - make no mistake - the email toll booth is coming for commercial emailers and newsletter publishers.
So, if you depend on sending email for your companys profits, either get ready, plan, and budget for the new tolls, or start making arrangements to distribute your content via blogs and RSS feeds, because the market will shortly force you to make a choice.
Copyright 2006 Jim Edwards
Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and co-author of an amazing program that teaches you how to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, affiliate links, or blogs... without spending a dime on advertising! Click Here>