If you haven’t started hosting teleseminars yet, you’ve no doubt heard the buzz about how they can be great tools for building or expanding your business. Specifically, teleseminars can help you accomplish the following:
- Position yourself as a leader or expert in your field.
- Use teleseminars as a sales tool by giving away lots of free information on a topic and then presenting a special offer for a product that will give them either more important info, or step-by-step instructions, or do-it-for-them tools, etc.
- Build a library of top quality information that can later be packaged into a course. For example, a 5-CD Set on Time Management consists simply of you interviewing 5 different time management experts (do a teleseminar with each one of them) and then packaging them up together.
- Offer your teleseminars as a premium product/service on your monthly membership site.
- Share cutting-edge or crucial information with your list or clients – increases your reputation, their trust in you and your integrity.
Obviously, a whole article could be written about each of these points and in Listen To Your Freedom I have a number of Modules that cover all the aspects of not only doing teleseminars, but using them to build your email list, and then packaging them up as quality content you can charge money for – where you only have to do the call once, but you make ongoing revenue from turning it into a digital product.
But for now, let me just give you the basics so you can get started – and don’t forget to use the list above to brainstorm how you can use teleseminars to position yourself as an expert in your field, or to create products you can sell on your site.
Setting Up Your Teleseminars
There are plenty of free teleconferencing services available. Just do a Google search on “free teleconference” to pull up a whole list of them. If you are really broke, or, you do not charge for your teleseminars, then this may be a good way to go.
However, if your reputation for excellence is important to you, or if you are charging participants, then you definitely should NOT use a free teleconferencing service. These free bureaus often use internet-based lines and the quality can be really poor. You are almost guaranteed to have glitches on these calls at some point – hey, they’re free, what do you expect? 
So, if you want to provide consistent, good quality calls, then use a good quality teleconferencing bureau that, yes, you have to pay for. However, as I found out, just because you pay for the service doesn’t mean they will provide good glitch-free service either! Since I’ve been in business online since 1995, I have contacts with a number of the “big players” in internet marketing. So I tried a bureau that well-known guru Dan Kennedy / Bill Glazer uses for their calls – and I know they have hundreds of people on a call, so I figured the bureau would be a good one, right? Wrong. Not only did I have some bad calls using them, but when I talked to the boss of the company after a particularly bad one (a total of 20 minutes of glitches and I have the recording to prove it!) His only solution was to not charge me for the call! This is not a good sign. I don’t want free teleconferencing, I want GOOD, reliable, consistent service.
Anyway, without going into all the different bureaus I have tried, I strongly suggest you use this teleseminar web host so that you can provide your customers with the following benefits:
1. People can listen in via webcast (they can listen from a webpage), rather than having to dial in and pay long distance charges, if they prefer.
2. Participants (or whoever you give the link to) can access a replay of the call immediately following it and download the mp3 file if they wish (and if you set it up to allow downloads). Note: Recording each teleseminar is automatically included, so you don’t have to pay the teleconferencing bureau extra to do this for you.
3. Participants can submit questions via the Question Box online on the webpage, before or during the call – so you can get lots of feedback and interaction with your listeners. People are often too shy to speak up during a teleseminar and they much prefer being able to ask questions this way.
4. You can send all your customers (or list) to an “Event Page” that gives them all the info they need for each teleseminar. The great thing is, this is a template page that is pre-formatted, so you just enter your specific info for each call. No need to get your web programmer to design a special web page for each event! You can customize the look and feel of the page though, to reflect your style or colors.
Where can you get all this? It’s provided by this company Instant Teleseminar, which also offers a free line for up to 20 callers – so if you’re just interviewing people and making the calls available later to your list, then you don’t even need to pay extra for a teleconferencing bureau that can handle 200+ callers at a time.
Now here’s another insider tip for you – as someone who’s done many teleseminars since 2005: Most people do not like to dial in to a live teleseminar or talk on a live call! You can test this for your particular market, but I have found that most people prefer to listen in via the webpage (webcast) and submit their questions using the Question Box on the webpage. In rare cases where a back-and-forth discussion is needed, I just ask that person to call in. But most people are too shy to ask a question in front of unknown hundreds and they’re also nervous about using the technology. The webcast makes it easy for them to participate.
Here’s the other thing: Most people will not join in for the live call, because their lives are just too busy! Or unforeseen things come up and they end up missing the call. This is another reason why offering the webcast option is a great idea. People can submit their questions ahead of time – and make sure you educate your people to let them know this – and they can replay the call later, or download it to listen to it later on their iPod.
Take some time now to brainstorm some topics that interest you, or some people you would love to interview. It may also be really valuable to your customers/site visitors to have someone else interview YOU and make that audio available as a free download on your site.
You can also use Instant Teleseminar to record podcasts – and then start your own podcast show on iTunes. Or to create your own Internet radio show. If you love talking with people, or you prefer to create audios, rather than written books or articles, then getting fluent with teleseminars can give your business or brand a huge boost; because when something is easy for you, or you enjoy it, you will automatically create more good stuff with it!
Okay, now you’ve got everything set up to deliver great quality teleseminars to your clients, that are easy for you to set-up and administrate!
Next, use my troubleshooting checklist to make sure your calls go smoothly, without any technical glitches.
* * *
In the Listen To Your Freedom program, we are all about hope and belief in yourself; combined with the tools and roadmap you need to make your online business successful – and create the life of freedom you first envisioned for yourself. Even if you already have a business or a website, if it’s not making you the kind of money you want, it’s because there’s a piece missing, or some crucial elements need to be tweaked. Click Here for all the program details…
About Jini
Speak Your Mind