Get Partners Involved
Strategic partners can be a great place to go to acquire attendees. An accountant might go to a law firm, or several law firms, and offer to conduct a free teleseminar for their clients. A construction attorney could go to a construction related trade group and offer to conduct a free teleseminar for their members.
Invite a potential referral partner to be a guest on your teleseminar and you can create a powerful promoter for your business.
Collect sign-ups
When you promote your teleseminar it’s best to require your attendees to sign-up. This way you have the data for future sessions and you can contact the attendee with reminders and follow-ups.
Encourage tell-a-friend
As you begin to promote your teleseminar make it easy for prospects to tell others about your session. Add a script to you web sign-up page and automate this process or use technology from your webinar tool that automates this.
Remind
Make sure that you use an autoresponder to automatically send a sign-up confirmation and “day of event” reminders with the conference call-in information and access codes. Most webinar technology handles this for you.
Invite participation
One tactic that works very well and will help you when it comes time to create the content for your teleseminar is to encourage your attendees to ask a question about the topic prior to the event. You can do this in your confirmation email.
Don’t sell
When you present a teleseminar you must present good content. If you simply treat it as a sales pitch your attendees will be turned off. Even free sessions must be valuable if you expect people to take the time to listen.
Have a call to action
Even though you shouldn’t sell throughout your presentation, you should have an offer at the end. This can take the form of some other, more advanced, free information or evaluation or simply a special deal to act today. Don’t end without a next step.
Get testimonials
One tactic that you may also wish to add is a call for testimonials. This can be very important as you start a teleseminar series and help build credible proof for future events. One thing you might do is offer a written transcript of the call or live session to anyone who sends in their (glowing) feedback.
Archive the content
One of the biggest benefits of holding events is that they present a great platform for creating permanent content. You should record each session and create a method to archive and promote this content on an ongoing basis. You might want to consider turning the content into a podcast or create an entire CD collection. Transcribing your audio sessions through a service such as CastingWords - is another way to extend the content.
Web Conferencing Services - I have use all of the following services and they all have their strengths.
John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award-winning publisher and author of “Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide"
