In Start Your Own Information Marketing Business, the staff at Entrepreneur Bookstore and writer Robert Skrob explain how to start and run a successful information marketing business. In this edited excerpt, the authors explain the benefits of using teleseminars to start your new information marketing business quickly.
The single fastest way to launch your new info-marketing business is by hosting your own teleseminar series. A teleseminar consists of a phone call in which you or perhaps you and a guest talk into a phone and your audience is able to listen in on the conversation by dialing in. By putting four to six of these teleseminars together, you create a teleseminar series.
Here's why teleseminars are so powerful. First, your initial marketing investment can be low. You create a simple flier to promote your teleseminar series, and you circulate it to your contacts and any other lists you may have. The low costs of this marketing allows you to price your teleseminar series inexpensively, perhaps even for only $99 per registration. Even if you get only 10 to 20 registrants at $99, you're making money immediately. Just 15 customers at $99 is $1,485.
The best part of your teleseminar series is the fact that you're recording it. Thus, when it's complete, you can turn it into a product that you can sell many times. If your teleseminar comprises five weekly one-hour modules, the recordings become a five-CD home study course.
Selling your teleseminar with a low $99 price allows you to maximize registrations and increase the opportunity to generate positive testimonials. When you add testimonials to the product marketing, you can price your home study program for $495 or even $995. So, through your teleseminar, your 15 registrants will have paid you a total of $1,485 to create a product you'll be able to sell for many years at a price of $495 or more.
The other benefit of teleseminars is they're scheduled in advance and you've made a commitment to deliver them. It's not too much for you to get done on a weekly basis. And within a few weeks, your information product is created. So it's a great way to pace yourself and get your product created. It's not so much work that you're overwhelmed, and it's not so slow that your product never gets created.
Let's review the benefits of using a teleseminar series to launch your business. First, it's inexpensive to create. Next, it motivates you to take action because the clock is ticking. You've booked it on the calendar. You've got people coming to your teleseminar, so you need to be there with content. When you finish your series, you have a product you can sell for many years. Creating a teleseminar series immediately launches your business, so you go from zero to getting started very quickly.
This is the beauty of a teleseminar series. Because you book it on a calendar, all of a sudden it gets done. You've made that commitment to yourself and to your customers that you're going to create the series. Everything moves faster because you're facing a deadline.
Now, there is a downside to using a teleseminar series to launch your new information marketing business. Teleseminars don't support a very high price. Just like a book, it doesn't matter how great your teleseminar is, you can't charge too much. For instance, you could write a book on the cheapest, most effective ways to market an online business. It could be 350-some pages long, with a wealth of terrific information in it. But it doesn't matter how good that book is. The public perceives the price can be only $20 to $25. Thus the publisher puts a price of $22.95 on it, which becomes $15 or so on Amazon.
The format of a book supports a price of only $20 to $25 max. It's the same with teleseminars. While they're a great way to launch your information marketing business, the format forces you to charge a lower price than you could if you delivered the same content in a seminar or other type of packaging.
While teleseminars don't support as high pricing as other product packaging, it's still a great way to launch your information marketing business because it makes you be committed to an eager audience of customers on a reasonable schedule for product creation. Thus, you create your product on schedule, and you get your business launched more quickly than with any other technique.