If you have a keen following for your blog, newsletter, tweets or forum posts, here's a way to channel that following into lucrative teaching and coaching services. It involves the use of multiple teleseminars, which are free or paid topical conference calls, as well as the leveraging of other people's expertise and followers.
You might well wonder why experts agree to participate in such teleseminars without getting paid for their presentations. The answer is that experts know that a well-promoted and well-executed telesummit exposes them in depth to people who have not heard of them yet, who then can opt in to their marketing list, buy their books and other products and become theirs new avid followers.
Here are the steps to follow for this teleseminar marketing model.
Step 1: Set up and moderate a free teleseminar series, or telesummit, with 6-12 relatively well-known experts related to a theme on which you work. Usually the telesummit sessions take place within a concentrated one-week or two-week time span. Each session consists of a one-hour interview where you ask questions of one of the well-known experts.
You'll need a web site or web page that pitches your telesummit theme and provides photos and bios of the presenters and descriptions of their sessions. The well-known experts are expected to announce the free series to their lists, and you make that as easy as possible for them by providing them with email messages that they can quickly customize and send out to their followers.
Your experts receive agreements on any upsell sales from those who sign up through their link. They also get the opportunity to make a brief sales pitch at the end of their interview.
Encourage attendance at the free telesummit sessions by sending reminder emails prior to each session. You may want to provide links to the records for these sessions for those who missed one or more of the calls.
Step 2: As the telesummit draws to a close, pitch all the teleseminar series participants on a paid class with you that related to the telesummit theme but delves into one topic area in more depth. If all has gone as planned, you have a list of implied and motivated participants, both from your own list and those of the experts who spoke in the telesummit sessions. Those on this list know you and trust you because you adjusted all the expert interviews. Send repeated pitches for the paid class to the telesummit participants until the class fills.
Step 3: When people sign up for the paid class, they are also pitched on expensive private coaching with you on the same topic. Be sure to limit the number of private coaching slots, so this comes across as rare and valuable opportunity for in-depth learning and personal development. After the paid class ends, send additional pitches for the private coaching option.
Someone I observed repeated using this marketing funnel charged $ 197 for a six-session paid telecourse following the free telesummit and $ 1997 for the private coaching upsell. It was very profitable for her and it could well be for you, too!