Teleseminar Marketing Funnel Number 3: Free Telesummit With Upsell to Premium Versions

Here is a way to use teleseminars to make money even if you have no list of your own, no reputation and no following. You put in the effort to organize a free multi-day telesummit on a catchy topic of interest to a definable group, such as women over 50, pet-shop owners or aspiring marathon runners. The telesummit consists of multiple one-hour telephone conference-call sessions. In each of those, you interview an expert on a topic related to the overall telesummit theme. Although the basic telesummit has no entry fee, you offer an option that costs enough money to provide a healthy profit for you.

Experts readily agree to participate in such telesummits because they understand that the publicity gets them known to people who hadn’t yet heard of them. The experts also earn commissions on sales from those people who signed up from their list, and they have an opportunity to invite other participants to sign up for their marketing list. You ask the experts to promote the telesummit to their lists, which they generally do in order to receive the commissions and new opt-ins.

Here’s how to plan and run this kind of profitable telesummit.

Step 1: Define the theme for your free multi-day telesummit. Invite 5-20 big-name experts to participate. Each session is a one-hour interview of one big-name expert by you. Create a web page or site containing descriptions of the experts and their sessions, the dates and how to sign up. Also create emails for the experts to send out about the telesummit to their lists.

Step 2: When participants sign up for the telesummit at your web page, give them two options: Sign up for free, which gains them access to all the live sessions, or sign up for $197 (or some other price), which gets them access to all the live sessions plus recordings and transcripts for each session. Sometimes there is a third, more expensive option, which provides additional privileges and goodies related to the telesummit topic.

Step 3: During each live session, you briefly remind participants that they can sign up for the premium option and receive all the recordings and transcripts. In addition, each expert has a giveaway offer that they describe at the end of their interview, which interested listeners receive after signing up for that expert’s list. After the last live session, email again all of those who signed up for the series, describing the highlights of the sessions and inviting them to invest in the recordings and transcripts for their permanent library. A good rule of thumb is that at least 10 percent of participants normally go for the paid upsell.

Should this telesummit consist of a free webinar series instead of free teleseminars? Normally, no. The logistical complications for both you and the presenters increase greatly with webinars, as compared with teleseminars. Remember that people can call into a teleseminar and listen while they are driving, exercising or preparing dinner, but that’s not true for webinars. On the other hand, if your telesummit topic requires visuals, you may be better off with the webinar format.

Source by Marcia Yudkin