Archive for Teleclasses & Seminars – Page 7

Writing Survey Questions: 3 Things to Ask

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You need to survey your readers to find out what they want, what they need, and what their biggest challenges are. This is crucial information you need to know before promoting any event or teleseminar or informational product.

When we promoted our Law of Action 2.0 mentoring program, we used a survey to help us define what people wanted to learn the most when it comes to marketing their business online. We wanted to keep the survey short so people didn’t have to spend time filling out irrelevant information. We included 3 items:

  1. One broad question with 10 choices where they were asked to rate degree of severity on a scale
  2. One open ended question where they could write in anything they chose
  3. One demographic question to define the number of years using Internet marketing

Writing survey questions can be tricky. There’s a reason most graduate schools require you to take a year of statistics. Unless you understand the pitfalls of surveys, you risk getting answers that tell you nothing. Keep it simple and make your questions as clear and neutral as possible.

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Is Your Blog Working for You? How Can You Tell?

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One of the mysteries of the universe may be measuring the exact return on investment for your business blog. You can spend a lot of time writing, tweaking, doing outreach in the Blogosphere, and still wonder what it all means.

Sure, you’ve got traffic stats. But what do they all mean? If you’re not using a blog to generate ad revenues, then sales are indirect. Indirect is hard to measure with any certainty.

The most important questions to ask are these:

  • “Does my blog do a good job for getting my business found online?”
  • "When people find my blog online, do they stay to read and do they subscribe to come back?”
  • "Will readers grow to know, like and trust me from reading my posts?”
  • “Does my blog make it easy for people to interact with me and use my services?”

Denise and I have invited Chris Baggott, an expert in measuring and tracking blog success for an interview. Won’t you join us? It’s free but you’ll need to register to get the call in number.

Get the Results You Want: How to track, measure and adjust your blog

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Video Content Marketing: Learn how to create video

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How to Use Videos to Boost Your Business
A 2-part teletraining with our colleague Leesa Barnes
July 23-24, 2008, 8 p.m. Eastern Time

Use VIP coupon VID723 to pay only $20 for the program

If you want to learn how to create videos for your business without blowing your budget, then check out Leesa Barnes’ program now. She’s got a lot of knowledge when it comes to creating awesome video on a budget.

I’ve sign up for this to learn more about how to save time and energy with video.

10 Steps to Writing Sales Copy for a Free Telecall

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When staging a major online teleseminar program, quite often we use a free preview telecall to generate interest. We make the subject of this call compelling in order to draw in as many people as possible to the free call. (Recently we presented The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing that Can Derail Your Business – And How to Avoid Costly Mistakes.)

The free preview call is not a marketing call, although we do warn them we will tell them about the project we have coming up. Nobody wants to be on a telecall for an hour to hear you market a program.

But people do want to learn how to save time, money and energy. So we deliver plenty of free information that people can use right away in their business. Then we tell them if they need or want to know more how they can access more with the paid teleseminar.

Even when a call is free, you still have to write marketing materials and promote it. In today’s busy world, people are cautious about signing up for
even free things, because they’re afraid of too many emails.

So you must write landing page sales copy that’s persuasive and compelling to get people to register for the free preview call.

Writing this sales copy is similar to the one for the paid project, but a little different. It’s much shorter for one thing. Here are the steps we took to write sales copy for this free preview call:

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Branding & Blogging: Which Comes First?

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Which comes first: a brand or a blog? And, is social media effective at reaching a corporate audience if that’s who your intended clients are?

There’s a heated debate about these questions on some popular business blogs and you’d do well to read up on these posts.

Before embarking on a marketing plan that includes blogging for your business, you need to be aware that there’s still one big-time consultant who isn’t convinced blogging and online social networking are worth it.

Alan Weiss is a self-proclaimed contrarian, and he says, "Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand… a blog follows a brand, not the other way around."

To which a whole bunch of famous bloggers left comments to dispute
Weiss. It got a little nasty and names were thrown around. Read our
complete article on Build a Better Blog along with the others
referenced in these posts: 

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8 Writing Steps Yield $18,000 in a Month

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What are the writing tasks involved in order to promote a major teleseminar program on the Internet? Obviously, you have to write a sales or landing page. But that’s only one part of it. There’s so much more.

Recently Denise and I along with colleague Kathleen Gage promoted a 4-week teleseminar called The Law of Action 2.0: Attract Clients and Build a Money-Making Business on the ‘Net. We started by promoting a free teleseminar called The 5 Traps of Internet Marketing. We got about 1,000 people to register for the call.

From that, we promoted the paid program, registering 94 participants and netted $18,000. The program is delivered in four 90-minute sessions and includes a private Facebook group, learning guides and many resources.

But it would be a gross exaggeration to say we’re earning $3,000/hour with the 6 hour program, although some Internet marketers would certainly use that calculation as bragging rights.

The truth is we spent considerable time writing the promotional materials and distributing our content in various forms all over the Internet long before the free program on June 24.

Denise is outlining all the promotional steps we did over on BizTips Blog this week. As a companion piece, I’m writing on this blog a series of posts to show you every piece of content marketing that was involved in the success of this program.

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Repeat the Benefits: Create a Placebo Effect

"Should I reinforce the benefits of my product on the thank you page?" One of our clients asked this question while we were reviewing his autoresponders and online content.

Pills
Of course. While this may seem obvious and common sense, many online business professionals forget that all content, even a simple thank you page or a thank you autoresponder, is an opportunity for marketing with content. But it’s more than just content marketing good sense.

There’s a psychological benefit. You create a placebo effect.

Scientists have proven that some pills can work to create a desired result based on the expectations of the patient. Sometimes when a medication is replaced with a sugar pill, the patient will still get the desired benefits, simply because the expectations are strong and somehow the body responds in the desired direction.

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Relevant Content: Search Engine Bread Crumbs

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On our 5 Traps of Internet Marketing teleclass yesterday, almost 1000 people registered and we got some interesting questions. Here’s one:

"What is the most important thing to do to get people to find your site when you cannot afford to buy placement on search engines?"

Getting found once you’ve got a site (website or blog) is what Denise and I call The Great Internet Challenge. We even wrote a white paper on it (if you want the long answer to this question, www.onlinemarketingchallenge.com

Short answer: Write relevant content. Then write more content. Then publish even more content on other sites such as article directories, press release sites, white papers, newsletters archived on your site, etc.

Each time you write content about your key topics, you are seeding the Internet with keywords. Like bread crumbs that lead back to the gingerbread cottage, those keywords will help readers find you.

Search engine optimization experts charge you an arm and a leg and then still ask you to do the same thing as I’m telling you here: write relevant content.

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3 Blog Squad Teleclasses this week

Internetcall
Monday, June 23,
1:00 p.m. Eastern Time (10:00 a.m. Pacific)

How to Get the Best Out of Your Blog: A 4-Point System to Get Found, Get Known and Get Clients
Part 1 of a 4-Part Teleseminar series hosted by Adam Urbanski on how to use social networking tools to get more business.

Info and registration

Tuesday, June 24, 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time (3:00 p.m. Pacific)

Discover the 5 Internet Marketing Traps that Can Derail Your Business
with The Blog Squad and Kathleen Gage The Street Smarts Marketer

Info and registration

Thursday, June 26 (Denise’s birthday!), 7:00 p.m. Eastern (4:00 p.m. Pacific)

Blogging for dollars: Can you really make 6-figures?
Interview with Author and Problogger Darren Rowse

Info and registration

Again, there is no charge for any of these programs. All are
designed to accelerate your business success. Hope you’ll join us for
one or all these terrific programs next week.

Ask, Ask, Ask: Using Surveys for Content Marketing

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We recently asked a thousand readers what their biggest problems are when it comes to Internet Marketing, using SurveyMonkey.com. This a great way to get content ideas, stay in touch with what readers want, and develop programs and info products that sell.

How can you create content that markets your business without knowing what readers want?

You can’t know what your targeted audience’s pain points are unless you ask. Even if the results aren’t what social scientists would validate as statistically reliable data, you can get a ton of comments that can seed blog posts and articles.

Here’s what one person said they wanted to learn:

"How best to use my writing skills to attract quality folks who will convert to customers. I write articles, post to my blog, have Squidoo lenses and I’m on MySpace and Facebook. Still, there is a gap. I know that relationship building takes time and patience, but I need to see financial results from these activities."

From this comment you can discern several concerns:

  • Time is certainly a factor
  • Knowing which marketing tools to favor
  • Return on investment of time
  • Financial results

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