Scott Colby on Fitness Marketing with Teleseminars

I am here with Scott Colby.  Scott, who are you and what do you do?
 

Hi Chris, thanks for having me.  I am fitness professional here in Dallas, Texas.  I primarily started off doing private training, transitioned over to doing private boot camps, which is something I enjoy doing and is more financially rewarding.  One of the good things about transitioning from private training to running boot camps, you can make a lot more per hour, so you can actually work less hours on the training side of things and spend more time doing business related things for your company.

Recently I’ve been able to free up a lot more time to work on my business.  One of the things I’ve started doing more and more of are tele-seminars  and I know we’re going to talk a little bit about that and how you can make money and grow your lists using the phone.

What is a teleseminar?

A tele-seminar is a seminar.  A seminar is where somebody teaches a group of people, and tele means telephone, so tele-seminar, the way I look at it is teaching people over the phone.  Really, they are becoming more and more popular these days as a means to communicate a message.  Many tele-seminars can have upwards of a thousand people on the line listening in and learning from an instructor or learning from one person interviewing the other.  There are a lot of different ways to structure a tele-seminar, but it’s just a way to learn over the phone.

How can teleseminars help build my business?

Well, like I alluded to, there are different ways you can use tele-seminars.  You can use them to build your list, I’ll tell you a little bit more detail about that, you can use tele-seminars to joint venture with somebody.  If you do a good job, they might want to joint venture with you on another project.  You can use tele-seminars to make money, to promote a service, to promote a product, there is really an unlimited number of ways that you can use tele-seminars to help grow your business. 

They way that I’ve used tele-seminars to help me in my fitness business — I first started out using tele-seminars — I think the first tele-seminar I gave was me and another fitness professional and we gave a tele-seminar on how to start up and run a boot camp.  We did it for free.  Tele-seminars you can do for free or you can charge money.  We did it for free because we wanted to build up our name and our expertise as the go-to guys, the go-to trainers for fitness professionals who are looking to start up a boot camp business.  We set up a webpage where people — if they wanted to listen, all our secrets — we were going to give away for free but in order for them to listen in on the tele-seminar they had to — we set up a web page where they had to opt in, in other words, they had to leave their name and email address in order to get access to this tele-seminar.  What that did for us, is it help build our lists, but it was a very niched list.  Everybody listening in on the tele-seminar was somebody, a trainer, who was interested in starting up a boot camp business so it was a highly niched list.  The secondary or follow-up reason to do that now, once we create all of our boot camp products, we can just email the people that signed up for the tele-seminar because we know already they’re interested in running boot camps.  Let’s say we create a coaching program for people who want to start boot camps, well, the first people we are going to tell about it or promote to are the people that were on this free tele-seminar.  That’s one way you can use tele-seminars to build your list and to establish yourself as an expert in an area. 

Another way that I’ve used tele-seminars is to actually make money.  I am currently involved in what we call a twelve-week tele-seminar series and the way I ran this is, I wanted to bring together twelve of the worlds top health and fitness experts to come on.  Once a week were going to do a tele-seminar.  I was going to interview a different guest each week for twelve weeks.  Well, if you’re somebody who is not that well established or known in your field, worldwide, it may be hard to make a lot of money and then charge for a tele-seminar, to get a lot of people to buy it.  The way we set it up, this tele-seminar, this twelve weeks was free for anybody to sign up for and – if you make it free, you’re going to get more people to sign up, so you’re going to build your list a lot better, and then we had a back end, or an up sale.  So when people signed up for their free tele-seminar series, they were given an offer to upgrade to purchase the MP3 recordings and the transcripts of all twelve calls in case they couldn’t make a call or if they just wanted to have access to the call forever and be able to download it to their Ipod or to be able to write out the transcripts.  So, we actually had about 340 people upgrade to that one time offer, so we made thousands of dollars doing it that way.  It’s very interesting, it’s a free tele-seminar serious, but with this one time offer, we made thousands of dollars on the special upgrade.

How much did you charge for the upgrade?

We charged $97.00 and honestly, I didn’t really do any research, I just thought it was a fair price.  It actually, the material is so valuable, to think of twelve of the best experts in the world in the fitness industry sharing one hour of their information, their top secrets.  So they are getting twelve hours worth of audio recordings and transcripts.  The value in there, when we wrote our sales page we really made it so that the consumer was aware of the value they were getting and that all they had to do was to pay a mere $97.00 to get access to that.

The other way, if you’re going to do something like that, you want to get these experts.  If you really want to build your list and grow it quickly, you want to get these experts to agree to mail out to their lists and promote the twelve-week tele-seminar series for you.  Let’s say you have twelve guests, and lets say they, on average have 10,000 people on their list or something like that, 10,000 to 20,000, because again, these are twelve of the best people so their lists are probably going to be fairly high.  When they promote to their lists, everybody is going to be coming to your website to opt in for this free tele-seminar series, so in this particular case, in one week I grew my list by about 9,000.  Of course when you ask these joint venture partners to do you a favor like be a guest and to mail out to their lists, you really want to hit home and hit real hard what’s in it for them.  You want to do that first before you say exactly how it’s going to benefit you, you want to tell them how it’s going to benefit them first. 

A few things on how they’re going to benefit, or how they’re going to make money is; if they promote to their lists and somebody buys a special upgrade, they’re going to get an affiliate commission.  You want to set your joint venture partners up as affiliate partners that way you can track, by who buys these special upgrades, who was the guest speaker that referred that particular person and you pay half of the commission to them.  It doesn’t have to be half, but it seems like a fair split.  So anybody who purchased an upgrade for $97.00, half of that was going to the joint venture partner and half of that was going to me.  So that is how the joint venture partner can make money right off the bat, before this twelve weeks even starts.

Then, on the actual call itself, we gave great content, but towards about the last fifteen minutes of the call or so, we usually started talking a little bit about a product or service that the guest speaker that tied in real well with the content they were giving.  And just made an offer there if anybody was interested in finding out about the product that they were talking about and we would set up a website for that.  So, the guest speaker can make money two ways, they make money on the front end before even the twelve-week tele-seminar series starts, and then they make money on the actual call itself, by promoting one of their products by the end of the call.

We always made sure that each call was filled with great content before we went into any of our pitches for that particular guest’s product or service.  Then also, it’s a good idea to give the guest speaker a copy of the audio MP3 after the fact, just so they can do anything they want with that.  That’s just another added feature or added benefit for the guest speaker.

How much does it cost to run a tele-seminar?

You can actually run a tele-seminar for free, which is the amazing thing.  There are a lot of free services out there.  I’ll give you a couple; www.freeconferencecall.com ; www.nocostconferencing.com, that one you can actually get 400 guests on the call for free which is pretty amazing.  On freeconferencecall.com, I believe you can only get 99 on there for free.  And then the one I like a lot is called Live Office, www.liveoffice.com.  And on those you can get at least 250 on there for free and they have another number which they can’t guarantee you how many you will be allowed to have because it depends on how many people are conducting tele-seminars at one time, but it’s at leas 250 and maybe more.

There are other services where you have to pay.  If you were looking to have a tele-seminar with a thousand people on the line or something like that, then there are services you can pay for to do that.  I think Voicetext.com; I think that’s one highly regarded service of that.

What are the various types of teleseminars?

Various types of teleseminars are — there are actually a lot of types.  I’ve heard of them doing like a book tour.  If you’re an author and you have a book that you’ve written, you know a lot of people do in person a book tour where they’re going from city to city and signing books and that takes a lot of effort.  I know some people nowadays are actually holding tele-seminars to promote their books, which is a great way because you don’t have to travel anywhere.  You are just at home or wherever you are and you can get people from all over the world to listen to you talk a little bit about your book and promote your book.  So that’s a type there.

Another type that I’ve seen is — I did a coaching program over the phone, I guess that’s one type too, a coaching program.  I ran a coaching program on how to set up a boot camp business and it was a four-week program and each week we would have two tele-seminars.  So, it can be a coaching service. 

Another type of tele-seminar is what we call a preview call.  I don’t know if that’s the exact name for it, but lets say you’re about to launch your coaching program, you need to get the word out there that you’re an expert and give away a few of your secrets for free.  A lot of people have these preview calls where they’re giving a lot of good content, not all their secrets, but good content for free.  And then you let the people on the call be aware of, “By the way, if you want to know all the secrets and exact blueprints about how I did this, I am starting a coaching program and you can sign up for it here”.  So, a lot of people do what they call a preview call and it’s kind of a prelude to a service that they may be offering down the road.

Just to promote a product, like I was saying before, you can do it just to promote a product.  You can do a six week or twelve week intensive like I did, where I joint ventured with a bunch of experts.  Another cool thing about that, when you do something where you’re joint venturing with all these other experts, you’re now seen as an expert too.  I’ve aligned myself with twelve of the best people in the world and now anybody on those calls have aligned my name with those experts, so I’m perceived as an expert as well now.

You’ve got a round table discussion.  You can really have a debate, bring two people together with opposing views and have them debate against each other.  Really the skies the limit as far as the types of tele-seminars that you have.  Usually you want, at the end of each call, you want to have some sort of reason that you’re putting on the tele-seminar.  You really want to have a call to action at the end of each call.  Whether you’re leading somebody to buy a service or a product, or you’re leading them to a web page where they can download a free report so you’re capturing their contact information to build your list, or if you’re leading them to an affiliate web page where you’re going to make affiliate commissions.  You’re really going to want to have some sort of reasoning to be doing a tele-seminar.

The other thing I want to note though, Chris, is it’s a good idea to do some practice ones first before you get up the nerve to have five hundred guests on the line or five hundred listeners I mean, because tele-seminars, they’re not for everybody.  The first one that I did, I actually had — it was me and another fitness professional co-hosting it and we actually talked in detail before hand about what we were going to say, how we were going to signal when one person was done talking and the next one should chime in and things like that.  So, your first one may not be your best one, but you’ll learn as you go along how to put these all together and they’ll start to become second nature.

Teleseminars are also great because they’re very personal, so what would be better?  Reading a long sales copy web page and trying to sell a product at the end and the customer doesn’t even know you, or having a preview call, preview tele-seminar where you’re on the line, you’re energetic, you’re showing your expertise about a certain topic, and then you tell them about your service that you’re about to launch.  So it really gets real personal where people get to know you and I think they’ll be more comfortable buying from you once you do some tele-seminars.

I’m curious about what kind of signals you could use to cue the other person to talk and stuff?

SC:    Well, we were just doing simple signals like, if I was talking and I was ready for the other guy to go onto the next topic, I’d say something like, “Does that sound about right”?  Let’s say you and I were doing that, “Does that sound about right Chris”?  Then that would cue you if you were the other host to go in, as far as agreeing and then maybe adding a little bit and then going on to the next topic.  So it’s really things like, “Does that sound about right” or “Does that cover everything” “Did I leave anything out”?  So, we had like ten secrets we were giving away.  And we wanted to take turns who started talking about a particular secret and so, like when I was talking about secret one, when I was done, I’d say, “Does that about cover it”, “Is that about right”, “Did I leave anything out” and then the next person would know to start talking.

What equipment do you need to have a tele-seminar?

Equipment you need to have a tele-seminar is a telephone.  Actually, you can do a tele-seminar with just a telephone and that’s it.  The way it works is, let’s say you want to go with one of those companies.  Basically those companies I listed before like Liveoffice.com or preconferencecall.com, nocostconferencing.com, these are companies where you, they basically are the bridge line companies.  They are the companies that host all these phone lines, and what you do is you sign up on any of those for a free account and then they’re going to give you a main number to dial in and then a pass code number to dial in.  That’s the number that you’re going to have to give to everyone of the people that you want to attend the tele-seminar.  You’re going to give them all the same main number and pass code number.  So everybody’s going to be dialing the same number.  If you’re the host, you’re also going to be given a host number and a different pass code number to dial into.  Really, once you pick a day and a time, you have the phone number, so you literally can have a tele-seminar using just your telephone and nothing else. 

A lot of these services, like I use Liveoffices.com, they have what they call web based controls.  So I’m always in front to my computer, because I can control some things on the computer there.  For instance, Live Office, you can record each call for free.  So if I’m on the web based control, there’s a button there that says, click here to start recording.”  So then, I just click where it says that and the whole thing will start recording.  There’s another button that says, click here if you want to mute out everybody because you don’t want to have a whole lot of background noise, so if there’s a lot of people on the call, it’s real typical to mute everybody out so they can only hear you and not everybody else. 

So, there’s web-based controls where you can mute out everybody.  You can see how many people are on the line, if you’re using these web-based controls, anytime somebody joins you, you can see that person's phone number show up.  I think it’s a pretty good idea to have a computer in front of you as well, if possible, along with your telephone.  That way you can control some of these features over the web, plus, if for example, some of these calls that I’ve done, we’ve taken questions over email at the end of the call.  We didn’t do them over the phone because it can get pretty noisy if everybody is trying to ask a question at once, so we would take questions over email at the end.  So we would have to be at our computers checking our email during the call to see if there were any questions.

Then I alluded to some of these services you can record the tele-seminar right from the phone company, the bridge company, that you got the telephone number from.  Some of them you can do that and some of them you can’t.  If you can’t, or even if you can, it’s a good idea to have a second recording so you can, in case one of the recordings doesn’t work out for some reason, you’ve go a back up.  Especially if it’s a really important tele-seminar, like you have this amazing guest and you know you’re not going to get an opportunity to interview them ever again, it’s a good idea to back it up.  Maybe have two means of recording or even three.  So I also used a digital recorder that’s made by Olympus, model DS330, and it’s just a real small digital recorder and I bought a special adapter and the adapter hooks to my headset on my handset and it hooks the other end to the digital recorder and essentially this digital recorder can record both sides of the conversation.  It can hear me and it can hear my guest or anyone else who’s speaking on the other line.  It also comes with software, where after you’re done with your call and you’ve recorded it all on this digital recorder, you hook up your recorder to your computer, download the call to your computer and you can upload it into a wave file and transfer it to an MP3 file and all that good stuff.  You can really literally record the calls yourself with your own digital recorder and the sound quality is generally very good and then you have your MP3 file there within minutes after the call is done.

So, again, you can do a tele-seminar using the phone only, but in general, I have a phone with me, I have a computer, and I have a digital recorder.

How do you get people to sign up for a teleseminar?

Usually you’re going to have to announce it to people somehow.  The best way to do it — I have an email list with people that I regularly send out emails to with good content, so that’s one way is to announce it to your list.  Like I said, this twelve-week tele-seminar series, I had twelve guests promoting it so they announced it to their list too.  That’s pretty much the best way to get people to sign up for your tele-seminar, to announce it.  If you don’t have a list, come up with a compelling reason why somebody else would want to announce it for you, somebody else that had a list.

How do I get people to show up for my teleseminar?

Showing up for your tele-seminar and signing up for your tele-seminar are two different things.  Usually you get a big number of people that sign up, but then a lot of people don’t bother dialing in for one reason or another.  Your goal is to get as many people actually on the call as you can.  Like I said, you are probably going to have some kind of call to action afterwards whether it’s “Go here and sign up for my free report” or “Go here and purchase my product” so you definitely want as many people on the call as possible. 

The best method that I’ve seen to get people to actually show up to your call is to send out email reminders.  There are differences of opinion like how often you should send out these reminders and what time intervals and day intervals and things like that.  Again, the more emails you send out, the more you’re going to bother people and might get people unsubscribing from your list.  You do want to do it enough times so they’re going to want to sign up for your tele-seminar. 

What I do in the twelve-week tele-seminar series, the day before — we do our calls like Tuesday night, so Monday morning I send an announcement that tells them who the guest speaker is and what they can expect on the call.  Then Tuesday afternoon, I send them a courtesy reminder, “Don’t forget and if you haven’t already, sign up for this tele-seminar, it starts in a few hours” and I know other people that will send out one last reminder like an hour before the call.  They will send that out only to the people that have signed up for the call and they say like, just one final reminder, our call starts in an hour.  You signed up for this tele-seminar, here are the call details once again incase you forgot them and we’ll talk to you on the call.  That’s worked on me, there’s been times that I’ve signed up for tele-seminars and I’ve forgotten about them and then I’ve had an email come in telling me that the calls going to start in an hour and that refreshes my memory and I get in on the call.  I think reminders close to the time of the call is probably your best way to get people to actually show up. 

Also, another method, I haven’t really used but I know some experts who — some people I see give away like, you’ve got to be on the call to get this special bonus.  Or you have to be on the call because we’re giving away $100.00 to a lucky winner or you have to be on the call because only people on the call will get a special offer on a seminar we’re doing”, or something like that.  That’s another way people have come on calls.  Give them some sort of reason or incentive to be there.

How can you make money with tele-seminars?

Making money with tele-seminars, well, I talked a little bit about it already.  Basically, again, first of all, you can charge people to be on your calls, so if you have a class expert, like you’re interviewing Oprah Winfrey, you could probably get away with charging for the actual call itself and not making it free because she would be such a dynamic guest.  You would probably have a lot of people that would be willing to shell out a few bucks to listen to her.  If you are going to charge money for your call, you have to make sure that they know this is going to be a life changing call.

If you’re going to do a free call, like I said, you can make money promoting somebody else’s product.  Let’s say you were coming out with a new product Chris, and I wanted to promote your product to my list.  I would sign up to be an affiliate of your product and invite you on as a guest.  We would establish you as an expert by providing great content that they couldn’t find anywhere else, and then at the end, you would describe your new product, make it sound like they can’t live without it, and then if people bought it they would buy it through my affiliate link and I would make commissions, you would make money.  So that’s a way. 

You can promote your own product.  Let’s say I want to do a tele-seminar and I wanted to promote my own product, I could certainly have people from my list come to the call, again, you still want to give great content no matter what type of call you do, but then I could promote my product at the end of the call.  Then they can get into my coaching program and so you can do small group coaching if you have a certain expertise and a particular niche like I do on how to build a boot camp business, so I’ve had people sign up for a four week coaching program.  Each class was a small group, it was about fifteen students, but each call was essentially a tele-seminar.  We all got on the phone and I taught them my methods and my strategy over the phone.  So there are a few ways right there where you can make money.

Scott, where can people learn more about you, your products, and your services?

If you want to learn more about how I put together some of my tele-seminars, I’m going to give you two resources.  Both are completely free, but for the tele-seminars that I was describing before that I did with another fitness professional, you can see that it’s completely a free tele-seminar.  You just have to sign up your name and your email address.  It’s www.fitnesscampsecrets.com.  And if you want to see, how I structured this twelve-week seminar with the twelve guest speakers.  And how I did the special upgrade where I made thousands of dollars just by people purchasing the special upgrade for $97.00, that’s a tele-seminar series that I’m doing called MY Ultimate Body Makeover and it’s: www.myultimatebodymakeover.com; and then I’ll just say one more thing very similar to that one.  We’re in the middle of just starting it up, gathering guests, but we’re going to do a follow-up to My Ultimate Body Makeover with a teleseminar series called; My Ultimate Mind Makeover, so its: www.myultimatemindmakeover.com. 

 

This has been a teleseminar  fitness marketing interview