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In his best-selling book The Success Principles, Jack Canfield shares that it is essential to 100 percent responsibility for everything you experience in your life. The results – or lack of results – are ultimately your responsibility.

The common objection many people have to this principle is “Yeah, but I can’t be responsible for things like natural disasters, the economy, or the actions of other people.” This is where the real beauty of this principle is revealed.

Crediting Dr. Robert Resnick with teaching him this formula, Jack explains that:

E + R = O

An (E)vent + your (R)esponse to the event = your (O)utcome

If you don’t like the outcome you are getting, you have two choices. The first is to can waste your time blaming the event. The second is to change your response until you get the outcome you desire.

If you don’t already apply this principle to your life, now is an excellent time to start. After all, the seminar and training industry is vastly different than it was even a few short years ago. During the recession, training and travel budgets were trimmed, and attendance at in-person events plummeted.

Meanwhile, the 24/7, no-travel-required convenience of virtual training lead to increased demand for teleseminars and webinars - often at the expense of seminars and workshops.

If your events aren't as full as you'd like, will you bemoan your lack of results and place blame on the economy, changing customer needs or some other factor outside your control?

Or will you simply acknowledge the impact that the economy, technology and other factors are having on your registrations and revenue … and commit to success anyway? The seminar and training industry has been hard-hit by the economy. Will you blame it for the undesirable outcome you’re getting and drag your energy downward by focusing on the negative? Or will you acknowledge the impact the economy is having on your registrations and revenue … and commit to success anyway?

If the latter, here are 3 ways you can change your responses:

1. Expand your training options. Seminars deliver a unique experience that can’t be replicated over the phone or internet. But it’s also a fact that many prospects do not have the budgets or time to travel. Therefore, they want access to training via teleseminars and webinars. Change your response and deliver what they want!
2. Improve your marketing system. Now the time to promote smarter. Examine every inch of your marketing system and see where you can make improvements. For example, can your marketing copy be improved? How is your follow-up after registration and after the event? Do you stay in touch with your list on an ongoing basis? Do you ask for testimonials and referrals? Are you targeting the best prospects when promoting – especially when investing money in costly direct mail promotions? These are only a handful of the ways you can improve your seminar marketing.
3. Keep a positive mindset. The training industry will come back - either because the economy recovers, because more people and organizations will realize that continuing education is essential to staying competitive, or both. When it does, you’ll be ready. The improvements you make now to your marketing program will prime you for success. By staying in touch with your core audience now, you’ll be the one they think of when their training budgets are replenished and traveling to seminars, workshops and conferences becomes a possibility again.

You can’t control everything that impacts your seminar business. But you can control how you respond. Focus your time, energy and attention on what is within your control to ensure the survival and success of your seminar business.

Despite your best planning, sometimes things creep up on you. Where it once seemed like you had all the time in the world to promote your seminar, suddenly you're under the gun and wondering what to-do's you can safely drop.

Last week, I shared 5 tips for filling seminar seats at the last minute. Here are 5 more tips to help you:

1. Reach out and call someone. Consider doing a voice broadcast to let subscribers know that a few tickets are still available for your event. If you normally market via email, incorporating telemarketing may help your offer stand out from the clutter.
2. Network. Work your connections and talk to everyone you meet about your seminar. Be very clear about who should attend, how they’ll benefit and what your special offer is. Talk to affiliate and joint venture partners, current and past clients, colleagues, members of associations you belong to, networking groups and chambers of commerce in your area. My colleague Dr. George Huang of Freedompreneur.com filled his first workshop in less than two weeks, largely through very persistent networking.
3. Enlist your social networks. Talk about your event on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Be sure to include a link to your sales page so that people who are intrigued by the posts they’re seeing can get full details about your event. In addition to updates, share interesting tips, intriguing ideas and curiosity-provoking questions to get people clicking your link. For example, instead of relying only on posts like “Only 2 days left until my seminar,” incorporate messages like “Learn the 7 mistakes that kill marketing response.”
4. Publicize your events. In addition to sending press releases to the various publications read by members of your target audience, don’t overlook online event calendars. Many publications and web sites have calendars of upcoming events; you often can post your own listings. People who read event calendars are open to attending events, obviously … so put your event in front of interested prospects.
5. Focus on hot leads. Spend extra time following up with hot leads. These are prospects who have raised their hands and somehow indicated that they are interested in this event. It might be the segment of your list that registered for a preview teleseminar about your upcoming workshop. It might be indivudlas who have taken the time to call or email with questions about the event. These are your best leads – and you aren’t done marketing until they say “no thanks” to your event.

Are these techniques guaranteed to fill your seminar in a matter of days? Unfortunately, no. But they are the techniques that successful promoters use to market their seminars. If you don’t see a boost in your registrations, you at least will have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done all you can to promote your seminar. After your event, take note of what you’ve done and the results you’ve achieved. Then begin mapping out the plan for improving your promotions the next time you offer your seminar.

As a seminar marketing coach, I often get calls from seminar promoters who are desperately trying to fill seats for events that take place within days. Sometimes the problem is that they didn’t start promoting early enough. Other times, they have been marketing their events for weeks, but without the desired response from their target market.

If you find yourself in a similar situation – with a large number of seats to fill in very few days – here are some ideas to try:

1. Keep the faith. With most events, the normal registration curve shows a last-minute upswing in registrations. The closer you get, the more registrations will come in. With virtual events, most registrations arrive in the last 48 hours before an event. With a live event, registrations increase in the last week or two before the event. Do your best not to tune into the feelings of fear and anxiety that may be running through your body. Instead, hold a firm vision of success – picture your room overflowing with people who are eager to hear your message. Staying in a positive state will help you stay open to the opportunities that appear to help you fill your room. It will also enable you to act quickly in the days remaining before your event, rather than freezing with panic.
2. Increase your marketing. Launching your marketing early enough is only one key to successfully filling a room. The second key is to stay in front of your list. The closer your event gets, the more frequently you should be in touch – even up to the minute it starts. There are people on your mailing list who are interested in your event, but who are on the fence about registering. Continuing to market to these individuals will help to nudge some of them into action. They are hesitating either because they are waiting to see if they can clear their schedules or because they aren’t fully convinced that attending your seminar is a good use of their time and money. Keep reminding them of how they’ll benefit – as well as what they’ll miss if they choose to skip this opportunity.
3. Focus on locals. Some people will hop on a plane at the last minute to attend an event without any hesitation. Others won’t simply because of how much it costs to purchase airfare at the last minute, which is why it makes sense to direct extra marketing attention to locals – people who are within driving distance of your event.
4. Know your VIPs. As you build your business, work to identify the prospects who are most likely to attend your events. Reach out to this group in the final days and weeks before your event to ensure that they know about the seminar, as well as to get their RSVP.
5. Make a special offer. In addition to keeping up or increasing the frequency of your marketing, consider making a special offer to fill the remaining seats. Perhaps you offer a discounted price, extra bonuses, or a second ticket to share with a guest. Another option is to list your event on LastMinuteTraining.com, a service that allows you to sell seminar seats at a discounted price in the final days before your event.

This list is by no means comprehensive. In my next post, I’ll share 5 more tips for filling seminar seats at the last minute.

Email is the most common tool used to promote webinars and teleseminars. It’s particularly effective because it easily allows an event promoter to stay in touch with prospects and continue marketing the event right up until the last minute. This is important because most registrations for webinars and teleseminars occur in the final 48 hours before the event.

However, relying only on email marketing can be detrimental. Here are 7 reasons to use more than email to promote your webinars and teleseminars.

• List fatigue. If your subscribers get bombarded by emails constantly, they are likely to become less responsive. They see your name constantly, so it becomes easy to skip messages. This is particularly true when your emails are usually promotional vs. educational. Readers assume that your messages are only trying to get them to buy something, so they delete your emails and move onto something more interesting.
• Poor customer relations. If subscribers believe that your messages are designed only to get them to buy something, some may become irritated and remove themselves from your list. As a business owner, you are focused on generating revenue. Viewed from this angle, unsubscribing from your list is simply a subscriber disqualifying themselves as a good customer for your business and, therefore, may be an acceptable cost of doing business.
  

But some organizations, such as associations, may need to be more sensitive to subscriber complaints about the amount of email being sent. Members may become so unhappy that they’ll decline the opportunity to renew their membership – a price that’s too high to pay simply to get more people on association-sponsored webinars and teleseminars.

• Spam filters. Although you ask clients and members to put your email address on their email whitelist, you have probably discovered that your messages are still blocked by spam filters from time to time or with certain subscribers. If you are relying only on email to promote your webinar or teleseminar, some prospects may never even hear about your event if your messages are mistakenly intercepted by a spam filter.
• Appeal to a wider audience. The more tools you use, the more likely you are to connect with any particular individual. Some people respond to email; others tend to ignore it. Some people response to social media; others don’t. Still others read direct mail, while others don’t even glance at it. Using multiple marketing channels creates more opportunities to connect with your audience via their preferred channel of communication.
• Appeal to non-email users. There are people who not only don’t like receiving promotional messages via email, they don’t use it at all. My sister recently started a new job and was surprised to discover that two of her coworkers don’t know how to use email. A close friend of mine only started using email within the past year. A client of mine knows that an entire segment of its database doesn’t use email (at work, at least) because the work environment doesn’t allow them to have convenient access to a computer.
• Appeal to younger subscribers. Generally speaking, Generation Y tends to communicate more with texting and social media. If you incorporate these additional forms of communication into your marketing mix, you may be more apt to grab the attention of these younger subscribers.
• Create a more stable marketing program. Depending on only one marketing tool can be risky. If the tool suddenly becomes unreliable, you’ve endangered your entire marketing program. For example, consider companies that relied primarily on fax marketing. When the Do-Not-Fax regulations went into effect, they had to scramble to find new ways to reach prospective customers. The more marketing tools you use, the more stable your program will be and the less impacted you’ll be if one tool stops working.

Using a multi-channel marketing approach allows you to build a more stable and robust marketing system to promote your events. One way to approach this task is simply to incorporate more marketing tools into your mix. If you have the resources and capability to do so, you may want to invite prospects to tell you what their preferred method of communication is and then build different marketing sequences to communicate with each group of subscribers.

Affiliate marketing is a time-proven way to fill seats at seminars, workshops, bootcamps and conferences. Yet, when compiling lists of potential affiliates to approach, many seminar promoters overlook one of their best prospects: Competitors.

Competitors are ideal affiliates because their subscribers and customers have already proven to be interested in your subject matter.

However, many seminar promoters automatically assume that their competitors will not want to help promote their event. They believe that competitors are thinking, “If my subscribers buy from you, they won’t buy from me.”

It’s true that some of your competitors will have this type of scarcity mindset. However, the savvier and more successful entrepreneurs in your niche will have a vastly different attitude. They recognize that customers look at industry experts not with either-or thinking (“I have to pick only one expert to follow”), but instead with the desire to learn as much as possible from multiple experts.

Experienced entrepreneurs also recognize that most people on their lists will not become customers. Most subscribers stay on the list for free educational information, but they never attend an event.

Promoting your event to their list becomes an opportunity for your competitors to leverage the relationships they’ve built with their subscribers. If prospects resonate better with your message and register for your event, your competitors earn revenue (in the form of your affiliate commissions) that they might not otherwise get.

Here are 5 tips for enlisting competitors to promote your event:

Tip #1: Be prepared to sell a competitor on the idea of promoting your event. Point out that most prospects don’t ever buy, and that promoting your event, they stand a chance of making additional revenue.

Tip #2: Explain how your event is different than what they currently offer – especially other events. This may help reassure more wary competitors who are concerned about losing potential clients to you.

Tip #3: Pay competitors a bigger commission than regular affiliates receive. This can be a good way to acknowledge that the quality of their subscribers is top notch.

Tip #4: Offer to do a preview teleseminar or webinar for your competitor’s list, and invite your competitor to host the event. This way, he or she will be able to explain to subscribers why they’ve chosen to endorse you. A preview event also gives them a chance to be in front of their lists.

Tip #5: Ask competitors to provide free resources, such as a report or audio, as bonuses for your attendees, preferably on topics that you are not covering in detail at the event. This allows them to get in front of highly qualified prospects, which can entice them to participate. And it benefits you, too, by increasing the value of your offer while also delivering an implied endorsement from your competitors.

Not all competitors will be willing to promote your event. Many will view you as a threat who will “steal” revenue that is rightfully theirs. But considering that competitors already have relationships with your ideal prospects, it is worth the risk of hearing a “no” for the chance to hear a “yes” to your request for help.

With the amount of time, effort and money you sink into your seminar marketing, you want to see a big return on your investment. This desire makes it tempting to load your promotional pieces with multiple offers.

For example, you might try to promote your paid seminar ... and in the same marketing piece, also promote a free seminar. You might promote a free seminar ... but also want to promote a free report and a free consultation.

On the surface, this strategy seems logical. The more offers you include, the more likely you are to present one that appeals to any particular prospect ... right?

Surprisingly ... no.

When making a single offer, prospects have one question to answer: "Do I want this or not?" All they have to decide is yes or no.

Presenting prospects with a choice of offers, however, makes them think. Now they don't merely have to decide "yes or no" ... they have to decide which offer they want most. That seemingly simple change can muddy the waters just enough that your prospects toss your promotional piece in the trash or into their "I'll deal with this later" pile.

Still convinced that making multiple offers in the same promotional piece makes sense? Here are some tips to help you get the most bang for your buck:

1. Are you promoting a free seminar, where you sell your products, services or next (paid) event? Try offering a recording to people who can't make it to the preview ... or who don't want to attend a live seminar, but are otherwise interested in receiving your information.

Don't be surprised if you get fewer people signed up for your live event, though. Ordering a recording is easier to say yes to than attending a seminar. (Tip: send the recording to no-shows. That way, you can salvage the "lost" registrations by still getting your valuable information in their hands.)

Also consider testing a virtual event (teleseminar or webinar) against an in-person seminar. Virtual events are easier to attend because they don’t require any travel, which makes them easier to promote.

2. Are you promoting an in-person, for-fee seminar? You can safely promote your live preview event or teleseminar in your marketing materials. Position it as a free trial for people who want to try before they buy.

3. If you insist on making multiple free offers in one promotional piece -- for example, offering a report, a free teleseminar, and a free consultation – help prospects quickly grasp what you are trying to promote by using big, bold subheads and formatting.

Remember, prospects are spending just a few seconds scanning your marketing pieces. If you bury your offers in dense paragraphs of text, they'll ignore what you're saying.

But if you can telegraph what you're trying to communicate ("I have 3 gifts for you -- take your pick"), you'll do a better job of grabbing attention and getting them to act.

My final tip? Test, test, test. By coding your promotions and tracking your results, you'll know for sure which approach -- one offer vs. multiple offers – produces the best bottom-line results.

Affiliate marketing is a top method for promoting a seminar, because it allows you to leverage relationships that other companies and experts have already built with your prospective attendees. When identifying potential affiliates, however, many seminar promoters and leaders make the mistake of focusing exclusively on competitors.

Competitors are a logical fit for affiliate marketing. Because they serve the same audience and offer similar expertise, there’s a greater than average chance that their subscribers will be interested in what you offer. But experts and companies outside your industry and niche also make great promotional partners for three reasons.

Reason #1: Less resistance. Because these professionals and companies do not offer the same type of expertise as you, they are much less likely than a competitor to view you as a threat. Therefore, you may find that they are more willing to promote your event.

Reason #2: Novelty. What you teach is likely to be new and novel to the affiliate’s subscribers. This will make it easier to grab attention when promoting your seminar.

Reason #3: Undivided loyalty. When competitors promote your event as affiliates, their subscribers may feel a sense of loyalty that dampens their desire to attend your event. When marketing to non-competitors’ lists, however, their subscribers can say yes to your event without any conflict.

To identify non-industry partners, start by brainstorming the types of other vendors and partners your ideal prospects are likely to be working with already. For example, if your event is targeted to small-business owners, your list of potential affiliates may include web site designers, accounting firms, attorneys, banks and perhaps even office supply stores or water delivery services.

Next, ask clients, students and subscribers what other experts they follow. You may receive additional ideas about the types of companies with which to partner – and perhaps even suggestions about specific individuals to approach.

With a traditional affiliate relationship, you pay a commission for every seminar registration your affiliate’s marketing efforts produce – an arrangement that appeals to revenue- and profit-driven entrepreneurs.

When approaching experts and organizations outside of your niche, however, also be sure to explain how your partnership can be used to strengthen the relationships they have with their subscribers. By introducing you as an expert resource or vendor, your potential affiliates can cement their positioning as a trusted resource of the information and connections their subscribers need to succeed.

You may find that some affiliates outside of your industry may not want to – or may not ethically or legally be able to – accept payment for their efforts. In this scenario, you could offer to:

• Donate their commission in their name to a charity they choose. This would allow them gain goodwill by positioning their promotion of your seminar as a fundraising effort.
• Extend a discount to their subscribers only (the discount would be equal to what you normally would have paid in affiliate commissions). Knowing that they are securing a discounted tuition for their valued subscribers makes affiliates feel good about participating in the promotion of your seminar.
• Give them free tickets to your event. For example, you could give one free ticket for the first seat they sell, and an additional ticket for every two seats they sell. By attending, not only will they get access to your valuable education, they’ll also get face-time with their clients and subscribers.

Affiliate marketing is a tried-and-true way to market a seminar. Use these tips to expand your reach by enlisting the help of experts and companies outside of your niche.

New seminar promoters often make the mistake of sending only two or three announcements of their upcoming events when marketing to their subscribers or a rented list. Unfortunately, they soon learn that most people don’t seem to even read their promotional materials, much less take the initiative of signing up.

Part of the problem is that prospects are deluged with marketing messages. Whether it’s traditional advertising, such as television and radio commercials, newspaper ads, or direct mail postcards, or electronic marketing, such as pay-per-click ads on Facebook, text messages sent to their cell phones, or pop-up ads on news sites or YouTube, they face advertising everywhere they look. It becomes easy for prospective seminar attendees to overlook your sole promotion in the sea of competing messages.

Conventional sales wisdom says that your prospects must hear or see your message nine times before they finally take action. Most seminar promoters – like most sales people in general – give up too early.

However, breaking through the marketing clutter is not the only reason you should promote to your subscriber list more often. Sometimes prospects see your messages, but are not compelled to buy for a variety of reasons.

In some cases, buyer reluctance can be overcome through better marketing. For others, the problem is simply that they are not ready for your event. Their life – in particular, the situation you will help them address in your seminar – has not grown so uncomfortable that they are ready to take action to change it.

For these individuals, the solution is keeping your message in front of them on a regular basis. Someday, they will be ready to make the change. They will be ready to find a solution, and when that day comes, you want to make sure that they think of you and your seminar.

To be in the right place at the right time – that is, in front of your prospects when they are ready to make change and sign up for your event – you must market to your list on a regular basis. This involves two major steps:

Step #1: Increasing the frequency of your marketing when you are in the midst of promoting a specific event. For example, rather than sending three notices to your list about your upcoming event, test the effect of five, seven or nine messages. This will help you break through the marketing clutter.

In addition, it will serve as a reminder for prospects who are interested in your event, but set aside your materials to think about and take care of later. An additional message from you could be the nudge they need to finally take action.

Step #2: Stay in touch with your list year-round. You never know when prospects’ lives will change and they will proactively begin searching for a solution. Keep your name in front of them with a mix of educational information and promotions. For instance, send out a monthly e-zine or newsletter, or periodically post a short educational video to your web site.

Without consistent follow-up, the time, money and effort you invest into generating leads will be wasted. Keep promoting your event right up until it starts to ensure that your marketing message is in front of your prospects when they are finally ready to buy.

Testimonials are an invaluable component of any seminar promotion. They help reassure prospects who are considering attending your event that yes, in fact, other people have also found your offer to be compelling enough to commit their time and money in your event.

You can get the greatest mileage from your past attendees’ comments by following these tips:

• Incorporate specifics whenever possible. Steer clear of testimonials that are general, such as “This seminar was the best!” Instead, you want “I used one idea to add an extra $40,000 in revenue to our bottom line last month.”
• Use full attribution. A testimonial from “Jenny in Chicago” doesn’t have the same level of credibility as “Jenny Hamby, copywriting and seminar marketing coach, SeminarMarketingPro.com, Plainfield, IL.” Use as much detail about your attendees as they’re comfortable letting you use.
• Capture audio and/or video testimonials. Listening to, and even seeing, someone give a testimonial adds even more credibility to their comments. Whereas it’s not hard to believe that a devious promoter would make up written comments, it’s harder to fathom going through the effort of finding multiple accomplices to record audio or video of false testimonials.
• Address prospects’ biggest objections. If attendees reveal that they struggled with their decision to attend your seminar, invite them to share that information in their testimonial. Just be sure that they also explain why they attended, why they’re delighted that they attended, and why they recommend that anyone who is struggling with the same doubt attend the event anyway.
• Let someone else present your biggest claims. Prospects know that you stand to gain financially for every seat you sell, so they will take any claim that you make with a healthy dose of skepticism. But the same claims coming from a third party in the form of a testimonial will be much more palatable.

An easy way to capture testimonials is to have a video camera set up at your event and invite participants to record their thoughts. You also can set up a testimonial recording line with a service like AudioGenerator to capture audio testimonials.

Once you have the video or audio testimonials, transcribe them. That way, you can include some of the verbiage in your written sales copy, as well as have the audio or video testimonials for prospects who want more.

In addition to including testimonials in a section titled “Rave Reviews” or something similar, sprinkle them throughout your copy. Add testimonials after major sections of copy, on name-squeeze pages, order forms and thank you pages, as well as email and direct mail promotions.

Above all, never stop collecting testimonials. You can never have too many examples of this form of proof.

A highly effective way to fill seminar seats – particularly when you don’t have a large mailing list of your own – is to enlist the help of affiliates.

Affiliates are individuals or organizations that agree to promote your seminars to their subscribers, members or clients. They are rewarded for their help in a variety of ways. The most common way is to pay affiliates a commission for every seat that they fill. Other seminar leaders reward their promotional partners by featuring them as an event sponsor, by providing seminar attendees with the affiliates’ free resources, or by giving affiliates permission to present a tuition discount to their lists.

Here are six ways you can find affiliates to promote your seminars:

• Start with your competitors. Why would a competitor want to help to promote your events? Simple. Seminar marketers realize fairly quickly that most people on their lists will not become customers. Subscribers stay on the list for free educational information, but they never sign up to attend an event.

However, the non-purchasing subscribers may resonate better with another expert’s message. If your competitors introduce you to their lists and you are paying a commission for every registration they generate, they stand a chance of earning revenue they might not otherwise get.

• A second group of potential affiliates are experts who work with the same clientele, but in a different way. By introducing you to their lists, these experts strengthen their positioning as a trusted resource of the information and connections their subscribers need to succeed. They aren’t concerned about the affiliate commission (some professionals may not be able to ethically or legally accept payment), but are more concerned with being viewed as a resource and connector.

• Find out who is promoting your competitors. These individuals have proven that they think the type of content you offer is valuable to their lists. If you can explain how what you teach is different than what your competitors teach, you may be able to convince your competitors’ affiliates to promote you, as well.

• Enlist your customers and past attendees. Tap into the power of referral marketing by asking your customers and past attendees to help promote your event. They already know, like and trust you enough to purchase your products and services, as well as attend your events. Why not formally ask for their help and reward them for their efforts?

• Ask registrants for your upcoming program to spread the word about the event they will be attending. For instance, on the registration confirmation page, include fields where registrants can enter the names and email addresses of people they know who might be interested in attending the event. When their guests register for the program, send them a thank you gift or commission check.

• Approach industry organizations. Research the type of organizations that your prospective attendees belong to and participate in, such as associations, clubs and chambers of commerce. Approach these groups about helping you promote your event. You’ll find that some groups will require you to pay for renting their lists or advertising in their publications. However, others may be interested in offering a discounted rate to their members or generating non-dues revenue by earning a commission for every member that registers for your seminar.

Before you start approaching potential affiliates, spend some time outlining the offer you are making and prepare a simple email or handout explaining how the process works. Many individuals and organizations that are involved with internet marketing are familiar with the affiliate marketing model. However, other potential partners will need additional support to
understand exactly how participating in your program will benefit them.

As with any sales venture, finding affiliates is a numbers game. Many more people will say no than will say yes. Your job is to keep reaching out until you find the partners you need. You never know who will say yes unless you ask.