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When I consult with speakers, trainers and other experts who are struggling to fill their seminars, one of the first questions I ask is, "How big is your mailing list?"

You see, trying to promote a seminar without having your own list is pretty darn difficult. (More on that in a minute.) In fact, not having a system in place to grow your list is probably the biggest mistake you can make. You face 3 huge challenges when promoting seminars without a list:

1. It's hard to get noticed. Experts estimate that we're exposed to up to 3,000 advertising messages a day. It's hard to attract attention in a sea of competition.

2. The chances of getting a "yes" are slim. If marketing is like dating, asking a complete stranger to register for  your seminar is like proposing marriage on a first date – it’s a big commitment that will scare most folks off. Even if prospects don't have a scheduling conflict, you still must convince them that your seminar is worth their money and time. That's not likely to happen the very first time you "meet" a prospect.

3. You have no way to follow up. Conventional sales wisdom says prospects must be exposed to your message 7-9 times before they’ll buy. But if prospects see your seminar promotion and aren’t immediately swept away … you have no way to get in touch with them again. Instead, you're trusting
them to find you ... IF they even remember your event.

The lower-risk, more cost-effective way to market seminars is to use what's called "two-step" marketing. Rather than promoting your seminar to the world at large, you first promote a free sampling of your content, such as a report, teleseminar or DVD. Then, when prospects sign up to get your resource, you take the second step -- promoting your event.

During my 4-week online workshop, Two-Step Marketing for Seminars, you'll discover a step-by-step system for setting up your own list-building funnel. Get more info about the event here.

One of the biggest challenges you face when promoting seminars is finding qualified prospects. If you don't have your own mailing list, you soon find that it is expensive and quite difficult to fill seats when promoting to the world at large.

Two-step marketing is the answer. With this approach, promoting your seminar is not the primary goal;  instead, your focus is on getting prospects to raise their hands and indicate interest in what you teach. In the first step, you promote free resources that you've created -- such as reports, teleseminars or DVDs. The second step is promoting your seminar to prospects who have signed up to receive your free information.

There are 5 keys to success with 2-step marketing.

Key #1: Create a valuable resource. The best resources:

• Appeal to your audience by offering information that will help them solve a problem or attain a desired benefit.
• Are related to your seminar. This helps to ensure that prospects are qualified to attend your seminar.
• Offer solid information. Your free resource is a way for prospects to try before they buy. If you hold back on the content, they are likely to conclude that you won't deliver much value during your paid program either.
• Make prospects hungry for more information. Subscribers who love your content will want even more ... making them ideal prospects for the next step in your promotions - asking them to attend your seminar.

Key #2. Sell the resource. The best free resource in the world won't do you a bit of good if no one knows it exists. You have to promote your free resources just like you'd promote a for-fee event or product.

Key #3: Follow up about the resource. If new prospects don't "consume" the free resource they requested, you'll lose impact and momentum. They'll never know how good your content is and, therefore, won't be inspired to attend your seminar.

Key #4: Invite them to take the next step. You wnat prospects to sign up for your for-fee seminar or workshop. To persuade them to do so, your follow-up promotions should include multiple calls to action that tell prospects how to get full details about and reserve their place at your seminar.

Key #5: Stay in front of prospects. If you send follow-up messages for a week or two and then disppear, your new prospects will forget who you are. Many seminar promoters find that prospects are on their lists for months - even years - before they sign up for an event. If you want your new qualified leads to remember you and THINK of you when they are ready to invest in training, you must ensure that you stay in front of them on a regular basis.

Two-step marketing is one of the most valuable strategies you can use to build a successful and able seminar business. For maximum impact, ensure that your two-step system incorporates the five components listed above.

Want to get your two-step marketing system set up quickly? Two-Step Marketing for Seminars is a 4-week online workshop that delivers a step-by-step roadmap for setting up your list-building funnel. You get 24/7 access to training materials -- and can bring your assistant or a guest for free. Read more about the program here.

Happy Valentine's Day! Regardless of how you feel about the holiday, one thing is for sure: It offers many valuable marketing lessons. Here's the most important lesson I want you to think about today...

When you're sitting down to dinner with your sweetie tonight, think about the first time you met. Did you propose marriage? I'm betting that you didn't ... because for most people, that's far too big of a commitment to make the first time you meet someone. Instead, you probably started out with a dinner date, coffee ... or maybe just a phone call.

Why? Because it's less of a commitment and much lower risk. If the chemistry isn't there, you can part ways without having invested too much time or money.

Now think about how you approach the task of promoting your seminars to the public. When you're approaching strangers, are you trying to convince them to attend your seminar (e.g., proposing marriage)? Or do you go for smaller and easier "yes" by offering a free sample of your content, such
as a report or teleseminar, to begin the relationship?

If you choose the latter, congratulations! This approach is called two-step marketing and it's hands-down the best approach to take if you want long-term success in the seminar industry. Two-step marketing allows you to build a list of qualified prospects ... so that the bulk of your marketing dollars can be invested with people who are interested in what you have to teach.

If you're not currently using two-step marketing in your business, please check out my upcoming 4-week online workshop, Two-Step Marketing for Seminars. I'll guide you step-by-step through the process of setting up your own two-step marketing system. Read more about the course -- including the buy-one-get-one-free offer -- here.

If you've ever thought that seminars are harder to sell than products and services ... you're right!

The reason is that when you're asking someone to attend a seminar, you're asking them to invest two things -- money AND time.

And money, frankly, is the easier investment to make.

There are 3 primary reasons that prospects hesitate to invest their time in seminars:

1. Once it's gone, it's gone. There is no way for prospects to recoup the time they invest in your seminar. Getting them to pay tuition can actually be easier - there's always the possibility that they'll recoup their financial investment with all of the great things they learn at your seminar. But they can only spend their time once.
2. The required investment of time exceeds the length of your seminar. A three-day seminar is not a three-day commitment. It's often 5 days ... even 7 days. Attendees may need a day on either side for traveling to and from your event location. They also need a day to prepare for being gone ... and at least a day for getting caught up.
3. Schedule conflicts. Even when you have prospects who are willing to invest the time and money to attend your seminar, at the end, they simply must be available. If your seminar conflicts with something else on their calendar, you lose the sale.

Understanding the role that time plays in selling seminar seats is important. You see, this is one of the primary reasons that it's difficult to promote a seminar without a list. When you ask a complete stranger to attend your seminar, they're not too likely to say yes for the reasons listed above.

A better approach is to use two-step marketing. Rather than promoting your seminar, offer a free sample of your teachings, such as a report, teleseminar or audio recording, when marketing to strangers. Then, promote your seminar only to people who respond to your first offer. By taking your content for a test drive, prospects will be better able to judge whether your full seminar will be a smart investment of their time.

Learn more about two-step marketing and how to get your two-step marketing system set up in 4 weeks by clicking here.

If asked, most seminar promoters would agree that low attendance is their worst fear. But when you’re promoting a low-cost or free seminar, having a large number of unexpected participants showing up to register at the door can be equally problematic.

Potential complications include:

• Not having enough seats available, in which case you either need to turn away guests or scramble to set up additional chairs in the back of the room.
• Not having enough staff to handle the at-the-door registrations. This can lead to delays in getting people into the seminar room.
• Irritating participants who pre-registered. If pre-registered attendees are checking in at the same table where unregistered attendees are signing up, registrants will be stuck waiting in line. For maximum efficiency, have a separate table or line where pre-registrants can check in.
• Interrupting the start of the presentation. If at-the-door registrations are too numerous, you’ll discover that not everyone has made it through the registration line by the time you’re scheduled to begin. Then you face a tough decision: delay the start until everyone is registered, which annoys the students who showed up on time, or start on time and have stragglers entering the room for the first several minutes of your presentation.

So what’s a seminar promoter to do? Here are 5 tips for encouraging pre-registration:

• Require pre-registration. Seems obvious, right? The downside, of course, is that you may lose a few students who are truly last-minute type of people. If you go this route, consider including some copy in your marketing materials to present your reasoning. For example, you could include a sentence or two to explain that seating is very limited and that you need an accurate headcount so that you can start the event on time vs. scrambling around to find extra chairs at the last minute.

• Charge more at the door. This encourages people to pre-register and penalizes them for waiting until the last minute to sign up.

• Offer a bonus gift for pre-registration in addition to or instead of a discounted registration fee. (Tip: have the bonus gift be one of your information products.)

• Stress scarcity. Make sure that attendees know that seating is limited and they may be turned away at the door.

• Don’t reveal the exact location of your event until after registration. That way, it’s nearly impossible for someone to show up and register at the door. (The exception, of course, is if a registrant slips and tells someone where the event will be or brings an unregistered guest along.) Instead, list only the city in your marketing promotions.

NOTE: When you are promoting in large cities, be specific about the part of the city and/or surrounding suburbs in which you’ll be hosting your event. For example, common seminar locations in Chicago are downtown, near O’Hare Airport, the northeastern suburbs (e.g., Schaumburg), and the western suburbs (e.g., Oak Brook). For Chicagoland residents, there is a tremendous difference in these locations – depending on where you live, some are easy to reach, and others are very inconvenient.

Having too many people show up for an event is, in some ways, a good problem to have. It shows that your marketing materials are working, you’ve found a hungry audience, and your content is appealing. As your seminar business grows and your seminars begin to fill more quickly, consider using one or more of these tips to minimize the hassles of a last-minute surge in at-the-door seminar registrations.

The best marketing lessons often come simply by paying attention to what happens in the world around you. Take, for example, my recent trip to the grocery store.

When I was headed out the door with my cartful of groceries, the greeter -- an elderly man who always welcomes me with a big smile and friendly "hello" -- flagged me down. His job that day was to hand out fliers directing customers to the store's web site to take a customer satisfaction survey.

I like George. So I went to the site to share my rave reviews about the store's customer service.

Unfortunately, the flier directed me to the superstore's home page, which featured dozens of links and buttons. Even after some persistent digging around, I couldn't find the survey. So I left without sharing my input.

Contrast this experience with the survey offered by a local pizza franchise -- their coupon takes you directly to the survey form. And when you're done, you get a discount coupon as a thank you.

From these two experiences come the following lessons:

• Lead visitors to the exact page you want them to visit. Depending on how your site is organized, dropping visitors off at your home page in hopes that they'll find their way to your seminar page can be like kicking someone out of your car miles from nowhere with a hearty "Good luck!" and assuming they'll find their way home. Although they might be persistent enough to find a trail, they are just as likely to get lost in the forest. If seminar registrations are your goal, take visitors by the hand and lead them to exactly the page you want them to go.

• If the URL of the page you want prospects to visit is long and convoluted, set up an abbreviated URL that redirects to the target page. For example, a client of mine runs advertising to promote its personal development seminars. Rather than including their web page's full address -- http://www.foundations1.com/personal-success/cornerstone/ -- which would be too long and clunky for a print ad, their webmaster provides shortened URLs that point to this page (foundations1.com/publicationname)

Tip: This strategy allows you the ability to track web traffic. In this case, setting up a unique URL for each publication allows us to see how many visitors come to the site from each ad placed.

• Continue the conversation. When prospects are motivated by a promotion to visit your web site, it can be jarring to land on a web page that doesn't relate to what was presented in the original promotion. Some will be confused and leave. Others may find their way to the seminar page, but by the time they do, they've lost their interest in what you were saying.

Continuing the conversation can be as simple as making sure that your landing page promotes the same thing that was offered in the original promotion. In other cases, you may want to go deeper. For example, if one ad plays up your seminar's ability to boost revenue, make sure that copy on your landing page also plays up this benefit. Ads that highlight a different benefit could point to a different landing page with matching copy.

If you're working with a finite budget, you want to make sure that every dollar counts. By using these three tips to create a more seamless customer experience, you'll eliminate the unnecessary loss of web site visitors, as well as increase your chances of seminar success.

A key to business success is giving customers what they want and need. As professional speakers, trainers and consultants who get paid to teach others about our areas of expertise, we can lose sight of the importance of seeking customer input. Because we get paid to know what our customers need to learn to overcome their challenges and achieve their goals, we overlook the value of asking them for their opinion.

Seeking input from prospective seminar attendees can provide valuable insight into how they view their challenges, as well as their need – or lack thereof – for your training. Prospects often dismiss upcoming events with “I already know that” or “I don’t need to know that” … when the truth is that they desperately need the training and simply haven’t realized it yet.

When you know that prospects would benefit from attending your seminar, but they don’t agree that they need the training, you have a few options. The first is to shift your focus and promote a seminar that prospects say they want. In some cases, this makes sense. Continuing to promote a program that customers don’t want is a frustrating, expensive, time-consuming process that will produce a small return on your investment. You’ll make more money by delivering the seminars your customers say they want to buy.

However, in some cases, you know that they must have the information in the program you are trying to promote. Successfully delivering a different seminar may be impossible without the training you provide in your first program. For example, perhaps students must have a basic-level training program – which they say they don’t want or need – before they can take the advanced programs, which are the seminars your audience wants. In this case, you will want to implement one of the two remaining strategies.

The second approach is to change your positioning. Customer surveys can help you understand how your prospects think about their problems. Take a fresh look at your seminar promotions – is there some way to describe your content and the benefits of attending in a way that fits the way your audience thinks about the topic?

For example, perhaps you stress that your sales seminar will help attendees be more comfortable when closing sales. Customer research may reveal that prospects aren’t concerned about closing; they are more focused with learning cost-effective ways to generate qualified leads. Since that is also a topic covered in your seminar, change your marketing copy to more strongly emphasize this benefit.

A final approach is to meet prospects where they are … and then educate them. Use your marketing materials to show that you understand their frustrations and goals. Then show them how the content you offer in your seminar – although it may not appear at first glance to be what they need – will help them achieve their goals. Use examples whenever possible to illustrate the points you are trying to make.

For example, imagine that you offer a seminar teaching clients how to increase their profitability. You may find that a portion of your audience views their problem as a need to increase revenue. For this group, you need to show why focusing on profitability is more essential to overall success, which you could do effectively by using numbers and real-life examples from your customer files.

As the expert, you can see the big picture of what your clients need to learn to achieve their goals. Use customer research to find ways to better connect and communicate with them, so you can develop the marketing message needed to establish your seminar as the solution to their top-of-mind problems.

As an event promoter, one of your biggest challenges is finding ways to cost-effectively increase registrations at your seminars, teleseminar and webinars. Merely increasing response rates isn’t enough – you have to do so profitably.

One of the easiest ways to increase registrations and event profits is to market strongly to past event attendees. People who are already familiar with the quality of your content, the style of your teaching, and the experience you deliver at your events are more likely to attend future seminars than someone who has never heard of you or who has never purchased anything from you.

As you market future events, include a few special promotions that are targeted specifically to past attendees. Acknowledge their past attendance, and remind them of the high-quality content you delivered.

Next, show them how your new seminar dovetails nicely with the previous event’s material. This positions your new seminar as a way to build on the foundation they created by attending your previous training. In essence, it helps them generate an even better return on their investment. For example, imagine that your first seminar taught people where to find high-quality sales leads. Point out that participating in your second course to learn five proven closing techniques will help them get even bigger results from their lead-generation efforts.

Another approach is to set up your events as a series – step one, step two, step three, and so on. This gives you a solid base of prospects for each event. It’s entirely possible to fill the bulk of seats at the remaining events in the series simply by contacting registrants from the first class. My very best response rate to date – 84 percent – came primarily from using this technique.

To encourage attendees to finish the entire series of events:

• Offer a discounted rate for pre-purchasing a pass to the entire seminar series. Allow people to sign up for each event one by one – this will appeal to those who don’t want to make too big of a commitment. But reward those who make a strong commitment to their personal growth by registering for the entire series. If desired, you can offer a payment plan to spread their investment over the length of the series.

• Develop a series that ties closely to educational and training goals that are shared across an industry. The best example of this strategy is certification preparation courses. Employees in certain industries are required or strongly encouraged to get certain certifications to move up the corporate ladder. Offering a number of courses that help them prepare for the certification exams is an easy way to encourage prospects to attend multiple seminars. The more courses they take, the better prepared they will be for the exams … and the more likely they are to get the promotion and higher salary they want.

• Use courtesy calls to scoop up extra registrations. Rather than doing hard-sell telemarketing (which most prospects don’t enjoy and many promoters dislike just as much), make courtesy calls. This is simply a friendly call to see if they want you to reserve a seat in the next course. Because of their participation in the previous course, you want to make sure that they get a seat in the next level if they want it. Not only is this an easy way to remind your best prospects that it is time to sign up, most past attendees appreciate the thoughtfulness.

Conventional sales wisdom tells us that it takes more work to get new customers than to make a second sale to an existing customer. The same applies when selling seminar seats. To make your job easier and maximize your profits, give past attendees more opportunities and reasons to continue training with your company.

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 newer forms of 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. Still others are so busy that taking the final step of registering for your event never becomes urgent enough to do, even though they are interested in attending your seminar.

For these individuals, the solution is keeping your promotional 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:

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.

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, periodically post a short educational video to your web site, or offer regulary scheduled free teleseminars.

Without consistent follow-up, the time, money and effort you invest into generating leads will be wasted. By maintaining a consistent presence in your prospects' lives, you increase the chances of being there when they are finally ready to buy.

Hot off the wire ... congratulations are due to T. Harv Eker, author of the New York Times best-seller Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, on the sale of his personal development training company, Peak Potentials Training, to Singapore-based Success Resources, as well as to new Peak Potentials CEO Adam Markel.

Success Resources is Asia's largest event producer and has successfully produced Eker's events -- including the popular 3-day Millionaire Mind Intensive -- in Asia, Australia, and Europe. Get the full details here.