How to Make $186.89 a Minute
“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.” – Jane Austen
I was so excited my hands were shaking.
It was 7:13 p.m. on August 25, 2004, and I had just completed a content-rich, 70-minute teleseminar interview with personal-development and goal-achievement guru Brian Tracy.
Three hundred forty-two participants paid the $29.95 tuition without raising an eyebrow, and 83 percent of them opted to pay $10 more (the “upsell”) to get unlimited download (and replay) access to our online release of the audio files and enhanced transcripts of the interview.
If you do the math, you’ll discover that the 70-minute teleseminar generated $13,081.50 in revenue, or $186.89 a minute. But the story doesn’t end there. Fifty-eight of the tele-participants decided to pay $30 more to acquire our “offline” release of a three-ring binder with the enhanced transcripts and an audio CD of the interview – to chalk up another $1,740. All told, we racked up nearly $15K in income for just a few hours of work!
Since 2001, I’ve trained entrepreneurs, independent professionals, and small-business owners to utilize teleseminars in combination with the Internet to boost and accelerate their business profits. Teleseminars have changed my life. Their leveraging power made it possible to turn my 2001 annual income into an hourly income in 2006… 16 times.
If you’re an entrepreneurial CEO, public speaker, author, or information marketer, you owe it to yourself, your business, and your lifestyle to take a closer look at the revenue-generating potential of teleseminars – even if you’ve never listened to one.
In my experience, teleseminars are the fastest, easiest, most economical way to increase your sales and profits without spending a single penny more on marketing or advertising costs. Best of all, you can conduct them from the comfort of your home, your office, a hotel room, or virtually anywhere else in the world. All you need is a bridge line and a telephone, and you’re good to go. (For unlimited usage of a bridge line at just $47 per month, visit InstantTeleWebcast.com.)
I should know – because, as I write this, I have over 14,100 teleseminar students from every inhabited continent on Earth. I even teach entrepreneurial CEOs an eight-module tele-training program on the subject called Teleseminar Secrets (TeleseminarSecrets.com), which commands $2K and starts on the second Monday of every December.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back-pedal a bit and analyze why the Brian Tracy teleseminar was so successful.
If you visit Brian’s website (BrianTracy.com), you’ll find that his typical audio program is available for $20. Why, then, can he and I command twice as much for a teleseminar? The answer is: greater “marketing intimacy” (in other words, live access), coupled with a 2,437-year-old technology championed by Socrates.
Secret of Socrates Rediscovered
If you follow this time-proven three-step “Socratic” method of inquiry, you too can capture more profits faster, better, and with less effort, even if you’re on a bootstrapped marketing budget.
Step 1: Ask Your Market. Most marketers create their message and then find their market to “monetize” the message. I do the opposite. I first “ask” members of my market what they want, and then ask them to pay for it.
For instance, the Brian Tracy teleseminar didn’t start on the evening of August 25, 2004. It started three weeks prior, with a worldwide survey posted online. After capturing over 860 questions that went into a special database I’ve developed, I chose the 12 most popular topics.
Step 2: Promote to Your Market. You’re not the “marketing genius” – nor am I. Your “market,” collectively, is the marketing genius. Once you adopt this mindset, you’ll never engage in marketing guesswork again. That’s why, after two weeks of getting survey responses (and “opt-ins”) for Brian’s teleseminar, I was ready to post an online sales letter – one that was ostensibly written not by me but by my “market.”
If you visit JustAskBrian.com/teleseminar, you’ll see the actual sales letter that had a conversion rate of over 22 percent and generated over $13,000 in teleseminar tuition fees. How did I come up with a sales letter that was ostensibly written by my “market”? Simply by writing out the survey results.
I happen to know dozens of world-class copywriters who wrack their brains for days trying to come up with a winning “appeal” or “hook” to reel in more sales. I don’t do that, because it’s too stressful for me. And, frankly, I don’t like to work that hard.
Instead, I just ask the people in my market what they want most, and then I give it to them. Follow this process, and you’ll soon realize you no longer need to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with your marketing dollars, because this system eliminates guesswork.
If you’re starting to smile because you’re beginning to realize how easy teleseminar marketing can be with my no-nonsense “Socratic” selling strategy, I want you to know that Step 3 gives you an even greater advantage to almost effortlessly crush your competitors.
Step 3. Repurpose Your Content. Because teleseminars produce audio content, it makes sense to “repurpose” that content and monetize it beyond the money you make from your live event. Put the recording on a CD and sell it. Transcribe the audio and sell the transcripts. Make MP3 downloads available online so your listeners can more “intimately” listen to you on their iPods or MP3 players.
For entrepreneurial CEOs like me, repurposing is the most powerful moneymaking force in the information-publishing world.
Although the repurposing possibilities are almost endless, the single most important thing you must do to monetize your repurposed teleseminar content is make it available for purchase before it’s even published. (Or, in this instance, recorded.) In info-marketing circles, we call this the “pre-publication” release, and it’s mind-boggling how many marketers leave thousands of dollars on the table by completely ignoring this strategy.
This is what I was doing when I first sold the $29.95 “admission” fee to the Brian Tracy teleseminar and then offered the $10 “upsell” for the unlimited download “recordings.” (In my experience, this upsell strategy outperforms selling the teleseminar for $39.95 with no upsell.)
Repurposed Teleseminars Make More Profits
Simply ask your market what it wants, promote to your market based on those results, and repurpose your teleseminar content to scoop up more profits with almost no effort.
It’s that easy. And besides Brian Tracy, I’ve done this with other “thought leaders,” such as Jack Canfield, Les Brown, Mark Victor Hansen, Vic Conant, Joe Polish, Michael Masterson, Joe Vitale, Janet Attwood, Jay Abraham, Stephen Covey, Michael Gerber, Zig Ziglar, Gay and Katie Hendricks, Harv Eker, Barbara DeAngelis, Jay Conrad Levinson, and Ken Blanchard … just to name a few.
Best of all, you don’t have to be famous to become a seven-figure teleseminar marketer. Like me, you can interview famous people in your business niche and share the profits – and create many ultra-fruitful strategic alliances along the way – all from the comfort of your home office.
[Ed. Note: Alex Mandossian, CEO of Heritage House Publishing Inc., has generated over $233 million in sales and profits for his clients and partners via “electronic marketing” media, such as TV infomercials, online catalogs, 24-hour recorded messages, voice/fax broadcasting, teleseminars, webinars, podcasts, and Internet marketing since 1991. You can get Alex’s insights into information marketing this fall at ETR’s Info Marketing Bootcamp. To get free instant access to Alex Mandossian’s blog on Electronic Marketing, please visit AlexMandossian.com.]