How (and Why) to Turn Your Book Into Teleseminars and Webinars

A great way for an author to build a business around a book is to turn the book into teleseminars and webinars. If you can turn the chapters of your book into a talk, speech, workshop, or class, you can turn it into a teleseminar or webinar. That means you explode the number of opportunities you have to speak to and teach people. In fact, you can do so from home but reach people all over the world.

In my last two posts, I explained how to use your book as the foundation for a speaking career and how to use your book as the foundation for classes and workshops. You can simply apply these same principles to creating presentations for teleseminars or webinars. In fact, you may be well on your way if you used my advice about creating a presentation for your class or workshop because this can be part of your webinar.

Let’s say you want to run a one hour teleseminar. Use your one-hour talk as the foundation. Shorten it by 15 minutes to allow for questions at the end of the call. (You should always have time for questions at the end of a talk anyway.) If you want to offer a one-hour webinar, and you’ve already taught a one-hour workshop or class, you’ve got your presentation done! Again, be sure you have time at the end for questions. You will need to reduce the number of slides in your class or workshop presentation if it was intended to be more than an hour long.

It’s a no brainer to create teleseminars and webinars based on any chapter of your book or even just on a part of a chapter. Simply:

• Choose the chapter.
• Use the title as the title of your presentation.
• Use each subheading as a primary talking point.
• Create bullet points to represent primary points made in clusters of paragraphs or important points you want to make based upon information that falls under those subheadings.

Why Authors Should Conduct Teleseminars

I can think of at least five reasons authors, and even aspiring authors, should offer teleseminars:

1. Teleseminars are the easiest online classes to teach. All they require is a phone line in most cases. However, in many cases you can also use the computer to sign into your account and track how many callers you have on the line, record the call, mute and unmute callers, and generally run the call in a very visual manner rather than by just pushing keys on your phone.
2. Many people enjoy being able to just call into a class rather than having to be at their computer to attend. This means they can listen in from their car or while folding laundry or exercising, for example. (Or they can do it while at work, and their boss won’t necessarily know!) The non-techies of the world often will opt to attend a teleseminars before they attend a webinar, so if you are appealing to an older crowd, keep this in mind.
3. Teleseminars offer a great way to build your email list. Every time you present one, the people who register actually should be signing up for a particular email list you’ve created for this topic. By segmenting your email list in this manner, you gain the ability to market to these people later. So, if your class is about a particular topic in your book (one chapter), you know these people are interested in that topic, and you can later sell them something related to that topic, if you want. You can build your list quite quickly by offering teleseminars frequently, or at least regularly. You also can determine the interests of your audience, or market, I this way. If a lot of people register for one teleseminar and not another, you know which one serves their needs. (However, how you market and the titles and keywords you use make a difference in response, too.)
4. Teleseminars offer you a chance to promote to new people as well as existing people on your list. Every educational teleseminars, whether free and for-fee, can be used to promote your products and services. Provide great content and then make an offer with a call to action at the end of the call. If you always give your audience high-quality information, they will come back again and again, and they eventually will purchase your products and services.
5. Teleseminars are a superb, and fairly easy, way to promote your book. You can hold them before, during and after your book launch. You can do them as you blog your book or write your book. They allow you to speak and teach and to interact with your audience—potential readers—in a very personal manner. It’s just like having a phone call with them.

Teleseminars vs. Webinars

So, why switch to the higher tech model, the webinar? Here are five reasons:

1. Some people are visual learners and enjoy seeing what you are teaching. Also, some people enjoy the online learning model provided by webinars. And these days, they can even see you if you choose to allow your screen-sharing technology to show a popup of your face. You can even do a Google Hangout and let them see you sitting at your desk or standing in your office! This takes the teaching to a different level as well.
2. With a webinar, you can share the presentation you created. They can see every slide you share, which, for some people, really enhances their learning. It can also make it easier for you to teach.
3. You actually have all the advantages mentioned above in the discussion about teleseminars: Attendees can just call in if they like rather than being at their computers; you build your mailing list and can create segmented lists as you do so; and you can promote to the new and old people who attend your webinars on the call as well as later.
4. You can pull the audio out of the video and actually provide both recordings to your list later. With a teleseminars, you can only provide the audio recording.
5. You can post your webinar as a YouTube video and your slide deck to a slide sharing site, such as slideshare.net.

Teleseminar and Webinar Logistics

While there are paid teleseminars services, until you have thousands of callers on your line, free services like freeconferencecall.com and freeconferencecallhd.com will work just fine. They have great service, and many options; call to find out which one is best for you. Be sure you get a free line with international numbers.

You can pay for an expensive service like GotoMeeting or MeetingBurner if you plan to do Webinars. However, Freeconferencecall.com can do it for you for under $20 per month if you use their StartMeeting service. And when you aren’t using the service, simply turn it off.

There are many experts out there who profess to have earned millions from webinars and teleseminars. They run very expensive courses to show you how to do the same. I can tell you that I have used them successfully to build my lists, to promote my books, products and services, and to fill courses.

You can run 90 minute, 60-minute or 30-minute teleseminars. Some days seem to be better than others—and you’ll hear lots of different advice—and some times. I try to do mine at times that allow both the east and west coast to participate, but you may also have attendees in other counties.  Optimal day and time often depends on your market. So, test it out. See what works best for you and your readership.

Photo courtesy of dejanj01 | stockfresh.com