Want To Hold A Seminar - Help!

[Jason Pereira]

Hey Warriors - hope everyone's having a good day.

Over the last few months, I've been more and more involved in offline-online efforts; I tried out the whole "offering local businesses website building services" after the craze on here and was astounded with the ease of it all. I'm now looking to move onto seminars.

The part of the world I live in has two main things about it... it's rich and doesn't know a lot about online activities. Mention Wordpress over here and you might as well be talking about nuclear physics.

I know that there are quite a few successful marketers on here, some of whom have conducted their own seminars - I'm looking for advice, if I could ask for it. I'm pretty much a complete newbie to the whole offline seminar thing; I have the place but not much else.

A couple main questions...

1) How much would you charge for a one day seminar for an audience that has no idea about internet marketing?

2) How would you promote it?

I have a few ideas of my own but would love any advice from those that have been there, done that (or even ideas from those that haven't!).

Thanks

[mikemcmillan]

Hi Jason. I see you are in Dubai. I have done quite a few live seminars, but the situation may be different here in the states than it is in your country. The way I got started about ten years ago was to contact school districts and community colleges. Most have outreach program or community education programs. The offer one-shot (one session) classes or seminars and promote them by mailing catalogs out to every resident in the city and surrounding area.

The first one I did was a nightmare. It sounded so easy, but there is a lot of organization involved. Within a few months however, I was getting 30-40 attendees each paying $79 for the seminar, and about 80% of them bought my related manual for $59 the evening of the seminar which lasted 3-1/2 hours.

I know you want to fill a convention center with a thousand people, but the big thing is to get your foot in the door, to get some experience, and to develop a good set of materials and an outline to follow. But even in these small venues it was easy to pull in $1,500 a night and I was doing these four nights a week.

Eventually, after a couple of years I was doing my self publishing seminars at large convention centers and hotels and getting a couple hundred people to attend. But the travel was a drain. Eventually I turned my seminars into an online course which reaches far more people and you can do it from home.

In Dubai I don't know if the formula of going through community colleges would work. But one key I would look at, rather than trying to do it all yourself, is to find a big brother--an organization that could help you promote your seminar. Maybe you could offer them through a library, some government organization, or some educational organization--or if there is some kind of Chamber of Commerce or government organization set up to help small businesses grow and prosper.

Even if you have to split your fees with a large organization, that organization may be able to help you market your event to such an extent that you make much more money working through them.

That's not the exact answer you were looking for, but maybe it will give you an idea. I know that Dubai is a well monied country, but I also know that real estate values are tanking and a lot of investors are in trouble. In tough times it would seem there might be some great opportunities to share our knowledge with others.

My sincerest best wishes for your success!

[travlinguy]

I don't know why you'd want to do a full day seminar to sell Websites to the locals. I'd get set up with a two-hour introductory, or 'teaser' gig where you give them a lot of useful, yet general info about getting their site online, etc. From there you go for the private consulting arrangement where you go into detail about what you have.