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Copyright © 2010 Willie Crawford
Since attending my first Internet marketing seminar in December of 2002, I have attended at least 50 other seminar, conferences, workshops, bootcamps, or cruises with groups of marketers. I attend so many events because they help me to grow my business exponentially by networking face-to-face with my peers.
Attending live events, provided you choose carefully, is well worth the meager investment usually require for admission. However, there are certain thing you need to do before, during, and after an event to gain the maximum benefit. Here are some of the things that I do and consider important in getting the most out of your seminar experience.
Have specific objectives for attending the event. The webpage describing the event will typically tell you what each speaker is going to cover. Networking and chatting about the event on social networking platforms such as Twitter will give you ideas for what your objectives should be.
Have specific people that you want to make sure that you meet and start to form relationships with. While you can certainly get to know some of the speakers, there will often be many others in the audience that it will be beneficial to get to know. By chatting about the event in forums, and on sites such as Twitter, you can often identify many of the other attendees beforehand.
I go as far as pre-arranging appointments with some of these people. Some seminars can get so hectic/busy that you may have difficulty cornering a particular popular speaker or attendee. By pre-scheduling an appointment, you avoid that problem. It's probably best to schedule these appointments in the evenings, and you can simply arrange to meet the individual in the hotel lobby, or in a restaurant for a cup of coffee.
Find a seminar buddy if you haven't previously attended a live event. Many of the seminar "regulars" will know each other and it can feel uncomfortable until you get to know these folks. Find someone else who is relatively new and latch on to them, and the two of your can offer each other mutual support.
You may also want to share a room to reduce expenses, and so that you have someone to discuss the seminar experience with. Seminar hosts usually arrange for special discount prices with the hotel where the event is being held, so the room should not be overly pricey. However, you may still want to share a room.
After the seminar, stay in touch with your seminar buddy, and make them your accountability partner. Tell them which things that you learned at the seminar that you are going to implement, and ask if you can use them to nudge you in that direction with weekly calls. These calls can be over Skype so you don't need to incur any long distance phone charges.
Your accountability partner should keep you focused and moving in the direction that you said you were going to go when you were pumped up by the seminar atmosphere. You should do the same thing for your seminar buddy.
Many of the speakers at seminars offer coaching or mentoring packages. You may also want to enroll in the coaching program of a speaker that particularly resonated with you. They may be more effective at motivating you than an accountability partner.
If you have a pet project that you hope to find joint venture partners for at the seminar, take along some flyers or brochures explaining your project. You may not get an opportunity to fully explain your project to all of the people that you want to. However, you can often just hand a brochure or presentation folder to some of these individuals and ask for permission to follow up with them later. Most will agree to that.
Take along lots of business cards with accurate, complete contact information. Many people at live events automatically ask for your business card. Passing out cards with the wrong email address or phone number, that you have to mark out, and write in the correct one comes across as very unprofessional.
Believe it or not, I've encountered online marketers who had business cards printed out and didn't think to put their email address or website url on the cards. Plan far enough in advance and plan thoroughly.
Take a digital camera or a portable video camera. You can buy a Flip digital video camera for about $50 in many places. While at the seminar take photos with lots of the attendees. Also shoot video of various happens at the seminar. You may also want to record you interacting with various attendees.
You can upload the videos to video sharing sites such as YouTube and use them in creative ways in your marketing.
With still digital images you can attach them to emails when following up with individual. This serves as a memory jogger if both you and the other individual are in the picture.
Use the photos and videos on your websites or blogs, politely linking back to the other person's site. I use photos of me with a product owner when doing a product promotion for them. Posting a photo of the two of you on your blog as you talk about their product adds credibility.
I also use digital photos of me with the other person in the follow-up system that I use. First of all, realize that when you give someone your business card at a live event, most people won't follow up with you. They get back home, fall back into their old routine, and don't follow through on many of the things that they planned on doing at the seminar.
Therefore, YOU should be the one to follow-up. Here's how I do it, and recommend that you do it to. I use a greeting card system called Send Out Cards that allows you to compose and send real greeting cards right over the Internet. You can add digital images to these cards. Their system has over 15,000 cards to choose from, which is really amazing. You just log-in, compose a card, preview it, and when you click the send button, the company prints out your card in full-color, puts it in an envelope with first class postage, and mails it to anywhere in the world.
So, to follow-up with an individual, I just download the photos that I take at conference to my computer. Then I design a card that basically says it was nice to meet them and let's keep in touch. If we discussed doing a specific project together, I suggest when and how we get started. I also upload a picture or two of us taken at the event to the card. This serves as a nice memory jogger.
The Send Out Cards system is very versatile and even allows you to send out a series of pre-composed cards, much like an autoresponder series, so if you are particularly busy, you could set up several cards in what's called a campaign, and follow-up with individuals from a given event semi-automatically. Maybe you meet two dozen people at an event who all agreed to help with your product launch, so you could send them all the same follow-up sequence building up to your launch.
If you'd like to check out the system that I use and love, you can take it for a test drive (sending a few cards on me) by visiting: http://WillieCrawford.com/greetingcards/ I'm willing to do this because if you become a customer of the company, I'll earn a commission on each card that you send. I'm also looking for team members to help me sell the cards!
I often go back to my room while at a live event and send follow-up cards out before even leaving to head back home. That's how I make sure that I get things done in a timely fashion.
I also implement many of the things that I learn from speaker and attendees while still at the seminar location. It's easy to plan on doing something when you get back home and then somehow never get around to implementing it. However, if you do at least one or two things while still at the seminar, you set thing in motion. Once you set things in motion, overcoming inertia, momentum often kicks in and you find that you benefit a LOT more from having attended that live event.
The final thing that I encourage you to do is consider creating a product while at the live event. You'll often have lots of experts at these events, and this makes this the ideal environment for creating an interview product. You can easily do a dozen interviews creating either audio or video recordings.
Many of the speakers, and attendees who are subject matter experts, will be honored to grant you an interview. To showcase their expertise, many of them will also reveal little known fact without your having to work too hard to drag it out of them. You'll get back home with a nice interview product that you can package and sell, or use as a bonus with one of your other products.
Internet marketing seminar are inexpensive (some are even free), but if you follow the tips offered in this article you'll turn that tiny expense into a profit.
About the Author:
Willie Crawford has been marketing goods and services over the Internet since 1996. A professionally trained speaker, Willie teaches at seminar and workshops around the world. Willie also spends considerable time sharing his knowledge and experience inside a private membership community called The Internet Marketing Inner Circle. Check them out for only $1 at: http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com/
Follow Willie Crawford on Twitter.
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