There are two primary things I suggest you do.

Most seminars are boring and teach you very little. In order to get people to shell out a lot of cash you have to be giving them some real value. When I do my fred info bootcamps, I give people a full week of education on how they can create and market their own info products.

The reason why it’s possible for me to charge what I do for this event is that people leave with a FINISHED product and a system to market it. The other reason why prices can be set fairly high is that it’s a small group and I put people up in my house in Las Vegas. This has a strong appeal and will make it easier to get people to part with their cash.

You also have to be willing to truly do the best for your attendees. People will want to hear from people who have been to your event. This is were video testimonials are really helpful. The ones that I have on the site that promotes this event are incredibly effective. I suggest you take a look at them to see why they are so powerful.

Your seminar attendees can smell if you’re merely out to take their money. OR, if you’re truly interested in helping people. Very few people can effectively fake it. Don’t be one of them!

The best way to maximize event marketing promotions is by doing joint venture email marketing. Identify others who have email lists that you feel would be responsive to your seminar offer and then ask the list owner to e-mail either a pre-written email to ensure effective promotion or a link to your carefully written Web site. You split your profit with them in return for their help.

You can find people with whom to do these joint ventures by scouring the Web for sites that rank high on the search engines or get a lot of traffic and whose audience has something in common with yours. Sometimes, these sites are competitive to yours and in many of those cases, the site owners may not want to help you become more successful.

You generally split the gross registration fee profit with joint venture partners 50-50. Let’s say you have an event for which you’re charging
$997 and on which you have hard costs of about $30 per attendee. You would give a joint venture partner about $480 for every person who registers from their list or site. Why so much? It gives your joint venture partners a reason for doing the deal and it only costs you $30 out of pocket for each additional person.

This is a great way to promote because you put no money up front. Also, if you have a decent back end the lifetime value of these new- found customers could be considerable. (Remember that once they sign up for your seminar or product, they are no longer exclusive property of your joint venture partner.)

This is my preferred way to promote seminars. If you use this method exclusively, you can break even with even a tiny number of total registrations.

Direct-Mail Joint Ventures

Despite the clear advantages of email marketing, many seminars are still being promoted via direct mail. I recommend that you move away from direct mail as your primary means of marketing. Why? The cost of printing and postage make it more difficult for you to recover your money.

But if you are going to go the direct-mail route, explore joint- ventured physical mailings. The arrangements here can be many and

varied. The person whose list you are mailing to is concerned about the integrity of their list.

You will usually compose the letter, pay for the mailing and then give the mailing list owner a per-name fee or a percentage based on response.

With the right list, this can be a very effective way to promote your event. Given the incredibly high costs associated with this type of a mailing, however, you’ll want to test the list before mailing the entire lot.

The nice thing about using this technique is that once people respond, they become a part of your in-house list. If your lifetime customer value is high, it might even make sense to use this method of promotion if you can only achieve a break-even on the front end.

You can also rent various types of mailing lists both on and off line to promote your seminar or event. Generally, this method does not pay off. Perhaps the biggest reason: a seminar priced higher than
$100 or so requires that people know who you are. Unless you have some celebrity in the field, a blind mailing to a list of people who have a specific profile won’t likely sell anything with a very high price tag.

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