Topics/Titles for Your Seminar or Event

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TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: Let’s talk now about selecting a title and topic for your seminar.

Fred: Sounds good.

Avish: How important is it, that you create a great title?

Fred: Well, it’s really, really important. Particularly, if you’re not a celebrity delivering that seminar. By celebrity, I mean a well-known entity in your field, no matter what that field is. So that the seminar, the title that you select is just like a headline on an ad. It’s really crucial for your success.

Avish: Okay. Obviously the title is going to come out of the topic. So how do you decide what your seminar should be on?

Fred: Well, I mean — you should decide what your seminar should be on, based on what knowledge and expertise you have and what sort of specialized information you can deliver to that group. So let’s assume that you, you know, are really knowledgeable in your field.

Like, let’s use our good buddy Bill Louise here as an example. He happens to be a voice-over artist, knows a lot about the voice-over field. But rather than just doing a general seminar on how to get into voice-overs, which is a little bit too broad and might appear to people a little too general and fluffy. He came up with this new thing, which is how to make money doing audio book recordings, which is a subset, a smaller subset of the entire voice-over business. It is generally easier to sell a program like that to your group or to your target market than it would be to try to sell them something that’s more general.

Avish: Okay, so what you’re saying then is that because you want to make it different from stuff is out there? Why is it important that you niche down?

Fred: I think it’s important for a few reasons. Number one: that you’ll find that there will be a lot less competition. When you’re advertising a seminar or event in your field, there will probably be a lot of people that are giving something that is kind of general in nature. And it makes it a lot easier to sell something if you target, again, a very specific group. If you do that, choose not only a very specific group, but a very specific topic within your field.

So now, what will happen is, and again, looking at Bill as an example here. Voice-over artists — there is a lot of them out there, a lot of people interested in getting into the voice-over business. Now, when you say to them, hey, the title of this event is “How to Generate a six-figure income Recording Audio Books as a Voice-Over Artist” you’ve now said to them, wait a second. It’s not just voice-overs in general that I’m talking about here, but I’m talking about a very specific path and especially if it’s a topic that people are more curious about or interested in at the time.

It’s going to be easier to sell people on showing up to that very specific event as opposed to something more general that you’re trying to encompass everyone. But the nice thing is you pick something that’s a topic that most or many people in that particular field would be interested in, but yet it doesn’t appear to be too fluffy and general. Does that make sense?

Avish: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s just say that you have someone standing in front of you and they know they want to do a seminar, but they don’t know what they want to do it on. What would be the first thing or what would be the next step that you would suggest they take.

Fred: Well, it’s similar to people who are getting into the professional speaking business, which you do a lot of at speakingexpert.com. The first thing you want to do, is to help people figure out what background do they have, both personally and professionally, that would be of value to other people who are interested in topics that are in that field.

So you would want to look at and investigate what knowledge and expertise do you have. And a lot of people that are listening to this program will say, “well, you know know, I don’t really know what I know.” Well, chances are you know a lot about things that you haven’t even thought about.

For example, I remember doing a program back when, for a group of people in Oklahoma, where I sat the night before with a woman and she was struggling with the idea of a niche and which niche do you choose. And I said to her, “what exactly do you do well?” And she says, “Well, I do a number of things pretty well.” And I said, “Well what, give me an example?” And we’re sitting there at dinner and she points to her napkins and she says, “You know, I can fold this napkin in twenty-two different ways.” And I said, well, well, I almost said bully for you. But I said, “Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know if there’s demand for that. But, you know, she says, “Oh, no, no, no, people are really interested.” And I said, “Well, interested?”

And she had some very specialized knowledge in the field of napkin folding, which I sort of pooh-poohed in my head at the time. But the next day in that particular seminar, quickly discovered by doing a Google search, that there were a lot of people that had an interest in understanding and learning how to fold napkins. So, my bad for thinking that that wasn’t a topic. So there are a lot of people listening to this program that have very specialized knowledge. And by the way, that wasn’t her primary field of interest. But what we were looking for, and what anybody listening to this program should be looking for, is a combination of what you know how to do. No matter how mundane, list everything you can think of, and then go and take that knowledge that you have, that you could do a seminar about. Look and Google and search for things that people are looking for. And finally, look at how much competition there is. So you have a combination of your own personal background, whether or not other people would be interested in it, and number three is, how much competition is there.

Avish: Okay, just for people who haven’t done thing, I’d like to dig just a little bit deeper on those last two. How do you figure out whether people are looking for it? And how do you figure out if there is competition?

Fred: Again, our good friend Google would be very helpful in this area. Again, let’s take napkin folding as an example that we just used here. So we would go into the Google External Keyword Tool, which is, you know, if you just Google “Google External Keyword Tool,” you’ll find it.

And what we’ll do is we’ll put in the keywords, in this case two words, “napkin folding” napkin folding. And we’ll look at how many people are searching for that term on a monthly basis. Now, as it turns out, I remember back then and it may have changed, so if you check on me now, it might not be exactly accurate, but back then I remember it was slightly over 19,000 searches on a global basis, monthly. And I think that if you see, and again, even if you get 3000 people searching for the term, it doesn’t mean you should abandon the idea of doing the seminar. But what it means is, that you’re going to have a little bit of a harder time finding the group of people to sign up for that, A, and B, you’re probably going to have to charge more money and do a more expensive event.

So, first thing that we do is to determine whether or not there is demand, is to take the keywords and put them in the Google External Keyword Tool, and find out. The next thing we want to do is, you asked about competition. Let’s see what now. One of the things is that in the Google External Keyword Tool itself, there’s a little bar, a little bar that gets — the more colored and full it is, the more competition there is in the field. That will be one of your indicators.

The other thing is that when you actually Google the term, you pull up the top twenty or thirty sites. Go through them and look at them and see who else, if any in that group, is doing a seminar on a similar topic. So that would be something you’d want to do as well to determine competition.

Avish: When you’re looking for competition, is it good that there’s no competition? Are you looking for a lot of competition? What are you really looking for when you do a competition search?

Fred: That’s a good question. And if you have nobody competing for the topic, it might beg the question, is there demand? So I would be a little concerned if no one else was doing it. I would also be concerned on the other end of the spectrum, if a lot of people are doing that particular kind of training. For example, if you went to the whole voice-over field, voice-over seminars, or voice training. But audio book training, there might be less. So you can take and slice your seminar a little bit thinner, if you will, if there’s too much competition and try that route.

Avish: Okay, so to summarize the topic piece then, you want to look at your history and interests and then go to Google, discover whether there’s a need for that, whether people are looking for that. Then try to find something that has some competition, but not too much.

Fred: That’s exactly right.

Avish: Well, then let’s just tie it back to the title then, now that we’ve got our topic. What are the elements that go into a great seminar title that’s going to attract attention?

Fred: The title has got to be again specific enough to sort of stand out, yet not too specific to exclude all the people in the groups. So again, getting very, very redundant — using the audio book seminars as an example. Now, the beauty of doing a seminar that is more specific, so “Seven Things You Must Know as a Voice-Over Artist to Succeed Doing Audio Book Seminars.” So what we are doing is taking a specific slice of a niche, we’re promising a certain number of specific secrets that people want to know, because it usually begs the question.

Title selection is very similar to headline selection if you’re writing copy. You want to make it specific enough, with enough promises and intrigue. You know? So one of the formulas that people will always use is, “How to Blank, So That You Can Blank.” So, let’s just take you, you’re in the professional speaking business. What we could do, and it doesn’t have to be exactly in that formula, but “Seven Secrets to Double or Triple Your Income as a Professional Speaker in the Next Eighteen Months.”

Now, notice what we’ve done there. We’ve made a promise of the number of secrets, seven, and we’ve also given a time frame. We’ve geared it to professional speakers. So all of those things make that a good title.

Avish: Okay, great, so pick your topic, make your compelling title, and put it together like that. Thanks Fred!

Fred: There you have it!