Almost inevitably, when I post an entry which shows my warts, I receive positive and useful feedback and the inspiration to move forward. Yesterday’s observations, when I described the problems in marketing my first real Webinar: The Art and Science of Publicity: Publicity and media relations for your architectural, engineering or construction business: Three steps to success, resulted in readers sharing some worthy observations.
Bobby Darnell, for example, observed in an email:
I have to agree with Vivian…you give away too much!
My degree is a BBA in Finance and one of my investment professors said that ‘Advice is worth exactly what you paid for it.’
I believe you are sitting on top of a marketing revenue goldmine but just need to maybe reconsider how you promote yourself. Without ANY advertising, except for links on my blog, I sell a program called ‘Building New Business’ levels I, II and III. I have made over $20,000 in ‘passive’ revenue from this and my entire program is only 65 pages long. The reason I put ‘passive’ in quotes is that it is an interactive business development solution, meaning, I am on the phone with the client, working with them through the first part of the program. (The reason for it being ‘interactive’ is (1) I don’t want to just sell a ‘home-study’ course that people will buy and inundate them with stuff so they never complete it and get too busy to return it for their money back. I want my clients to see results. The second reason is (2) There is so much that I convey over the phone that prevents them from just copying and giving it away to their friends.
Anyway, we have talked about this some in the past and I would be happy to chat with you some more. You are an inspiration to me, the reason I began blogging and I believe you just need to think about maybe tilting your head a bit, looking at your business model a little differently and charge more!!
You can also read the comment from Cassandra Pollack:
I received your email 2 days ago, and it piqued my interest. I am planning on bringing up your webinar at our Friday sales meeting. Perhaps other people are interested, but they need to consider it, or need to talk to someone else to get the approval to spend the $. Or, it’s on their to-do list for “sometime before June 1.”
After writing the posting, I reached out for some marketing support and received confirmation that the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) will publicize the event in upcoming newsletters and member communications.
In my limited experience in co-ordinating Webinars for Bill Caswell, we have noticed that about half of the people register ahead of the event and half sign up on the day of the actual Webinar. This makes sense because most of us don’t want to tie up or commit our resources/time when we know that something might happen at the last minute to derail our plans — and conversely on the day of the event, we may know we have a true block of time available to spend on the project.
Bobby Darnell’s points about fees and individualization touch close to the project’s concept. The real value of the event for participants will be our one-on-one conversation to develop a basic media plan and system. This will be immediately useful.
Years ago, I learned the value of intelligent perseverance for what is really important in life. Thoughtful effort and “carrying on” is not the same as blindly repeating mistakes hoping somehow things will work out in the end. With media publicity and consulting, you need some luck and inspiration to succeed. But if you do enough of the right things, in the correct manner, you will likely ultimately hit a marketing home run.
