Basically, there are two things that must be in place before any of your offerings can be successful (read: profitable). One is that it must be designed for a niche. So, there must be a group of people who you are targeted to offer your product/program/service toward.

The other is that is must solve a problem that your niche wants solved. Sounds obvious, yes? But many times, we create what we think our niche NEEDS instead of what it WANTS. It’s critical to know the difference and to use that knowledge to create your offerings.

There are many ways you can find out what it is that your niche wants most so you can create it and offer it to them. One of those ways is to hold a teleseminar that both delivers value to your participants as well as provides you with market research to use to inform your product line.

The best thing is that these types of teleseminars can be easy to fill and fun to host. Here are the steps:

1. Decide on the topic

Your best best is to choose a topic that’s broad in scope, meaning that it discusses a problem that the majority of your niche struggles with and would like help in solving. This will get you more people on the call as well as give you a more diverse group from which to learn from for your own market research purposes.

2. Use a mini-application

When people register for your teleseminar, ask them to fill out a short questionaire. This really begins your market research because you’ll be asking them what it is that they are struggling with specifically in relation to the bigger topic.

For example, if your topic is “How to Balance My Business and My Family and Still Have Time for a Great Life”, one question you may ask in your questionaire is, “What’s the ONE thing you struggle with most when it comes to balancing your business and your family? Please be as specific as possible so I can give you some specific strategies to help!”

You could also ask the question in another way: “What two questions do you have that I must answer on this teleseminar for you to feel it was of value to you?” You may also want to ask where your participant is at present with regard to your topic and where they’d like to be.

Tell them you’ll be answering as many questions as you can on the teleseminar itself, to engage people right from the start when they are registering for the call, as well as encourage them to show up in the first place (this is particularly helpful if this is a fre*e call).

Also, don’t be shy about telling your participants that you’ll be using their comments and feedback as part of growing your own business. For example, if you’re writing a book and you need some more content for a certain section, hold a teleseminar on that topic and share with your teleseminar participants that they may be featured in the book if their comments, suggestions or examples are used. People will jump to sign up for your call!

3. Ask questions

At this point, you have an outline for the call itself, and now you’ve filled it in with more content with the answers to the questions that were submitted when people registered.

The next step is to weave those questions and answers into the conversation on the call itself, and ask if there are MORE questions or comments around them. This will give you more in-depth and insightful information for your purposes, as well as be valuable to those on the call. This is when you really want to give the space and the time for your participants to talk (count 5 Mississippi’s if you have to to stop yourself from filling any silence while people are thinking).

Be sure to record the call so you can listen carefully to the conversation again and take notes about what you hear that your participants are looking for in terms of solutions to their problems.

4. Send a follow-up email

As soon as possible after the call, send a follow-up email thanking your attendees for their time and participation. Include notes from the call that you’ve cleaned up and converted to a neat PDF file for them as well for added value.

What you’ve done with this is type of ‘Open House’ teleseminar is invited your attendees to ask you anything they want about your area of expertise. With the information you glean, you can easily tailor your next product around the things they most want, which equals a successful offering for you!

Do you want to Master the Art of Teleseminars to Make Thousands of Dollars?

In my brand-new L.E.A.P.™ GOLD program, we’re going to go well beyond these basics with this topic, including delving into cutting-edge methods and new technologies to ensure your teleseminars are the ones your target market clamors for!

Although there are fancier ways to teach ‘virtually’, teleseminars are still HOT, simple to do, have stood the test of time and, with the methods you’ll learn from me, are proven to make more sales. You can be creative with them, making them more fun for you to host as well as for your attendees, and you can make A LOT of money from just a single hour of work that you can do in your pajamas from your office, back deck, front porch, dock or sailboat (I speak from experience here)…

We’ll cover both free and paid teleseminars, which to offer and why, what technology to use, pricing, what to do if something goes wrong (it happens to all of us at one time or another), and much, much more. I’m even going to share all my templates and other how-to pieces to model to host your own successful teleseminars.

Interested? Reserve one of the *very* limited seats TODAY

I’d love to know your thoughts on hosting your own teleseminars – please feel free to share your comments below.

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I have a successful business because I know what to do and I do it. I make a good income, I work with clients I enjoy, I get to be creative and I get to do all of that in a way that serves my family and my life.

So when I attended a small intensive led by Laura West, my intention was not to get more strategies or techniques, but to truly shift the way I envision my business as I reinvent it in these shifting current entrepreneurial waters. And that’s exactly what I got – here are just four of those shifts:

1. Money comes from working within your creative power centers

Laura’s created this powerful body of work around the ‘creative power centers’ that crystallized where I needed to spend my time and energy on to evolve my business in the way that honors my life and my own strong boundaries around that life.

For me that means really listening and following my intuition more, taking care of my personal energy more, increasing a team member’s responsibilities, and adding a whole lot more ‘Alicia flavor’ to the mix.

2. Always come back to what I want

When the thoughts get muddled and the confusion sets in with all the choices of what to do in my business (and my life), I will keep coming back to this single question:

What do I want?

And I’ll keep asking it until what I want is crystal clear. Then I’ll know exactly what to do.

3. Systems and structure equals more freedom

I’m great with systems – we have one for pretty much everything in my business – but structure is lacking a bit, and that’s because I can operate well on the fly. However, just thinking about how a little bit more structure would benefit me and my team and how that would lead to more freedom for me got me excited about actually putting that structure in place right away.

4. My non-negotiables are my success

I’ve been looking more closely at this and with the focused time at the intensive, I realized that a big attraction piece for my audience are my non-negotiables (family first, summers off, etc.). From that place, I was able to draft the new design of my business and I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come.

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Building a responsive, high-quality list of email subscribers is the key to leveraging your marketing time and increasing your income. Here’s 6 specific ways to show you how:

1. Don’t Hide Your Opt-In Form

Don’t make your website visitors search for the opt-in form to your list. To make it super-simple for your visitors to sign up, do what I recommend to my clients – just a simple one-page website, that I call an Invite Site, where the only thing you’re doing on the site is inviting your visitors to sign up for your list.

Then there’s no confusion or question about what it is they should do. Once they sign up, you can redirect them to another page where they can gain access to more information from you.

2. Offer a Free Taste

Encourage people to sign up for your list by offering them something of value for free in exchange for their email address. Good choices are a mini-ecourse, a special report, a checklist, or a short audio program. Add some enticing copy describing the benefits your visitor will receive from your gift to increase your sign-ups.

3. Keep it Simple

If you only ask for your visitor’s first name and email address, you’ll get a higher response rate, meaning more people will sign up for you list.

Obviously, if you’re offering a physical Free Taste (like a CD), you’ll need to get your visitor’s shipping address as well. Just try to limit the information you’re asking for to increase the number of people who sign up.

4. Add Your Privacy Policy

Make your visitor feels comfortable giving you their email address by adding a short privacy policy right there with your opt-in form. Something as simple as “We will never share your email address, period” should suffice.

5. Include Testimonials

Even adding two or three testimonials of people who’ve signed up for your list and received your Free Taste will increase your list numbers. If you currently don’t have anyone on your list, send a copy of your Free Taste to a handful of colleagues and ask for testimonials in return (and offer to do the same for them).

6. Getting People to the Opt-in Page for Your List

Once you optimize your opt-in page, you need to get people to it. There are literally hundreds of ways that you can drive traffic to your web page where people sign up for your list (we cover 42 of them in my 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™), but here are three of the best:

1. Utilize your email signature in every email you send out. Be sure you point people to your opt-in page in your signature with some enticing copy as to why they should click on your link.

2. Write and submit articles, including the link to your opt-in page in the author’s resource box.

3. Do a simple pay-per-click campaign to drive targeted traffic to your opt-in page.

Follow these tips and you’ll start increasing your email list subscribers today.

I’d love to know which of these resonates with you the most – please leave your comments below.

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“Do I always have to come up with something new?”

This is a question I’m often asked by my private clients, and the answer is a resounding YES, if you want to continue to grow your business.

Besides boring your target market after awhile, you’d get bored, too, so yes, you want to breath some life into your business by consistently coming up with new offers. This helps keep your list interested, and it helps you stay cutting edge in your market.

Here are 5 easy ways for getting and staying hot in your market:

1. Be recognized…

Start showing up – in-person and/or virtually – at events that are offered for your target market. Throw your own events. Be seen on discussion lists and popular blogs where your target market hangs out. Join the conversation, offer your valuable insights and comments, ask good questions and give good answers. Joint venture with your colleagues and double your efforts with half the work. Join associations made up of your peers and volunteer to be on a committee or head up a project. There are loads of ways to build your recognition in your market. Pick a couple and start doing them NOW.

2. Be open to offering other’s products…

If you’ve hit a creative low point, there’s always the option of offering someone else’s product to your list. It’s still new and fresh material to them and a new offer for you to make. Make a list of five of your colleagues who each have a product offering that complements what it is that you do and start building a relationship with them now (if you don’t have one already), so when you want to offer their product, they’ve gotten to know you and your business a bit so they may be more willing to say yes to that kind of strategic alliance.

3. Be more ‘serviceable’…

Take a fresh look at your service offerings. Write down what they look like currently on one sheet of paper, including all the features and benefits. One a separate sheet of paper, write down how you’d like your services to look, including all the features and benefits. You might be surprised to find a real difference. Based on what you discover, consider repackaging your current offerings in a way that better suits you and your clients.

4. Be trendy…

Enter the conversation already going on in your client’s mind to spark new ideas. What are they reading, seeing on TV, involved in right now in their world? What current event or newsy item or popular TV show can you tie into your sales copy for your offerings that will keep it fresh and make stand out in an already crowded marketplace?

5. Be occasion-oriented

Tie a promotion into a holiday or special occasion. There’s hardly a week that goes by these days that doesn’t have some sort of celebration attached to it. Or you could make up your own. For example, January (New Year’s) and September (Back-to-School) are great months for launching new products, programs, or services that allow the client to do, be and have better.

If you want to keep your clients and customers, keep them interested. Always be offering them something new, either in the way of a new product, program or services tailored to their wants or by tweaking your current offerings to keep them fresh and make them stand out in an already crowded marketplace.

I’d love to know which one of these 5 resonates with you the most. Please leave your comments below.

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Once you’ve figured out your niche (or you’ve at least narrowed it down significantly), it’s time to figure out what problems they are struggling with, and what they want by way of solutions. Remember, if you will only ask your market, it wants to help you create the products it wants to buy!

How do you find out what your target market wants? There are several ways to get this information and use it to help you create an offering that will solve your niche’s problems and make a profit for you at the same time.

The best way is to do your research. The most critical research to do is to join the conversations that your market is having:

Here are two ways to do this:

1. Simple: Ask them!

Ask your prospects a simple, open-ended question, like “What’s your biggest challenge with building your business online?” or “What’s the one thing you’d like to learn more about that relates to balancing your work and family life?” Tailor the question to your niche and use the information you receive to help spark ideas for new products and services.

2. Almost as Simple: Do a simple survey…

…that asks 1-10 questions using a survey tool like Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. This allows you to ask more specific questions to elicit more specific responses. Doing a survey like this really helps you to NOT waste your time creating offerings your target market simply doesn’t want.

Once you’ve figure out what your niche’s problems are, you can create or find the solutions to solve those problems. Your solution can be packaged in a variety of ways: an ecourse, a PDF manual, an ebook, an audio download and/or CD, group programs, teleseminars, e-manuals, etc.

Here’s a very simple process to follow to create a product to add to you funnel quickly:

1. Do a free or paid live class on your product

Once you’ve done your research and you’ve chosen a topic your target market is interested in knowing more about, offer a 1-hour teleclass on that topic. Cover three points and offer your solutions. Most important is to make sure you record the teleseminar, as this is what leads to a product for you.

As you’re designing your outline for the class, do so in a way that creates notes for your participant. (If you’re a member of my Coaching Cafe, you know that I give very detailed class notes, so you know what I mean by this).

As the end of your live teleclass, you’ll have the recording and notes to then…

2. Package it virtually.

Now you have the audio recording and notes to offer as a bundled product and…

3. Package it into a tangible product.

You can then take it up a notch and turn it into a physical product and offer it that way as another income stream for you.

And here are some of my other favorite tips for simple product creation:

- If you don’t have a list or access to a list, you can offer a free class on a topic and then charge people for the product down the road, or afterwards.
- Another option is to have someone interview you on your topic to create your product. You can offer the questions along with the interviewee’s questions. This is a good strategy if you don’t think you can get enough people on a call.

- You can record any live classes or workshops you’re holding as well, and re-package those presentations virtually or tangibly.

- Try to record everything so you always have the option to offer it at some level down the road.

- Promote your teleclass to your list, via colleagues who are willing to spread the word (especially if it’s free) and at teleclass listing services.

- Promote on the discussion lists and groups that you’re a part of, promote it there with permission and on the appropriate day.

- Pricing: If this is a new process for you, if you’re offering your topic for the first time and sort of feeling out your market, go with the lower end. If you’re putting together a 90-minute class with lots of comprehensive step-by-step information, charge more.

- When it comes to creating your big-ticket item, they can be created from all these little products along the way. So, if you were creating a product a month or every other month, that gives you 6-12 products at the end of the year that can be packaged together into your big ticket item.