What Is an Online Event?
Online events take most often the form of teleseminars (conference calls or webcasts in a variety of formats) and webinars. A webinar contains visual and audio elements, while a teleseminar or webcast focuses on audio. A printed document may be added, and especially for the pure audio event it is very important to provide a clear structure to the listener in a printed format. The visual portion of an online event may be a power point presentation, or a transmission of the presenter’s computer screen.

What Is so Special with Online Events?
First of all a written text contains only a fraction of the information which gained by listening to the voice of a person. By Talking and listening it is much easier to create a bond of trust. If you want to learn more about this aspect of an online event, do a web search for “Arthur Joseph”. In this article I want to concentrate on more formal aspects of marketing with an online event.

Natural Reasons to Send Follow Up Messages
You get naturally a number of natural occasions to contact your audience through email, twitter etc: Announce the event, remind them to attend, when the replay is put online, when the replay is going offline. You can add a deadline to register, or to ask questions in advance. You can contact them this way. You can send five, six, seven messages in one campaign without being or sounding spammy.

Urgent Need for Action
You have at least two deadlines inherent in your online event which create automatic urgency: The events date and time, when it’s over, it’s over. And the second deadline is the time when you remove the replay. If you choose, you can add a third deadline by asking to register for the event or request a certain topic to be covered latest at a certain date.

Project Scarcity
Every direct mail copywriter will tell you to create a sense of scarcity. Your online event does that elegantly: You have only 200 phone lines available. Seats are awarded on a first come first serve basis. The more you have been able to become known as an expert in your field, the ability to ask you a question and interact directly and publicly with you will be seen as a scarce and valuable opportunity.

Sense of Belonging
To belong to a select group is a powerful motivator for humans. You can use this fact of course with your online event by making a special offer exclusively to the group attending the event. But you can even go a step further by doing events for your customers only, or for your twitter followers, Facebook friends and mailing list subscribers. If you do this properly, you can strengthen your relationship with your audience with each and every event you do.

Recommended Resources:

• Teleseminar Secrets by Alex Mandossian

Basic Functions
We use our “Tell a Friend” script for motivating people to inform their friends about an offer. The script makes it easy for our customers to spread the word. They need to fill only their own name and email plus the names and email addresses of their friends into a form, then press a button and, wow, the news goes out to 3, 4, 5 friends. Our script allows us you to offer an incentive if somebody sends the message out. We can also configure a campaign to reward senders if their friends take action after receiving the email, and we have control over the message which is passed along.

Why it Works
The basic power behind our tell a friend script comes from the fact that people love to share new and useful stuff with others. If the information they share is indeed new, surprising and helpful, it is like sharing a secret. And you all know that a secret must be shared with the “best friend”. If we add a carefully crafted reward into the picture, the system becomes even more powerful.

The Motivation
People share useful information and secrets (not readily available information) with several goals in mind. They may hope to …

• provide value to a friend
• strengthen a relationship
• shine as an experts, who knows more than others about a certain field
• earn an additional incentive
   
• but, if not done correctly, a reward can devalue the information and act as an disincentive

The Message
Our tell a friend script allows us to control the message which is sent out. We limit the script always to send a message written by us, because otherwise people could use it as a platform for sending spam. This could spoil our name create trouble with our internet service provider and even with governments around the world. The message need also to conform to the FTC’s disclosure requirements related to product endorsements.

Message Attributes
How does a perfect message for word of mouth marketing look? Here are a few points:

• It must be short and easy to understand
• It must be interesting, even surprising
• It must provide value to the recipient, even if he does not follow up with an action
• It must induce a follow-up action
• It must not feel and taste like spam, and neither be a hidden product endorsement or sales pitch

Composing a message for tell a friend scripts is copywriting. Every internet marketer needs to hone his copywriting skills continously in a cycle of testing and improving.

Message Examples
The program comes with a readymade message. Take that message as a placeholder. It may sound like

Hi [friends name]
I just found an incredible website offering the cheapest air tickets you can find anywhere, online or offline.
Check it out, click now on this link:
[Website URL].
You will not regret it.

I wish you all the best

[Sender's name]

The Test
Would you like to send this message to your trusted friends? Could you hope to gain their respect as an expert, and to strengthen your friendship? And if you received such a message, would you act on it? As far as I am concerned: no and no. If you plan to use a tell a friend script with such a placeholder message, better save the purchase price and use the money to dine with your wife.

Another Example

Dear [friends name],
did you know that there are a few airlines out that allow you to reserve your seat for your family visit next Christmas already in January and then to wait with the ticket purchase until September.

I got this information from Johannes Stockburger.
You find the details at

[website URL]

I hope this information will allow you to reduce the fare of your next holiday flight.

All the best

[sender's name]

The Same Test
Would you feel good to pass this message to a friend who travels frequently to see his family during the holiday season?
And would you mind to receive such a message from a friend who knows about your recent holiday travel adventures?

Follow the Rules
Our tell a friend script adds an opt-out link under this message, and we leave it there. It is just a sign that we and the person sending the message through the script accept the right of everybody else to decide which information they want to receive.
If the letter contains an endorsement, and the script offers at the same time an incentive to send the letter, we must disclose it. But we avoid endorsements and sales pitches in this message.

Conclusion
We try to craft a message providing immediate value to the reader. We avoid open or hidden sales pitches and endorsements in tell a friend messages. Otherwise we would have to include information about any reward offered for sending the email.
We take care that the system cannot be used for spamming, add an opt-out link to the end of the message and we do not allow the sender to change the message. Finally we safeguard the form with a CAPTCHA to prevent abuse and protect our reputation.

• Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
• Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
• Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%

I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.

Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.

Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.

Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.

What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.

1. Traffic Generation: You need to get visitors to your website, and lots of them.
2. Initial Sale: To receive money, you need to gain trust of your audience. The willingness to give you money for a promised product is certainly an expression of trust. The price of the initial sale may or may not cover the cost of acquiring this new customer.
3. Backend Sales: If you have earned the trust of your audience, and strive to earn their trust every day again, they will buy again and again. This is where the real money is.

This is a numbered list, because it is essential to go step by step. Why? It is much easier to sell to somebody, who has already bought from you, and was more than satisfied with your performance. You just need to tell him: “I have this, do you need it?” And he will at least consider your offer. But to come into this position, you must have made already a first sale (or at least built a relationship of trust with the customer).

To get a first sale, which means a sale to a person who never bought from you before, and who probably does not know you, you must have an excellent offer. And you need to present this offer in a very convincing way. You know this long sales letters and these product launches.
If you are not completely new to direct marketing, you know probably also, that the only way to get a real good converting sales letter or sequence of sales messages only by testing. There is no way to know for sure, which headline is performing better, which picture, background color, layout outperforms all others. But the difference between a conversion rate of 1 percent and 2 percent can be the difference between a big loss and a small profit, especially if you realize that you pay for your traffic. And you do pay, either with money, or with your effort.

To get valid test results, you need lots of traffic. If you run a split test only between two headlines or two pictures or two videos, you need at least 30 conversions on the weaker one, to have a reliable result. This means to test only two variants, you need at an average conversion rate 3000 visitors. If you do not have a strong stream of traffic to your website, you may just need a year or two to test every aspect of your sales process. In this case your product will be probably obsolete before you can roll it out.

To learn how the masters are using this sequence, read The Great Formula. Mark Joyner, the author, allowed me to offer you a free download.

It’s all rock-solid and can be put to use in your business starting today, right now. Hundreds of thousands of people, including me, have taken advantage of it over the last few years.

Check it out, it’s free !
Enjoy!

Johannes Stockburger

PS: Jeff launches a new coaching coaching program and offers this software to you as sample. Just take advantage of this great traffic tool. It is hassle free and well worth your time.

Why is this?

1. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all located in the US, and this is still the one country in the world where the right of free speech is more entrenched than anywhere else in the world.
   Mr. Obama is certainly more powerful than Mrs. Merkel of Berlin. But he would not dare to announce, that he wants to punish a British citizen living in Argentina, for a statement he made in a newspaper in Sweden. Merkel thinks she has a right to decide what other people may say about certain topics, not only in her kitchen cabinet, but around the world. (By bad luck she did not get the idea to invite Mr. Williams for a common visit in the German “Bundesarchive” to share a research day. It would have been interesting to know, whether in the archive are feasibility studies and cost-benefit analysis done before the holocaust machine was started. As I know the Nazis, they certainly did such studies in advance)
2. Social media, especially Twitter and YouTube are not restricted to one single infrastructure. You can get Twitter messages via SMS, a mobile internet connection, or the fixed internet. If the message is blocked on one channel, you can get it next minute via an alternative channel.
   You can use a simple mobile phone to take a picture or video, and you can send it on the spot via your G3 network connection to YouTube or to a photo network. Nobody, really nobody has the power to undo this. If the topic is hot, hundreds of people everywhere will have seen the video, and taken a copy, before anybody can remove it.
3. This means: If you live in a country with low regard for free speech, you better make sure that you have a strong social media presence. Otherwise you could wake up one morning just to find out that you get no more traffic on your web server, and that your email goes into the air. If you do not have a friend network or if you cannot reach your friends, you are helpless.

But what can keep you from sending a tweet from your mobile or any internet cafe around the corner?

Yours for life without sleepless nights
Johannes Stockburger

PS:
Another obvious aspect of this thought is: host your website on a server in a free speech country.

1. Define ad groups narrowly, with one or just a handful of closely related keywords (synonyms). If you put too many or too different keywords into one ad group, you will never know which keywords bring clicks and conversions from the content network.
2. Observe the statistics given by Google closely. It may take one or two days, but Google will show you, which websites produce clicks and conversions.
3. Move every websites which produces conversions at a profitable cost from “automatic placements” to managed placement. You do this by marking them and using the menu item “Manage placement and bid”
4. If you find websites which are producing lots of clicks but no conversions, block them by using the menu item “Exclude placement”
5. Watch the statistics of managed placements closely. If you feel you could get more conversions from a placement at a reasonable cost, you can increase your bid. If you find the cost per conversion is too high, reduce the bid or remove the placement.

By using this 5-step process you can often get more conversions from the content network at lower prices, than you could get from the Adwords search networks with the same keywords.

• be interested in the topic
• believe that you can give a valuable input
• give you at least some trust

You need to have that in mind if you start to channel traffic to you new web business, no matter what is the source of traffic. In essence you need to build an audience. This means you need to build a relationship to people who value your input, and who are willing to listen, if you send them a message.

If you have already an audience in the offline world, you can draw them into your internet world. This is the case if you have already a brick-and-mortar business. You can draw your existing customers and prospects into your internet activities by providing through the web enhanced service, like support videos, 24 hour ordering etc.

To get additional people into your audience, you can use many methods. Some of the more popular are:

• paid advertisements
• article marketing
• social networks
• teleseminars or webinars

About each of this methods there is a lot of material and training courses available. And it is important to master the ones you use. So, the best approach would be in the beginning to study one or two in depth.
I one of the next posts I will discuss some characteristics of each method. This will help to decide which is the best to start.