Frugal Marketing
(featured column)

Organize Your Own Seminar
Part 2: Now Get Paid For Your Seminars
by Shel Horowitz

Always spend the last few minutes on an evaluation, asking what was useful, what was missing, what could have been improved, or else pass out a simple evaluation questionnaire; this will help you refine your seminars and build your reputation as someone whose presentations are worth attending. 

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Once you've done a few free seminars, and you've gotten good feedback, you may decide to start charging to attend. Seminar prices are all over the map, from a nominal fee of $10 or so on up to many hundreds of dollars. The more valuable and unique your information, and the more people can put it to direct use and either save or earn significant money, the more you can charge for it. Eventually, this can become a significant income stream.

But of course, expectations are higher with paid seminars; you MUST deliver high value!

And, while you may still be able to use free publicity and get a room for free, in many cases, once you put a fee on your seminar some of those doors will be closed to you. So you need to work much harder to locate and fill your room. 

A hotel conference room or restaurant banquet hall may be your best bet if you don't have a space of your own, because it will include niceties like coffee and water for all attendees and other people do all the set-up. But you may have to pay dearly for the privilege.

You can still keep publicity costs very low by using your own lists, and especially the list of people who attended your free seminars. Invite them not only to attend but to refer others (give a slight price break if people register together). 

Add Internet postings, your own e-mail newsletter, and some carefully targeted direct mail into the mix, and you ought to be able to get at least enough to more than pay the bills.

If you're charging money, attendees will expect useful handouts. Prepare these in a word processor or presentation program (such as PowerPoint). Consider using slides or overheads, but don't let them control your presentation; they should be an add-on and not the whole thing--and if the projector breaks, you should still be able to carry on without the visuals.

Of course, if you have informational products--either your own or others'--bring them along. At the end of your session, make time to autograph and sell the materials to your attendees. (If you run out, it's a nice touch to take orders and then ship them later, but to charge the same price as if you hadn't run out--in other words, you offer to pay the shipping cost.)

If you missed last month's article, read Organize Your Own Seminar: Part 1

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Copyright © 2003 by Shel Horowitz

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