Internet Business Seminars
February 11th, 2009 | Published in Uncategorized | 6 Comments
I had a hectic weekend. I spent it at The Think and Get Rich Bootcamp in Dublin. It was about €160 to attend and for that we got 11 world class speakers on topics ranging from writing a book to selling on eBay. There were two sessions in the morning and two in the afternoon. This seminar is pretty much a polar opposite of the upcoming Dublin Bizcamp. Each speaker would give about an hour of ‘education’ on something to do with creating an online income followed by about half an hour or a sales pitch. That was fine by me. The speakers really were excellent (for the most part) and even the sales pitch gave you some ideas.
The sales pitches were so good that even I had to hold on to my chair to avoid signing up to one of the many courses available. The upsold courses varied in price between €1,500 to €3,000. Most of them promised the opportunity to make tens of thousands of euros a month in online income. That does sound a little too good to be true which is what made a lot of people hold back from purchasing. Personally, I am finding it hard to keep on top of what I have, rather than looking for something new to get involved with. If I had seen someone offering training on setting up an affiliate plan I might have gone for it but as it turns out there wasn’t one on offer.
Anyway, if you would like to sell during a talk (which I don’t do myself), this would be the way to do it based on what I saw at the weekend.
- Establish how stinking rich you have become via whatever medium it is you chose (property, internet marketing etc)
- Establish that it wasn’t always that way referencing any working class background or dire financial story you have available to you.
- Explain your ‘lightbulb’ moment that made you realise that you didn’t need to suffer in poverty.
- Describe your meteoric rise (including picture of fancy cars and houses)
- Demonstrate the great deals that are out there to be had (using case studies)
- Make your offer, outlining at least 5 components demonstrating that each is worth at least the price that you will eventually offer your product at.
- Total up the total cost of each component which should come out at anywhere between 5 and 20 times your eventual offer price
- Discount that by 55%
- Then offer a special limited offer to anyone who signs up on the day for the first x attendees. x in this case would be somewhere between 12 and 40.
- Demonstrate that this is the only time you will be able to avail of this price.
Is this high pressure selling? Well – you could say so. On the other hand – it might just be the most effective method of driving sales. I’ve kept in touch with someone who has signed up for the events and they will be reporting back at the monthly Goose Forum. Lets see how much value is delivered.
February 12th, 2009 at 11:55 pm (#)
I too found it hard not to rush out next door to sign up for one of these “super discounted courses” and at one stage i did go out to hand over my dosh for one of them, but the long que gave me time to re-think and i ended up not going for it. I did find the weekend of value to me as i am trying to learn about the whole idea of generating an income online. It was good value for the money……..
January 17th, 2010 at 3:09 am (#)
Quite a humourous piece. Do you have an update on how the person got on?
January 17th, 2010 at 4:56 am (#)
Hi Joseph
I did get some feedback from various people who attended the courses. The feedback reminded me of an urban legend I heard of many moons ago. I think it was our business studies teacher in secordary school who told it to us.
A guy took out an ad in a paper and offered a fool-proof way to lose a third of your body weight overnight. The ad included a money back guarantee so long as you agreed to carry out the instructions to the letter. In due course, hundreds of thousands of dollars rolled in. If you spent the money, you got in the post by return mail a simple slip of paper with a few words on it. It read …
Chop off your head.
Naturally enough this wasn’t an option and court cases ensued. Legend has it that the judge threw out the cases based on the fact that the advice offered did in fact provide a way to lose about a third of your body weight.
Now while the courses offered didn’t try and get anyone to do anything that drastic, they did provide a pretty lengthy and heavyweight method of making money online. I’ve no doubt that if you followed the instructions to the letter you would in fact make a tonne. The only problem is that what people really wanted to buy was a way to “make money online, without doing anything” which was the implication if not the letter of the sales pitch.
In short – or all the people i know who signed up – none – to my knowledge have made a return on their investment. The training courses provided were apparently excellent with great insight and fantastic teachers but the amount of work required to implement the various schemes (from ebay trading to writing a book) would put off all but the most dedicated.
The only pitch I’d say was borderline fraudulant was for a software package that offered to dig up thousands of leads for a range of different niches easily. As it turns out, the software really didn’t work that well at all in Europe. At the time there was no hands on demonstration available which looked fishy at the time. I think they were selling licenses for €1,200. Not good.
February 13th, 2010 at 10:54 pm (#)
Hi James,
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I made the error of looking for jameskennedy.com – my mistake.
That is disheartening to hear. I attended it too. I actually met you there, believe it or not.
Like you, I was very tempted to take up some of the courses although thankfully my bank account wouldn’t permit it at the time.
In the meantime, I looked up some of their speakers and wasn’t too impressed by some of the reviews that they had received. The ebay guy has had his account suspended by ebay – that is never a good sign!
The fraudulent software sounds pretty bad.
Having said that, the weekend opened up my eyes and consequently I launched a website – so it wasn’t all bad! However, much of what was covered at the weekend is all available online for free anyway.
February 13th, 2010 at 11:13 pm (#)
Hi Joseph
Thanks for stopping by. Which website did you launch after all that? I do think these things are good for delivering a dollop of enthusiasm which can be worth the price of admission.
James
February 14th, 2010 at 11:37 am (#)
Yes James, your right about that. It certainly enthused me. So I can’t complain.
Although I will be paying more attention to maxims like: ‘If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.’
Yellow Magpie is the site.
Regards Joseph