Personal Life Media

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. And on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Sharla Jacobs. Sharla has an information product training system called Leverage Your Genius, and she’s come on the show today to specifically take a core module out of that program, and we’re going to talk about teleseminars that sell. Now you know that I’ve talked to you about other teleseminar people – I’ve had Lisa Barnes on, I’ve been promoting Lisa Sasevich Invisible Clothes product, How To Sell From the Stage. And I met Sharla at Eben Pagan’s green room event and took an immediate liking to her. I know you’re going to feel the same way. And I love what she and her husband, Jesse Koren do. They essentially teach people who have a good knowledge about something, how to productize it, how to get beyond the, you know, work for hire consulting business and leverage their genius into an information product business, a multi figure information product business. And so when I talked to Sharla about coming on DishyMix, we decided that we would just go deep into one area of Leverage Your Genius, and that’s specifically around teleseminars that sell. We’re going to get deep into that and we have a special treat for you today. So lets get Sharla on the phone and we’ll tell you all about this goodness. Welcome Sharla. 

Sharla Jacobs: Hi there Susan.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to have you on. It took us a while to get it together but I’m glad we did. 

Sharla Jacobs: I’m so thrilled to be here and I’m so excited to share this really valuable information about designing and delivering teleseminars that sell today.

Susan Bratton: So Sharla, DishyMix listeners really run the range of individuals who are building their own brand up to marketers and ad agency folks from multi national, you know, global, multiple brand lines, and I really think that a teleseminar that sells could work for nearly anybody’s product or service if done right. So that’s why I wanted to take that part of Leverage Your Genius and get into it. But before we do get right into the teleseminar piece of it, would you just explain at an over arching level what Leverage Your Genius is, and just tell us right up front, and we’ll cover this more in depth later, what your little special thing is that you created for DishyMix listeners, ‘cause I like to get that right out.

Sharla Jacobs: You bet. Well Leverage Your Genius home study course is a full training that gives you all 10 strategies that you need in order to create a profitable information product and build a business around that. That’s what the course is about. And I’m going to be sharing a little more about that ,and then I’m also going to give you a fabulous free gift at the end of this call. So not only am I going to get into depth about how to produce and how to design and deliver a high impact teleseminar that sells and I’m going to cover the gamut so it doesn’t matter if you are, you know, working one on one and that’s all you do, and you want to build out your brand that way, or if you’re a large organization, you’re going to be able to use content from what I share today on the call. And then at the end of the call I’m going to give you access to a 17 minute video - this will be my gift to you because I love Susan so much – that will teach you how to build the business out and it’ll teach you how to set up your business for six figures and even beyond if you’re just starting out. So that’s my gift to you at the end of the call in addition to all the valuable content that we’re going to cover today.

Susan Bratton: I know you had to do a lot of work to create that gift for us for DishyMix listeners, so thank you. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you’ve just had lying around. I know that you’ve actually spent a couple of weeks getting it organized so that you could offer it today, so thank you for that. So you’re really going to go over at this point four keys to a successful teleseminar, and I’m excited to hear this because I’m working on two teleseminars right now and I want to make sure I’m doing everything right to get as many people to come to it, executing it well, doing the right logistics and creating good follow up. And so can you tell me what your four keys to the teleseminar that sells are?

Sharla Jacobs: Absolutely. There’s four keys you’ve got to have for every teleseminar that you do. I’m going to share what they are and then I’ll go into them in more depth. So the first key is you’ve got to fill your teleseminar with potential clients or customers, right – if there’s nobody there you can’t really do a call. The second key is you’ve got to have (unintelligible) content, and I’ll talk about what this is in a moment. The third key is delightful delivery. If you’re not delivering in a compelling way people are not going to want to work with you, you know, more after the call, right. So you want to be able to connect with them. And then the fourth key is logistics. So let me go into the first key which is to fill it, because if you don’t have, you know, if you only get ten people on the line you’re not going to make any sales. It’s just going to be a nice teleseminar but it’s not going to be a teleseminar that sells. So in order to get people into your teleseminar the first thing that you need to have is you’ve got to have compelling and provocative language that connects with your prospect or potential client. And so, I’ll give you an example actually what this looks like. The compelling and emotionally evocative language, it really describes what the participants will get from attending your teleseminar. It’s really got to connect – and this is so important – to a specific problem that you’re going to solve on that call. And if your copy, it isn’t compelling, it isn’t evocative, it doesn’t have emotional connection for them, you’re not going to get anyone to sign up for the call and if no one signs up for the call you can’t actually do any sales on the call, right. So I’ll show you an example of something that we did, and you can go to bit.ly/optinsample, and you can take a look at some of the language that we’ve done there and for this particular call, this was actually a promotional call that we did for Leverage Your Genius and it was about avoiding mistakes that people make when they’re first doing their first information product. And on this call just because of the language we had about 1400 people register for this call with just three emails to our list, which was only about 7,000 at the time. And when you read this page you’ll actually see how it describes the problem, it gives a powerful promise of what they’re going to learn, and that’s what you want to do. So I’m giving you that as a template and something that you can model. And I want to encourage you that as you go out there, because, you know, you’ve been participants in these promotional teleseminars, you know how lucrative they can be, so I want you to take a look at when you get those invitations from people to join them, take a look at the page and really evaluate how emotionally provocative is it, does it compel you to sign up. And it might be, you know, if it compels you then you’ve probably got that problem and that’s a really good model for you or a template for you to take a look at when you’re writing your own copy for your opt-in page. So you’ve got to have compelling language…

Susan Bratton: It was funny, I was at SES this week, SES San Francisco, and one of the keynotes was B.J. Fog – what a great name – and he’s a behavioral expert at Stanford and he talks a lot about persuasion and influence, kind of like Bob Cialdini whose also been on DishyMix. And he talked about the fact that pleasure and pain are the number one behavioral motivators of every human being. And it’s interesting that pleasure is great but pain works better. You know, for all of our copywriter listeners out there, marketing copy and ad copy, for a lot of these kinds of teleseminars what I’ve noticed is people like to know, you know, the 10 mistakes you can avoid. Like that kind of content works so well for us, you know. And it’s not manipulative; if you have a product or a service that provides a solution to a pain point, it’s not a bad idea to focus on that. So I notice that you do that on your opt-in sample, and thanks for giving us that URL.

Sharla Jacobs: Yeah, you’re so welcome and absolutely Susan. I mean think about it, that’s just the way that our brains are wired, right. If we’ve got a problem… I’ve actually, I’m dealing with some TMJ right now and I’m such in a hurry to get it handled and that’s so much more important than going out and doing some interior decorating that I want to do to my house right now…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Sharla Jacobs: you know. It’s just the way that we’re wired. So yes, speak to the pain. And it’s really about, I love that you said it’s not manipulative because what I see it’s really about needing people…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s about understanding what drives them. 

Sharla Jacobs: Yes, it’s like we’re meeting them right we’re they’re at, and then we can take them over to the great results. So take a look at that opt-in sample and use it for a model and also watch what other people do and you’ll see some of this in action. So that’s the first piece around key number one, which is to fill your teleseminar. And the second thing is you’ve got to promote your teleseminar. And I want to share three simple ways you can get people on your teleseminar, even if you don’t have a list. So the first is a couple of simple little resources. Teleclassplanit.com is a place you can list your call for relatively, you know, just a few dollars and that can get people to your call. They actually send out calls, send out an email regularly and, you know, once a week to people that are on their list. Now particularly if you’re selling something that is about marketing or making money, because a lot of those folks are actually teleclass leaders that are on the calls, so that’s a little tip. And then, you know, I’m just going to say – and this is really your specialty Susan – I’m going to say social media and I’m not going to cover this in depth because, you know, anybody who’s following you has got some great resources when it comes to social media. And, but one of the things that we do is we set up regularly scheduled Tweets inside of a social website called socialoomph.com. That’s s-o-c-i-a-l-o-o-m-p-h dot com…

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, I know Social Oomph. I’ve been using that for a long time. Although I’m onto a new thing now. I’m so done with Social Oomph, and actually I still have my subscription to it because I’m letting all the things that are already in there keep going. But I’m not using something called Objective Marketer. I’ll send you a link to that and I’ll be blogging about it. It’s like a whole new level of dashboard command and control for both scheduling Tweets but it goes beyond the scheduling. It actually lets you easily track the number of clicks your various Tweets and Facebook posts and blog posts get, so it’s like the analytics for a whole campaign around a promotion of something and you can also whenever you Tweet something out, it can be in a branded wrapper where you could have Leverage Your Genius logo on the top of everything you Tweet so if someone clicks on a Tweet or a Facebook post and they go to that page that you Tweeted out it could have a wrapper of your brand on it. So that’s like a new thing for me. I thought I’d share that with you. 

Sharla Jacobs: Oh, I’m so excited. I knew I was going to learn something on this call. 

Susan Bratton: I promise we’ll trade.

Sharla Jacobs: I’m just, that’s like a marketers dream. I can’t wait to get started with that.

Susan Bratton: I’ll set you up.

Sharla Jacobs: Great. That’s going to take things to a whole new level. So that’s the second way to get people to promote your teleseminar. And the third way are joint ventures, and this is really my favorite way to get people to my teleseminars. You know there’s, working with partners, for me it’s actually – and Susan you probably have this same experience – when we talk about working with joint venture partners this is often about having somebody host a call where they bring you on to interview you about your stuff to their list. And for me it’s like playing with friends. You know, it’s really, there’s really an art to working with partners, and I’m going to talk about this in just a moment. But the logistics of it are basically they send emails out to their list for people to join a call with you and it’s your content. Sometimes they host the call and they take care of everything and you just show up and you leave, and sometimes – and this is really the brilliant way to do it if you can do it this way – sometimes they will actually let you set up the teleclass registration page, which means that you capture the list. And, you know, this is an example of how powerful this was: a few years ago we were launching one of us first mega info products and we had recently met Eben Pagan because one of our former clients was a good friend of his and she had actually come to us, she was doing $45,000 a year in her one-on-one nutritional consulting practice and did some great work with us and learned how to speak to sell and, you know, really get her, really had a sell to groups. And she built her business up to $250,000 by the end of working with her. So Eben was pretty impressed with what she did and reached out to us and we became friends, and he hosted us on a teleseminar and he sent out two emails and we added 1,100 people to our list in just two days and then we were on the call and we sold $60,000 worth of information products during that call, so it’s a really great relationship. This is really the power of these joint venture relationships is that one person with the list, you know, they can really, really help you a lot. So like I’m saying, he allowed us to do the call registration page and when some of the people sign up for the call they ended up on our list as well, and that is really, really awesome. And, you know, gosh, there’s so much more that I could say about working with joint ventures, and actually in the Leverage Your Genius home study course we spend five hours laying out exactly how to contact them, work with them and how to really work with these joint venture partners to get people to your calls. And, you know, I just want to make sure that you get some good tips for working with people right away. And I’m curious Susan before I share some more tips if you have some wisdom and gems that you want to share about working with joint venture partners?

Susan Bratton: Well I think the number one things is you have to do something for them before you ask them to do something for you. It’s very unusually for someone like an Eben Pagan to say “Hey, you’re doing a great job. Why don’t you come and let me promote you to my huge list of rabid fans and followers”, you know. So I don’t want to set up an unusual expectation. I would just say, you really have, it’s just like press and blogger outreach. You have to do your homework about your targets first – who are your target JV’s, why is there customer base, you know, could be well associated or complimentary to what you’re trying to do, what value do you bring to them. You can’t just go “Hey, will you interview me and let me promote my teleseminar to your list?” And so it’s touchy and it takes time. You actually have to spend, you know, you should start now just connecting with those people. It’s exactly like blogger outreach or things like that. 

Sharla Jacobs: That’s great, and for me I think of it, it’s like making friends. I go out and I make friends and I see what I can do for them and, you know, sometimes there’s a lot of different levels as to how this can work. So, you know, just when I go out to meet people that are, you know, we say bigger players, right, people that have bigger lists than I do, I really think what do I have to offer that I can help them with? And, you know, an example is that I’m friends with John Walker, who’s Jeff Walker’s brother. And I thought, “Gosh, you know, I wonder how it’s going for them with their product launch managers”, and we do a sales training on how to have those one-on-one conversations and how to, you know, how to have somebody talk themselves into working with you. And so I thought, “Well John can I, you know, can I do some free training for your people just to be helpful?” And I just really trust that all of this comes back around. And then another example is a lot of people will do a call swap. Say you’re at the same level; they’ll do a call swap, so my friend Bill Berring, I’ll host a call for him for my list and then he’ll host a call for me. But it does take a while to get here, and honestly Susan what happened for me is that I, we hadn’t done any kind of information marketing. We just had, you know, we had a business, we were doing well, we done about, you know, 3 quarter million in sales – this is a few years ago – and we had not really done any information marketing. It was really just getting people to a workshop and doing our business model from there. And I actually signed up for one of those big highend platinum mastermind programs in order to create relationships with people and in particular I signed up for Ali Brown’s mastermind program and I hate to say this but it’s almost like buying a relationship. It’s like if you want to, sometimes if you want to create connections getting in one of those high-end mastermind programs is really helpful because she was the first one who hosted me on a call and once people saw that she was hosting me I got massive amounts of invitations to be interviewed in different places.

Susan Bratton: I think that’s a really good piece of information, that that’s a marketing cost being in one of those masterminds, but also if there isn’t a mastermind for your niche – ‘cause one of the things that you teach people Sharla is how to take what you know and turn it into a product, which is exactly why you’re on DishyMix today because I’m literally now getting an email a week, which is consistent, from one of my DishyMix listeners who says “I’ve been listening to you with your Eben Pagan stuff and all these different things that you’re talking about, and I want to let you know that I’ve got my product plan ready” or “I’ve got my product” or “Here’s how I’m making my product.” And so I can tell that people are doing this, but for a lot of my listeners they might be in a vertical niche where there isn’t really a kind of like, they wouldn’t fit into a Biz Ops mastermind or a health and fitness mastermind or something like that, so they can go create their own. I’m in a syndicate with other people in my category, and it was created by a guy who saw that there was no mastermind in that niche, yet there were a lot of people kind of in that category, and he created and it’s the best mastermind I’m in. It’s amazing. And so you can create your own if there isn’t one that exists, and that’s a way to pull your JV partners together and create those relationships.

Sharla Jacobs: That’s fantastic advice, and I’m seeing more and more people doing that. A good friend of mine, he’s got one just for people who market to coaches and, you know, it’s worth going and it’s a lot of fun, and it really is about making friendships and seeing what you can do to support other people. So, you know, my thoughts when I’m going and connecting with these folks that are good potential partners for me is what can I do for you, how can I help you, how can I support you.

Susan Bratton: You’re really good at that.

Sharla Jacobs: And I love it, I really love it. And I feel like it’s one of my gifts and one of my talents, you know, one of my geniuses, right. But I think if you take that approach when you’re meeting people that are good potential partners with you – what can I do for you, how can I help you – it’s really a great way to do it. And sometimes there’s even some fun things that you can do. Say you’re even going to work with somebody who is a bigger player  and maybe you have something to offer in the realm of you can coach them on something that they could do a better job at. And I’ll give you an example of this; we have a former client, her name is Brenda Norman, and she’s the irresistible (unintelligible) mentor, and she actually started with us, you know, as a client years ago and she was an investigative journalist for a major city newspaper, and she was just burnt out, tired, exhausted. Came to us, no business, just knew that she needed to do something different. And within a year and a half she built herself up to a six figure business and, you know, discovered that she’s a pretty extraordinary copywriter. And now she’s teaching copywriting to incredible, you know, holistic practioners and coaches and people who are in soft services, and we’re going to do a little call swap here, but her list size is actually much smaller than ours is, and so she actually offered to do some copywriting makeover stuff for me. And it was just, you know, she’s basically doing some free coaching for me as a way of kind of evening out the trade and you’ll find that that will help a lot. And I was really eager when she came to me and said “Hey, I want to, you know, gift you with $7,000 worth of copywriting coaching services” I was thrilled and she’s brilliant. And now I’m calling her my copywriting coach and that’s giving her even better positioning with other people. And so her being willing to show up and serve in a way that was beyond “Hey, will you just promote my stuff to your list”, has really opened up so much for her, and you’ll just really find that, you know, if you show up to give you will get so much in return. So that’s really the overarching, that’s my overarching message about being with joint venture partners and I love that you brought that to the table first Susan about that it doesn’t just happen. Most people don’t usually just offer to promote for you. But it really is about building relationships over time.

Susan Bratton: So we’re going to go to a break Sharla, thank you. And I just want to recap our key number one, to fill your teleseminar with potential clients you’ve got a sample page, bit.ly/optinsample. You can copy the language there so you can get the provocative language. Secondly you’ve got to promote it to get people in. So you can use teleclassplanit.com, Tweet and use social media, do a keyword rich press release, send email out to your customer list, blog about it, do personal invitations for people that you know that you would like to participate. People that you think “Hey, this would really be nice for you. Why don’t you check it out?” And then of course leveraging joint venture partners to promote it to their lists for you. And I’m sure there’s lots of other things my marketers could come up with. So we’re going to go to a break and when we come back we’re going to talk about compelling content, some of the logistics and what was the other thing? Oh, delightful delivery. Delightful delivery, lets do that too. Does that sound good?

Sharla Jacobs: Sounds great.

Susan Bratton: Awesome! All right, we’ll take a break and when we come back we’re going to be with Sharla Jacobs, and she is the Leverage Your Genius home study program person. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back.

Susan Bratton: We’re back with Sharla. Hello again. So lets move into what are the two most important things that you should do when you’re actually delivering the promotional teleseminar. 

Sharla Jacobs: Well I love this because this actually really fits right into key number two, which is compelling content, and, you know, in order to make your content compelling just like your language for your teleclass registration page, it has to solve an urgent problem, right. And if we have time during this interview I’ll actually give you a simple formula for designing your content. But when you’re talking about the two most important things that you must do when delivering your promotional teleseminars – and really if you miss either of these you’re going to miss tons of sales – you’ve got to one, provide value and two, move them closer to buying your stuff. And if you miss either of those things you are going to find that you’re either going to feel like you gave a great call with lots of information and nobody bought or people are going to think you’re really salesy and they’re going to feel like, you know, you didn’t give them much value and you’re going to get a ton of returns because people aren’t going to trust you. So…

Susan Bratton: There’s got to be a balance, some kind of a ratio of  like, you know, 90/10 or whatever it is, right?

Sharla Jacobs: Yes. Yeah, 90/10 or 80/20’s a really good rule, and there’s actually a way to design this and we go over this in the Leverage Your Genius home study course. We design your whole call so that it’s one long offer that gives value the whole way through. So I wish I had time to get into that today, but this is what, you know, we just have a little bit of time today, so why don’t we go and move into key number three, which is delightful delivery. And I really want to say that, again, this is about creating trust and likeability and connection with people, and the three elements to delightful delivery and captivating your teleseminar audience are connection, congruence and confidence. And I don’t have a lot of time to get into these, but I do want to say something about congruence. This is about being the same person, that you don’t give your content and then turn into a sales person when the offer comes, and we change the language a lot because we don’t like traditional sales language so we say offer instead of pitch, right. But you really, you want to be one personality the entire time and you’ve got to feel comfortable selling in order to do that. And I just see so many people who are in business shifting from being, you know, like a coach and a teacher in one moment and then to a sales person in another moment, and they wonder why they don’t get sales. So, go ahead…

Susan Bratton: So Sharla, seeding, that’s what you teach people how to do, and we’ve talked about that a little on DishyMix at various points in the past. But give us some of the best rules of thumb about the most appropriate ways to seed or talk about how you’re seeding in this show for your offer to my listeners because, you know, lets be totally transparent here. We have created this bit.ly link, the bit.ly/dishymix, it’s a thing that you can’t get anywhere else but it’s still a way to bring people into your fold. So talk about how you’re using this show to seed. 

Sharla Jacobs: Great, I love that you asked this question because I think it really is a mistake that a lot of people make is they just have content and then plop an offer at the end and it’s like “Where did that come from?” and people get off the call as fast as they can. Well we’ve been seeding because essentially the whole call is one big seed because we’ve actually taken content that we teach in the Leverage Your Genius home study course and we’re teaching bits and pieces of it here so that you can get value, and what happens for you is you’re seeing the value through, you’re seeing that there are things that you can use immediately and as you’re leading your teleseminars your prospects are going to listen to you and they’re going to get value and they’re going to think “Wow, there’s got to be a lot more where that came from.” And so you actually want to tell them that there’s a lot more where this is coming from. And you’ll notice that I’ve done this, particularly when I talked about joint venture…

Susan Bratton: The simple formula…

Sharla Jacobs: Yes…

Susan Bratton: You talked about joint ventures and the simple formula for designing your content. You were like “If we had time I could get into this”, if we have time, but you know you don’t have time. So what you’re really doing is you’re saying “Oh wow, there’s a simple formula, I want that simple formula. I’m going to go to that bit.ly thing. I want that simple formula.”

Sharla Jacobs: Want that formula, right, right. And then that piece about joint ventures where I said there’s really an art to it, I spend five hours going over this whole thing, how to do it, and I give you all of these templates. I mean really step by step, like here are the emails you send and here’s, you know – and I’m doing it right now…

Susan Bratton: Exactly.

Sharla Jacobs: You know, here are the emails you send, here’s what your opt-in page looks like and here’s what you say if you want to be able to capture the list and just give you all of that content and it takes five hours and I’ve only got 10 minutes to talk about this right now, so let me give you some really great stuff that you can use right away. And we had a great conversation that was incredibly valuable. So seeding is not just about, it’s not selling, it’s very different. It’s about providing value that shows that you know what you’re talking about and that leaves them hungry for more. 

Susan Bratton: All right, good. So where are we? Are we on logistics?

Shalra Jacobs: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: We talked about congruence and being the same person when you deliver all of it, as your seeding and then as you’re making the offer at the end you’re just that person who has a solution to a problem. In your case it’s how do you teach someone to take what they know, Leverage Your Genius, and turn it into an online information product business of which teleseminars is a tiny little slice that you and I decided to present. So that’s a really good example of what we’re doing, but how do you get all this, you know, we’ve got the landing page where people can sign up, what do I do to actually execute on the teleconference, the bridge line, you know, all these different things?

Sharla Jacobs: Yes, so this is key number four, which is logistics. If you don’t have your logistics together you really are not going to be able to, basically you won’t be able to do it yourself and then you’re going to look kind of like an amateur to your JV partners and you definitely don’t want that. So there are a few key pieces that you need to have in place. You need a conference call bridge line. There are a lot of free bridge lines out there and Susan I know you do a lot of stuff on Skype and you’ve got great sound quality. We really like Maestro Conference as a resource, we actually have an affiliate link at rejuvenateconferencecalls.com, and if you want to, you know, give us a few pennies. I like Maestro because at the end of the call – and especially if you’re kind of just starting out and you’re going to have sales people available at the end of the call, you can put people on the breakout group that still have questions. So instead of people just getting on the teleseminar and, you know, you’re making your offer and say they still have questions, they want to talk with someone, and rather than just sending them to a sales letter you can actually have people on the line and break people out into groups. And we’ve done this where we’ve had, you know, five of our team on the call and at the end of the call, you know, if you have questions press 1 on your telephone key pad and then we’re able to split them into groups and so everyone gets their questions answered instead of just a couple of people at the end.

Susan Bratton: Now for Maestro, have you used, is it like a webinar, like go-to meeting or go-to webinar where you can actually show slides or is it only a teleconference service that lets you cluster people either during or at the end?

Sharla Jacobs: Well I understand – and actually Brian who’s the CEO of Maestro is a friend of ours – and I understand that they just put webinar technology in place. We haven’t used it yet so I can’t give you a testimony about that. But I do love it as a bridge line. As a strict teleseminar I think it’s a great, great product. 

Susan Bratton: And in Maestro does it give you, do you do your own sales pages or in Maestro – ‘cause we’ve been looking at Instant Teleseminar too – you can sign up, you can get someone to sign up for your teleseminar, sometimes the teleseminar services like Maestro or Instant Teleseminar or whatever, they have a place where you can go to sign up and…

Shalra Jacobs: I wouldn’t do that.

Susan Bratton: Okay. Tell us how you do it and why.

Shalra Jacobs: Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. Yeah, I would go back to the call registration page sample that I gave you that was bit.ly/optinsample…

Susan Bratton: Thank you.

Sharla Jacobs: and I would build your own, because you’re going to be able to control the language that’s on there, it’s going to be branded personally for you. If you do a call – and we’ve done this before where we tested it and we did like a Maestro, they do offer that, but you don’t want to do that because it’s going to be branded with Maestro Conference for example and you’re going to have a limited space where you can write the copy and you can’t use any pictures of your own. And, you know, it’s like you want to create that connection; you can’t put video on your opt-in page if you want to do that. So you want to do your own rather than using one of those pre-created ones for you. 

Susan Bratton: And then you just send an email out to people with the call-in information. You’re using your broadcast and auto responder software. What do you use for your email system? 

Sharla Jacobs: Well we use Infusion Soft but I wouldn’t recommend Infusion Soft unless your company’s about a million in revenue or higher.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Sharla Jacobs: We used to use one shopping cart system and we were perfectly happy with that.

Susan Bratton: That seems to be like the gold standard for the individual with maybe one information product lines, you know, system or something. 

Sharla Jacobs: It works just perfectly…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Sharla Jacobs: And what happens is when people go to your call registration page there’s a web form on there – and you’ve seen these where you put in your name and email – they put in their information and two things happen. They go to a thank you page, which is where you can display the information for the call, and they also can get an auto responder email that gives them call information. So those are two other logistics that you need is, well you’ve got the conference call bridge line, you’ve got the call registration page, you’ve got your thank you page where you put the information about your call, and then you’ve got your auto responder. And these are really four key logistics again…

Susan Bratton: All right, go through those again a little more slowly.

Sharla Jacobs: Conference call bridge line…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Sharla Jacobs: You obviously want to do that. 

Susan Bratton: Right. That’s my (unintelligible) in teleseminar, go-to webinar, whatever you want to use.

Sharla Jacobs: Even freeconference.com works.

Susan Bratton: Yup.

Sharla Jacobs: Call registration page, which is the example that I gave you that it’s…

Susan Bratton: Yup.

Sharla Jacobs: bit.ly/optinsample. And you can also look at what other people do as models for that. When they do the, the third one is the thank you page, which is once they put their information into the web form on your call registration page they go to a page where you can say “Congratulations, you’re registered for the call” and you can give them the call-in, the phone number and the passcode and any other information that you want to give there. And then they also get an email auto responder. And this is all set up in your shopping cart and you don’t even need to know how to do this. You can go to elance.com and find a B.A. that can help you do the technology part of this. But then they get an auto responder that gives them the call information again. And then there’s really some other pieces to it. Again, I don’t have time. You want to make sure that you get people onto your calls and there’s a certain set of emails to do that. And then one of the most important things is that after your call is over you want to, you know, you’re going to record it so you want to make sure you have some way to record the call, you want to make sure you send out the recording and then you want to do a series of emails after the call that encourage people to go back to the sales letter and take a look at the information product that you were selling during the teleseminar.

Susan Bratton: So this is – thank you for that. This is, there’s a lot of little moving parts, but it’s a pretty standard process that’s completely learnable, which is nice. And you’ve templatized all of this in Leverage Your Genius, and it’s just one of the things that you teach. So what other things, explain Leverage Your Genius to us so we get a better understanding of it.

Sharla Jacobs: All right, great. Well again, Leverage Your Genius is a, it’s basically five days of video recording from a five training that we did. We go step by step how to set up your business using the 10 essential strategies that you need to create a profitable information product. And a lot of people have done information products and they’ve got cases of them sitting in their garage, and we want to help you avoid that. Another strategy is working with joint venture partners, and I’ve touched on it a little bit here, but really it is five hours of training where how do you talk with them, what are the emails that you send to them – we have a whole thing we call an affiliate package for example. And that is what we send our partners when we’re going to do a call with them that gives them everything they need. We have call leader templates. It’s really, if you try to do this on  your own, yes some of this is learnable, but it would take you a lot of trial and error, a lot of frustration, you would waste a lot of time and a lot of money trying to do this on your own. And so I really want to encourage you, if you are thinking about creating information products and doing them in a way that you are, you know, one, able to know that you are delivering something that people really want so you’re not spending a ton of money beforehand. This is one of the strategies that we call pre-selling. And we have not ever once spent a bunch of money on an information product to find out that it doesn’t sell. Every single one of them we’ve sold it before we’ve created it. And so we want to teach you how to do that. There’s, you know, just how do you actually set up the whole business model so that you’re able to do most of what you love. Remember I said earlier that one of my geniuses is connecting with joint venture partners, it’s one of my favorite things to do. I also love training and teaching. And most of what I do in our company, we have a million dollar company, I’m sitting here in my home office, I have a two year old son, he’s with my nanny, and I’m doing what I love and I’m the CEO of the company and I work about 30 hours a week, and I’m able to do that because of these leverage strategies. So how do you actually set up a whole business to do that; you want to make sure that you have the team in place. So in systems, there’s so much more that I could say about it Susan, but here’s what, in addition to the free gift, which is the 17 minute video on how to set up your business for six figures and beyond, once you, you’re going to have to actually opt in to get that gift. Once you get there you’ll see the video and then right below it is a letter about the genius home study course and it’s about all 10 of these strategies. So you get to read each of the strategies and we give you some value in that letter. And this is something I actually recommend that you do in your sales letters is make sure you can provide educational value as well. So you’re going to want to read that letter word for word if you have any interest in setting up a business where you’re selling information products. Because it gives you all 10 strategies you need to learn and it tells you what we’re going to show you how to do and give you all the templates for in the Leverage Your Genius home study course. And then if, you know, if it’s right for you and you feel like it would be a good match to come work with us I encourage you to do that. There’s some hot bonuses, you get two tickets to a live event with where we help you get over your fears about selling, you get six months in our six figure success circle, which is a call where you get to be live on the telephone with us three times a month, so we’re really there to hold your hand. And we even have a bonus for the first nine people who sign up through DishyMix and that is that you’re going to get three private one-on-one strategy sessions to really support you to customize what you’re learning. ‘Cause we really, you know, we’ve just had so many success stories, and I like to keep that success story role going, so we want to give you as much support as we possibly can, and I just don’t know any other company in the industry who gives you this much value for the tuition that we offer.

Susan Bratton: So you would be going to the bit.ly.com/dishymix…

Sharla Jacobs: That’s right.

Susan Bratton: You’d get the 17 minute video that has a lot of incremental information, more advice about how you can set up your own information product marketing business.

Sharla Jacobs: Right. An example about how you can get paid much more for you one-on-one time than you are now. If you’re struggling in your business, what’s going on and how you can set it up so it’s easy to grow, how to get people to join your email list who want to hear from you again and again…

Susan Bratton: I want to go just for that. 

Sharla Jacobs: Yeah. There’s so many, I mean it’s a 17 minute video and it is packed, packed, packed, and it’s just something if you’re even considering doing a business like this you’ve got to go pick that up.

Susan Bratton: I like how you called them hot bonuses. I think that’s a really smart, that’s smart verbiage. And I’ll tell you that I agree with you that the private one-on-one session with you and Jesse is probably worth the entire cost of the program because what I’ve found is in… You know how I told you I was getting those emails now every week from one of my followers saying “Okay”, I’m like, I’m on the path. I’m leveraging my genius, you know. And they send me an email like, “Here’s what I’m doing and this is what I’m thinking”, and I can look at that having done this now for only a couple years – I’m still a total newbie – but the business model is starting to, you know, make sense to me. I see all the things that I did wrong and how I had to, you know, fix them and Tweet them and recover for the mistakes that I didn’t understand I was making when I started making information products. And when I get the emails from them a lot of times I’m like, “Okay, I need to give you a call. I see two or three things that if didn’t have experience you’d think were the right things to do, but let me give you a couple of ideas.” And then after I get off the call they’re like “Oh my god, thank you. I totally get it now.” And you need that. You need to actually have mastermind groups and sounding boards. You know, like five days worth of video is awesome, and you can consume it as you need to and then sit on it and work with it and think about it, but I really like the private sessions with you and Jesse. You just can’t get better than that.

Sharla Jacobs: Yeah, and actually I need to clarify there that we actually, the private strategy sessions are with our strategists who are really experienced and worked with hundreds and hundreds of our clients, but you do get one of the calls that is a group call every month is with Jesse and I, and that’s where you get to ask your questions, and you send them in ahead of time and we make sure that all those questions get answered. So…

Susan Bratton: Got it.

Sharla Jacobs: we are really there to hold your hand.

Susan Bratton: Awesome! Okay, what else? How are we doing? We’re hitting our time limit of how much we can ask of people to pay attention to us. Is there any last thing that you feel like we didn’t cover enough or one of piece of information you want to give away or are we good?

Sharla Jacobs: Well the one, you know, the one thing that I want to encourage you to do, if you’re going to do this business you’ve got to find a teacher. Don’t try and figure this out on your own. It will cost you so much money…

Susan Bratton: And time.

Sharla Jacobs: and so much time…

Susan Bratton: And brain power. That’s the most exhausting. It’s your energy. 

Sharla Jacobs: Yes, it will hurt. 

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Sharla Jacobs: So find a mentor, and whether it’s, you know, me and my husband Jesse or it’s someone else, find someone that you connect with and, you know, you feel a heart connection with, you feel like you can really learn from them, you feel like you can grow from them, and really study with them fully. Consume all their stuff and just get their whole system, and you will be successful. I’ve never once met someone who is successful in this industry who has not had a mentor. Never once.

Susan Bratton: Who else, I mean we know about Eben and he came in from the dating and relationship information product business and then taught what he learned, and he’s very masculine, he’s got a lot of testosterone, his stuff is, you know, he does a lot of, you know, motivation plus education. But it’s definitely like the good old boys network. You…

Sharla Jacobs: Yes, and I love Eben. He’s like…

Susan Bratton: Awesome!

Sharla Jacobs: He’s a good friend of mine and I consider him a mentor and a partner and he’s done so much to contribute to our business, and yet very different style.

Susan Bratton: And your style, because you came out of, you really got your start teaching coaches and holistic practioners how to turn what they knew into a six figure business rather than a like “I’m making $60 an hour and I’ve got to get clients every hour”, you know, kind of thing. So you came from more of that heart centered, the world of coaches and trainers and people who do workshops and that kind of thing, how to productize that; who else is out there that’s similar, that teaches the model of information product business and how would you typify them?

Sharla Jacobs: Great question. There are a lot of other people out there that, you know – and truthfully there are a lot of people out there that teach some of this content, but I have to be honest Susan, I’ve never seen anyone who teaches this level of detail into what to do and also gives you as much hand holding for the investment that we offer. So I just have to say that as a caveat. And that being said, I love Lisa Sasevich. If you are a soft, you know, like a heart centered entrepreneur and you really want to get your message out there, which is we have the same market, Lisa’s a good friend of mine, she does great work, and she’s got some great information products on how to do teleseminars and how to, you know, speak to sell and things of that nature. You know, gosh who else is out there that I think will be a really good match for this as far as information marketing? Most of the people that I know that are teaching it are more on the good old boys side of things.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Sharla Jacobs: Alexander Brown is a good teach; she’s got a lot of good products out there. She’s somebody I learned from a lot in the beginning, and truthfully she’s the one that really helped me get into information marketing ‘cause we were just doing workshops before that, and she really changed our business model so that we’re able to have a lot more freedom. And she’s a fun person. Again, she’s somebody very high level, very difficult to get a lot of access to unless you want to pay a lot of money, but she’s got good stuff and I really like her templates and her products are really good. So those are two people that I would recommend. 

Susan Bratton: Awesome! That was helpful, thank you. All right, Sharla, hey thank you so much for going through all of the details about how to conduct a teleseminar that sells. I’m looking forward to integrating the things I’ve learned in this interview today in my upcoming teleseminars and I really appreciate that you put up a custom video for DishyMix listeners so they could get a really nice overview, ‘cause we have a pretty sophisticated marketing crew that listens to the show, so thank you for custom creating something for us. I really appreciate it. Remind you that it’s at bit.ly.com/dishymix. All right, so you’ve gotten to meet Sharla Jacobs. If you want to find out more about Sharla specifically you can go to rejuvenateyourpractice.com. You can also check out Leverage Your Genius or go to the bit.ly link and get in from there. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. I hope you got a lot out of this very transparent teleseminar scenario. It was a lot of fun, and thank you for listening to the show today. And I will connect with you next week. Have a great day. Bye-bye.