I wanted to share with you the overlooked benefits of conducting teleseminar interviews with thought-leaders in your market space.

At The Strategic Incubator, we have a great deal of experience in this area. In a span of one-year, between our clients and our own expert interview teleseminars, we have led or designed over 100 such interviews.

Before I answer this question, I want to introduce you to a talented friend of ours…

Pamela Slim is an author, blogger, and coach who helps frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own business. Her latest book, Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur, has really touched so many people at this point in time in our economy.

I (Matthew) am humbled to let you know my own story from Corporate Vice-President to starting our company is featured in the book.

Recently, The Strategic Incubator designed a unique virtual learning platform for Pamela Slim and all of those people who may not have the opportunity to be personally coached by Pamela herself.

Let me ask you two questions I’ve heard Pam address in her own teleseminar interviews, media coverage, and within her latest program offering that I’ll be discussing briefly in a moment.

Are you hating your job right now even though you must have a job?

Can you shake the feeling that you must be crazy to start your own business in this economy but even crazier for not starting today?

You can learn more about this program and join now by clicking on this link at  A Quickstart Guide to A Successful Transition to Self-Employment.

Pamela even offers a 100% No-Risk, No-Hassle money back guarantee.

For a one-time fee of only $137 dollars you receive life-time access to Pamela and others just like you.

Now let’s transition to the purpose of this post which is to discover the overlooked benefits of teleseminar interviews.

The Quickstart Guide to A Successful Transition to Self-Employment community forum is the place where great questions are asked and are answered by Pamela and the community at large.

Yesterday, one of the many talented ladies soon joining the ranks of us self-employed renegades by taking Pamela’s program asked a very important question on the “virtual boardroom” community forum offered by Pamela.

Her question:

Question: I’m interviewing a few thought leaders in my market space for free. Depending on the interest, I may re-purpose these interviews as part of an information product later for sale. Is there some kind of contract agreement I have to create between people I’m interviewing now?

My answer and recommendations are below.

The most overlooked benefits of FREE teleseminars are:

• Win-Win opportunity. Little or no resistance from thought-leaders accepting your invitation
• Relationship Building and possible future strategic alliance or joint-partnerships. You will be knowingly or unknowingly building a relationship that you did not have with thought leaders in your market space.
• Thought leader by association. You can be perceived as a thought-leader in your market space just by being associated with them.
• SEO benefits. You can reap the benefits of SEO (search engine optimization) when people find you by searching for the people you interview.
• List Building. You can build your list of followers when the person you’re interviewing has a list of people who may follow you now.
• Marketing intelligence. Discover what your ideal clients want to learn or need.

Question: Should I repurpose these expert interviews into a for-fee product?

My guidance on this question is:

• Free vs. for-fee. Free will limit the barrier of entry to recognized thought leaders in your market space saying YES to your offer of interviewing them. Truth is, if you don’t know these thought leaders, they could give a rip about you making off them. In fact, most of them the minute you tell them you are offering to interview them and later have plans to sell, will tell you NO because their credibility is in controlling their content to their own list of people.
  
• WIIFT. What’s in it for them? They probably don’t need this interview, so you must be able to answer this question. Sure it’s a good deal for you, but they will decide based on why this will be good for them. The reason it’s great for them is you are doing all the work to setup, ask questions, send invites, and record. They just answer your questions and they can repurpose to their own list. You do all the work and they get all the benefit. That’s the way it should be perceived.
  
• Think list building. Record the interview and provide to your guest interview. Ask him/her if they would promote this interview and provide a link back to your site. Require a simple, no-hassle opt-in sign-up consisting of first name and email. Upon providing this information, people will receive an automatic download of interview recording that they can time-shift and listen to 24×7 from wherever they want. PRESTO-Instant list-building strategy.

In answer to this question of charging for a teleseminar interview with a thought leader in your market space, this is one of the only times you will ever hear us say FREE is much better than FOR-A-FEE.

What are your questions or comments?

Provide them in the comment section below.