Selecting the Best On Site Internet Training

The fall is always a season where many of the big
name marketers hold major on site internet training. I have
noticed that more of these events are taking place
spread throughout the year-- perhaps because at events
like JV Alert the Big Guys get together and plan out a
calendar of major launches. If you don't follow in line
you're toast. Despite the coordination, fall is always
a busy training season in the IM industry.

Each person must to assess training needs before getting
caught up in the frenzy of buying the latest and greatest
product. No one has enough cash and time to go to all of
the super events out there, and you don't want to waste
the precious time and money on the wrong thing.

Sometimes when you buy a low cost product, the upsell will
be a high end course to help you tailor the training
materials to your own situation. It's a great strategy,
but it leaves a lot of people with training courses they
didn't realize they can't afford to support properly.

The hard copy course without the on site training is
sometimes much less useful, so in order to protect
the investment on a new product, it may well be
important to attend the live event. It is
too bad that these often hit the market quickly leaving
little time for those marketers who are not in the IM
Inner Circle little time to plan and budget for the
most critical events, or even double-booked.

Trainings are of at least 3 kinds:

1. The least focused on specific topics is usually the
"tell and sell." This is a workshop on a fairly general
topic area, such some famous marketer's free customers'
"thank you" event. By getting in a room customers who
have bought your products in the past, you've got a
perfect set-up to get them to buy products again at the
seminar, at a higher price point. So the big-name
marketer invites all of his buddies to talk about their
latest and greatest products.

Sometimes these will be relevant to what you need, and
most will not.

While the relevance of the tell and sell is lower,
the cost is also usually little other than travel costs,
and it does offer a good opportunity to network with other
marketers and to meet, often for the first time, some of
the big names in the industry.

It is good to attend one or two of these "tell and sell"
events early on in one's IM career just to meet people
and get the scope of all the new products coming on the
market. Try to avoid the urge to jump to the buy line in
the back of the room, unless the product is really way too
cool to pass up, and can be used IMMEDIATELY in your business.

2. Lecture training

This type of training is classroom style teacher at the front
podium and students taking notes at tables lined up in the rest
of the room. There may be guest teachers, or you may be drinking
at the cup of one great master. There is time, usually for
questions, and people you want to talk to can be buttonholed in
the halls, but the emphasis is on a lot of listening and note-
taking.

This format works best when the crowd is filled with fairly new
people, or people new to the product, and they just need to be
grounded in all the details. If there is a manual or video series
with on online training to follow, then the student can go back
home and apply the training to their own situation. With a good
support desk, the student will often feel good about the training
experience, even if they quickly forget the details.

This type of training may be rolled into the purchase price of
a product, or may include a refundable $97 to assure attendance
by registrants. Other common price points for this type of
training are $497 to $997, depending on the popularity and
scarcity of information on the topic.

3. Hands on workshop.

For this type of session, bring your laptop and notebook because you
are in for a lot of individual work. This type of session will
usually start with some lecture ground-work and will quickly move
on to more individual training where associates of the guru will
go around and assist people who get stuck. Often people will be
grouped into teams, interest area, or level of experience so that
the groups can move along at approximately the same pace.

Personally, I get the most out of this type of session, provided
I can apply it to a project I am actually working on and have a high
level of confidence and respect for that guru and his/her team.
When you can go home with a website completed and checked over by an
experienced IM'er, or a detailed project plan for how to carry out your
next launch, then the feeling of accomplishment is tremendous, and you can
zoom your success rate tremendously as a result of the experience.

Often these sessions do not come cheap, and go up in cost the fewer
people who are being helped at the same time. It is common for
IM small hands-on sessions to cost from $1997 to $5000. One-on-one,
if the guru even does them, will cost $5000 per day and up.
Major rainmakers like Jay Abraham may cost $5000 per hour or more.

There have been times in the past couple years when IM pundits
wondered if the on site training model was dead. Seats were left
unfilled and whole events have had to be cancelled because of the
high cost of travel and the uncertainty about the economy.

The live Webinar is also fast becoming a viable substitute for high
quality, hands on training. I will be covering this more as the
former Hot Conference is reborn in the form of GVO Conference with
many cool interactive features that are not commonly available when
there are large numbers of registrants.

Note that the largest Webinar in internet history just took place a
few days ago when Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss introduced Belcher's
new Social Networking course. Webinars can be tremendously successful
in introducing product launches, and they can also be highly useful
in delivering premium content. Again, more on this aspect of IM
training in a later post.

Liz Nichols
lizdnichols@gmail.com