Have you identified that you need to be speaking more often in your business to increase your marketing reach and share your expertise? Do you have a lot knowledge and experience to share? Do you really want to engage an audience in the growth that occurs with the content you teach? Have you thought about sharing your story online?

When thinking about where to speak people often think about the easily recognizable avenues, like local service clubs, the library, board of trade, chamber events, or  renting a space, etc. OR getting invited to speak at a conference, someone else’s event and stage. There are a lot of different places you can speak, but one place that is easy for everyone to get to is either in a webinar or a teleconference call.

Webinar vs. Teleconference Call

If you are going to do a webinar you will also need to have a presentation ready. This is a wonderful way to help people using both audio and visuals. To be able to attend, a person must have access to the Internet and a browser.

The teleconference call is strictly an audio event. The nice thing about this is it can be accessed anywhere your attendee has access to a phone. These events can be listened to while driving, at the kids games, or while focused in their office.

You will need to know your client well enough to understand which media is going to be available to them and powerful for them.

1. A Place to Promote It

You will need to promote your teleconference calls. If you want people to come they will need to know you are hosting it, when it is, and how to get access. Here are six places you can promote this type of event.

• Website
• E-mail signature
• Voicemail message
• Back of your business card
• Newsletter
• Through other people’s newsletters or websites

2. An Invitation

If you create it they will not come unless they know about it. You have to create an invitation that people will see more than once. Assuming that people you are inviting already know you (like your newsletter list) then they will need to see the invitation a few times before they take note that it is for them, that they are welcome. Sometimes when it is free it will be more easily ignored as “not for me”. And sometimes when there is a cost the benefit has to match exactly before they will read the details.

For instance, I have the Free BLITZ Entrepreneur Club Expert Calls. I have experts from all over the world with incredible business experience in so many different disciplines come and share tools and actions they used for their successes. Sometimes we have a great turnout and sometimes we don’t. There is a large portion of the people I share this with that do not show up for these incredibly valuable calls, not because they aren’t valuable but because they don’t see them as valuable for themselves. Reaching everyone more than once is the key. Each time there is a new person on the call I know that something shared was seen as valuable to them and they have made the choice to create the time to show up.

My point is that you don’t want to send one invitation and expect people to show up.

3. The Teleconference Line

There are many different teleconference lines available, some for free, some for a cost. Many have options for both. Here are a few things you can look for in the call line:

• Can you personalize the line?
• Can you record the call?
• Can you block certain callers?
• Can you control the sounds in the call (enter/exit/speaking permissions)?
• Is there advertising?
• How may attendees will be able to join the call?
• Can you have break-out sessions?
• Can you have presentation settings and Q&A sessions (differ in control)?
• Do you get the same phone number each time?
• Can you change the password?
• How much storage space is available?
• Do people need to raise their hand to ask questions?
• Are their toll-free numbers available?
• Can you download the recordings or are they hosted?

You may not need all of these features but you will want to know which ones are most important to your calls. If you have 50 people regularly on your call then knowing that some lines might allow only 15 people max. is necessary. If you have 100 people and you need them to be able to raise their hand during the call then you need software that allows you to access that feature.

Here are a couple of free software packages I have tried and liked. Note that digital phones can still cause issues with any program.

• www.freeconferencepro.com (Free)
• www.anymeeting.com (Free and paid options) (webinar and teleconference)
• www.maestroconference.com (Paid only)

What you might notice about these three things you can use to create your own teleconference call is that the first two are the same two things you need for any speaking engagement that you do. Marketing your speaking is still the most important step.  If people don’t know you have something to offer they cannot take advantage of it and you still don’t get to share.