In this series of informative articles, consultant Rene Gnam takes you through the basics of entering the high-pay world of seminaring.

A foremost direct response advertising consultant, René Gnam presents over 50 seminars a year and creates the advertising for many seminar sponsors. From his Florida office, he directs seminar marketing around the world and is deemed an expert on scientific analysis and projection of results. He has written two advertising books, several portfolios, recorded his techniques on audio cassettes, and recently presented 12 television programs on direct response advertising.

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If you have been running a particular business, or promoting a line of products, or providing services to other businesses, or by dint of your experiences have acquired high knowledge, you may have acquired a level of expertise that perhaps you are unaware of.

People are willing to pay for that expertise.

If you have written a book, or a series of articles on one subject or many, or made in-person sales presentations, you may have a new career ahead.

You may be a bright, marketable star, and the profits you can derive from your expertise can be enormous.

You need a strong ego, a willingness to face people, a feeling that you're among the best, a desire to perform, a life situation that permits travel, and a perfectionist's zeal.

There are three ways to break into seminaring:

1. Speak for someone else, then go out on your own.
2. Find someone knowledgeable as a partner to market you.
3. Gamble at least $10,000, preferably twice that, and do it all yourself.

The first two methods are the safest. Those who try #3 usually fail unless they have a strong response advertising background. But consider these successes:

Arleen LaBella and Dolores Leach present three seminars a week for a Boulder firm and earn over $50,000 a year each. A book they wrote gives them regular royalties. Their audio cassettes provide more revenues.

When Dawn Hancock and Katherine Russell promote a health conference for an Atlanta company, they often get over 700 people paying $595 each. That's $416,500, twice a year.

You Can Live Anywhere

Dan Neilson lives in a medium size town, Grand Prairie, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. He's the administrator of a hospital. Running a hospital gave Dan special skills. So he started a weekend seminar program, advising other hospital administrators on how to run a hospital. He now makes $4,000 profit every weekend that he feels like running a seminar.

Don Feltner runs a photo studio in a much smaller town, Wheat Ridge, 20 minutes from Denver. He started a series of seminar courses on how to increase photography studio revenues. Other people hired him to fly to Australia, Tahiti, Hawaii, and Europe to run those seminars. And he ran them himself all across the USA. He made $80,000 profit in each of his first two years at it, and found that he now has so much acclaim that he can sell his course in a book and make another $50,000 a year without traveling.

Hundreds of other speakers, able to communicate helpful information on a single subject, command a minimum of $375 per day to present one-day seminars for professional seminar organizations. Fees of $1,500 a day are commonplace. Top names, in fields of mass appeal, earn $3,500 - $5,000 per day.

Why have I told you these stories?

• Because you have experience.
• Because you have knowledge.
• Because you can run your own seminar.

Let's think of it this way...

Your Experience Counts

You sell educational materials to schools? Fine. Invite school authorities to a seminar teaching them how to better educate their pupils by using educational materials.

You do computer programming. Fine. Invite people to hear you tell them how to utilize the software they're considering now, how to plan for new software, how to get more production from the software they have now.

You're knowledgeable about rubber stamps...or zippers...or suspenders...or electronics products...or steel pipe...or zinc molds...or valves...or fasteners...or casket linings? Fine. Run a seminar and tell me more about them.

People will come. They'll pay. If you do it right.

Before you call hotels to book meeting rooms, carefully define your goals. There are only two:

1. Front End Profit...going for profits on the seminar itself,
2. Back End Profit...aiming for profits on revenues you get after the seminar.

A seminar's success, for one event or several, is measured by those two points, usually by spreadsheets on a computer. I’ll discuss that in the next article in this series.