Woe is Me – Late Night Teleseminars

Okay folks, someone has to say it and I guess I’m as good as anyone for the job. Stop with the 9:oo PM teleseminars on the east coast! You’re losing money because of drop offs or non attendees who must get their beauty sleep to keep up with the fast pace of the work world.

It’s bad enough that the real “meat” of a teleseminar generally doesn’t begin until after the chit chat and list of housekeeping items that should have been put on a web page somewhere because it cuts into the time available for actual learning. Then we have the “commercials” or “pitches” placed throughout that we must endure. And, as we tap our feet and roll our eyes, looking at the clock, wondering when we’ll get to the reason for the teleseminar, we finally get to the long, drawn out offer at the end.

It’s always a pitch fest to another program that is way more expensive and is the one that will REALLY address the reason for the teleseminar.  I say, why does it take so long?  You obviously do not value OUR time. To keep us up late and waste our time is just wrong, yet we let you do it because we want to learn the free crumbs you will throw at us.

I’m here to inform the teachers, information producers and internet marketers of the world that some of us go to bed at a reasonable time on the east coast. Yes, it’s true. by 9:00 PM, we’re already in snooze land with warm and fuzzy candy figures dancing in our head.

I WISH I had counted the many teleseminars I’ve missed because of this fact. The east coast gets hit the hardest with this problem. Evidently, the rest of the country thinks we can be up till midnight and up at 4am with no problem for our entire working life.

When I’ve been on the west coast of this great country of mine, I marveled at the early football games and other early television. Why, you could actually enjoy your show and get to bed at a reasonable time and it made my vacation absolutely wonderful. It was like I was in a dream world of joy and happiness. Okay, it wasn’t that great, but it was pretty great.

Then I come back to the east coast where the good stuff begins at 8pm or even 9pm and to watch it, you’ve got to stay up. This makes keeping up a fast pace of productivity very difficult without aging before your time which no one wants.

In enters the online teacher and repeats the process. I realize the time chosen is so more of the country can participate, but I’d like to see a more balanced approach.

Possible Solutions: split the difference. Let the inconvenience of late night for the east coast be split with the inconvenience of being too early for the west coast.

Or, let’s start at 8:30 EST because that half hour makes a world of difference.

Or, record your teleseminar and make it available to anyone at any time for a 24 hour period. This way we can pull it down when it’s convenient for us. The special offers made during a teleseminar are usually live for a 24 hour period anyway so you’d lose nothing and gain more attendees.

A replay isn’t going to help if it’s only available at a certain time – though obviously very helpful to you, it doesn’t help the consumer if that time is not convenient for us.

It’s a consumer driven world and it’s time you pushed the content to us so that we can consume it when it’s convenient for us! Podcasts are not that different from a teleseminar; they can both be put up on line and made available to everyone for download for a certain period of time.

Get with the program people! I know it sounds like I’m cranky, and due to lack of sleep, I am!  I like my learning time too, just don’t keep me up too late to do it or I won’t retain it and many times, I won’t even get to hear you. Worse yet, I won’t have enough strength left to actually implement your teachings.

Woe is me.