This question came in from someone preparing to launch her first teleseminar. Based on my years of experience leading teleseminars and my conversations with other teleseminar presenters, this worry has little foundation in fact. In most niches, this kind of dishonesty simply does not happen.



Even so, there's no sense in tempting fate, so there are a few steps you can take to minimize the odds of non-legitimate participants calling in to your telseminar.

First, provide the call-in number and access code for the conference-call line by email rather than posting it on a web page, where some Internet-savvy people and search engines can find it even when you haven't publicized the page.

Second, tell your paying participants exactly what to do if they know someone else who's interested in the teleseminar. Even when it's a free teleseminar, I tell registrants to direct friends to the signup page rather than give them the call-in information, because there are a limited number of slots for the call.

(Studies show that if you provide a reason for something, people are more likely to comply with your request.)

Third, you'll most likely be able to see for yourself whether or not unregistered people are calling in to your teleseminar. Most bridge line providers either routinely provide you with a list of those who called in or will do so upon request. You can simply compare the number of people signed up with the number of people who called in.

What you'll see, I predict, is that there are people who paid for the call but don't show up (and do not ask for a refund) rather than people who called in but did not sign up and pay. You thereby come out ahead, not behind.

One firm that has a teleseminar admission fee in the hundreds of dollars told me that they once noticed an unauthorized company dialing into an event. If I remember correctly, they noticed it because of an unfamiliar area code showing up in the participant list. After investigating, they approached the interloper afterwards in a low-key manner, telling them that someone had called in from their company without registering, and the offender quickly paid up - probably never to try to pull that move again. Note that while this situation did occur, it happened only once for this company that presented a couple of dozen teleseminar events each year.

A last bit of advice: If you're concerned about teleseminar gatecrashers, provide your handouts by email also, rather than posting them on the web. Otherwise the handouts can become accessible in web searches. See this for yourself by typing "teleseminar handout" or "teleclass handout" into Google. Thousands of handouts come up, some of them for courses that cost many hundreds of dollars to attend. I believe that most of those who posted those handouts did not intend them to be publicly available.

Generally, however, all you have to do is simply provide the call-in information and handouts to registrants via email and then concentrate on delivering the very best program you can.