I’ve been listening to a number of list building and lead generation teleclasses lately, and many of them have been offered in the form of a telesummit. A telesummit is a virtual online conference that offers a line-up of varied speakers over a period of time, like a few days or over several weeks. The telesummit is usually organized by a theme, like outsourcing or lead generation, or for a particular target market, like the online telesummit for virtual assistants for which I was recently a guest speaker.

Participation in many of these telesummits requires you to pay a registration fee, but the model I’ve been seeing a great deal recently is the "free for live" model in which registrants can participate in the "live" version of the program, but if they’re not able to be on the call live, the only way that they can access the content is to pay a registration fee for the audio file and PDF transcripts.

What I love about telesummits is that they are perfect for a downturned economy. There’s no airline reservation to make, no hotel to book, no clothes to pack, no shuttle fees to pay, no bad hotel food to endure….it’s simply conducted from the convenience of your home, the home of your speakers, and the home of your participants. You offer high value with low cost — a great combination!

In my opinion, this type of event is a genius way to turbocharge your business.

Here are 5 secrets to turbocharging your online business with a telesummit:

1. Grows your list fast. Many telesummit hosts report that holding a telesummit has helped them grow their list from 2,000 to 10,000 or 15,000 or greater in a span of only a few weeks when the participants are required to give their name and email address to get the telesummit call-in information. Best of all, the additions to the host’s email list are perfect leads for their target market. How did this happen? Because the host carefully chose their speakers who market products and services to a similar target market and created a telesummit around an issue or theme important to their target market. And, in an ideal world, the speaker has a large list and agrees to help market the telesummit to that list.

2. Establishes you as the preeminent expert. When you hold an event featuring well-known speakers, you suddenly become the authority, or the expert in the field. After all, how else could you have attracted these experts if you were not an expert yourself?

3. Helps you open the door for valuable joint ventures (JVs) and strategic alliances. Once you’ve invited someone to be a guest on your telesummit, you have provided a great service to them by introducing them to others who may not have previously heard of them. And, if you offered some healthy affiliate commissions for telesummit upgrades, they love you because you’ve helped them make money without a lot of effort. Assuming that your event was a success and there were no major hiccups in the process, this success has paved the way for future joint ventures and strategic alliances with this person. This certainly beats cold-calling someone to try and speak to them to sell them on a JV proposal, doesn’t it?

4. Increases your credibility. Another key factor in hosting a telesummit is that the notoriety of your speakers rubs off on you as the host. One of the quickest ways to go from "no name" to "big name" in your industry is to invite the industry experts to speak at your telesummit. The fact that you now have a connection with the movers and shakers in your industry gives you a leg up boosting your own credibility and expertise in the industry.

5. Makes some cash in the process. In addition to the advantages listed previously, there are a number of ways to make a little money in this free telesummit model. First, you offer every participant the ability to "upgrade" to get all the recordings and transcripts of the telesummit. Creating a price increase deadline (before summit vs after summit pricing) may encourage more participants to buy. Secondly, once the telesummit is complete, you can go back to your speakers and offer to interview them a second time exclusively for members of their list. The upsell in this second interview is the complete telesummit recordings and transcripts, on which you pay them a healthy commission on all packages sold.

Examine your business model and see how well a telesummit fits into the mix. You’ll need to begin planning 8-10 weeks in advance, but once you see the results, you may want to make your telesummit an annual event.