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Chuck Anderson helps online entrepreneurs fill events through events and partnerships.

Here’s the video interview. Below it, you can read a summary of Chuck’s answers to my questions and find his free offer.

Who do you serve and who are your clients? 

I serve people who usually have something to promote (book, program, service of some sort) and the way they have chosen to market themselves is through events. These events could be webinars, workshops, multi-day events (online & offline), conferences, challenges, summits (even executive summits & masterclasses)… at the end of the day, it’s an event, bringing people together and providing an experience, information, or both. And using that as an opportunity to sell whatever they’re selling. When you plan an event, the challenge is filling that event. What we do is help them fill events by recruiting 3 types of partnerships:

  1. Affiliates where you pay them a commission
  2. A joint venture partner where you do a cross-promotion
  3. Brand ambassadors, people who’ve attended your previous events and they are fans wanting to invite other people to attend your next event

What is their problem, their need, and what are the symptoms of that problem?  

Your audience might be interested in your event but they are not making the decision to register in your event until the last possible moment (the last 24-48 hours). We have to use this to our advantage by creating multiple deadlines, multiple points of urgency. This is also why ads don’t work because people are still going to wait until the last minute to register.

What are the common mistakes people make or obstacles they face when theyre trying to solve the problem on their own or with other solutions?

There are 3 common mistakes that I’ll mention:

  1. Throwing more money at promotion
  2. Too much reliance on organic sources to fill the event & over-reliance on social media
  3. Not working with other people’s lists

What is unique about your solution that helps people avoid those mistakes or overcome those obstacles so they can finally solve their problem? 

Our uniqueness is a combination of 2 things:

  1. Recognizing that events are very deadline-oriented and using those deadlines is a powerful way to get people to register. We have to recognize that and prevent ourselves from getting scared in the last 7 days by hitting the reschedule button because that is the most critical time.
  2. Getting affiliates, joint ventures, & brand ambassadors to promote EARLIER because they’re very deadline-oriented as well and how can we set this up where we are getting people to register for something much, much earlier than they normally would.

There are a lot of things to do this. Our favorite thing is to do the event before the event — a free preview event a few weeks or a month earlier.

For early bird pricing, supercharge that by planning a free event on the day before your deadline on the early bird pricing. 

How did you gain your own expertise, and how did you turn that into a business? 

I will go back to 1998 briefly when I was first introduced to the concept of affiliate marketing. A good friend of mine built a website… an ugly website because most websites weren’t very beautiful in 1998… all hand-coded. But the thing that really fascinated me was the check for $10,000 that was sitting on his desk which he got from affiliate marketing. He was putting on his website links to products that people could click and buy and he was earning money. They weren’t even his products. That was my first experience with that side of affiliate marketing.

But how do we do the other side? How do we recruit affiliates and get them to promote what we’re doing? And that led me to being the marketing director of a $20M company where almost 40% of our sales came from affiliates. Some came from our list, some came from advertising that we were doing, but a good 40% of that $20M in sales came from referrals… from joint venture partners & affiliates. I was recruiting, training, managing, and developing a long-term relationship with them. It’s not a transactional thing.

That taught me very early on the power of running an affiliate program and recruiting affiliates which was great because when that company was sold, I found myself as an independent coach and consultant. I was just starting my consulting business and struggling quite frankly to get clients. What saved me was that story I told earlier where I asked just one person to promote my event and it filled my event; it filled my bank account, and reminded me why it is so powerful to have affiliates and promotional partners and how much easier it can be. I’ve been focusing on that ever since. 

What is one high-impact-free action that you recommend that the audience can implement that will help them solve the problem?

The biggest tip I can give you is this: to create the event before the event. 2-3 weeks prior, create that FREE preview or open house which is simply an infomercial. People love it because they get excited and get caught up in the energy and excitement of what’s coming up and ultimately, it will give you the people to follow up with your emails, promotion, and everything who are ultimately going to end up buying tickets for your event.  

What benefit, goal, objective, or outcome do people achieve who follow your advice?

A good friend of mine, Kelly, was planning a 3-day conference. She’s an expert in publishing books and helping them to become best-sellers. She came up with an event called The Best-Selling Author Bootcamp. She had re-scheduled this event 3x before we had started working together. She had great content, great guest speakers, an audience that wanted it, but sadly, about a week or two before the event, realized that only a few people registered. 

Then we did the event before the event by accident. This was where we first learned the power of it. But we already knew that deadlines were super powerful. So 7 days before her bootcamp, we scheduled the preview event. 60 people or so showed up and listened to us. All we did was go through the agenda for the 3-day event. In the next 7 days, we went from 12 people registered to 53 people registered for the event and the bootcamp finally happened. That’s when we realized the power of the event before the event. And also, when we unpack it, we know that 80% of the tickets that were sold between the preview and the actual event, 80% of those came from the 4 affiliates that sent people to the preview event. That has been the foundation of our campaigns ever since. 

What is one free valuable resource you can direct people to that will further help them solve your problem? 

Absolutely! Two things: 

If you have an event coming up, and you’re looking for affiliates, you can go to our website —- eventaffiliates.com. There I have 2 resources:

  1. You can register your event for free and let us know all the details and we’re going to add you to our directory where we have a list of affiliates who are actively looking for events to promote, especially if you’re doing anything entrepreneurial, business, women in business… We have so many great segments and great affiliates who can help to promote. 
  2. If you’re open to promoting events, you can register at the other side as well as an affiliate. 

What’s next?

Sign up at eventaffiliates.com on both sides so you can get affiliates for your events and promote others as well.

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    2 replies to "Interview with Chuck Anderson: How to use events to massively grow your online business"

    • Jen

      What a novel idea — creating an event before an event. I’ll try that! Thank you!

    • Vee

      I remember watching “masterclasses” from MindValley thinking that I’ll get a lot of value in it.. then I find out it’s just a very long marketing or sales pitch. It was disappointing at first but when I think about it, there’s value in it too. I did learn a few important things and eventually it did made me buy the high-value course. So I guess it works!

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