Online conferences make you an expert

Conducting an online conference in a forum is a great way to boost your credibility and visibility with a receptive audience. The main conference rooms on America Online, CompuServe, and other online services are always booked for nationally-known movie or media stars, but special interest groups or forums are always looking for experts that can speak to their audiences. You can be that expert, and by doing so you'll provide a powerful incentive for customers to buy from you. To schedule yourself for a conference:

* Find an online forum or special interest group related to your business.

* Locate the transcripts of previous conferences in that forum, and scan them to see which topics have been done before.

* Send an e-mail note to the forum administrator, pitching your topic and yourself as the person to present it.

If your topic is accepted, your conference will be promoted a week or two in advance on the forum's welcome screen, and it may even be promoted on the online service's main welcome or What's New screen. When the day of the conference arrives, you'll field questions from the audience via a phone call, and a conference administrator at the online service will translate your responses into text that appears on the screen of the forum's chat room.

To get a better idea of how this works, attend the next conference in your favorite online forum. Then follow the steps above and become a recognized expert in your field.