Alright, I confess. I was at another free pitch-fest over the weekend. Are these things on all the time? I missed a seminar about public-speaking that I would have chosen in preference (but didn’t hear about until it had already started).

This time it was the World Internet Summit down at Heathrow. I say Heathrow when what I actually mean is “in a hotel down a little alley, hidden off a side street, near Heathrow”. The Thistle Hotel Heathrow, really has to work on its image somewhat! As a result, this felt low-key in some ways and yet all the usual names were there.

I went down on Thursday and Friday before getting twitchy about actually doing some work and making money rather than listen to others tell me how/sell me their scheme.

Having said that, the chance to talk to others in the UK who are in the same position as me is always useful and I’ll follow up a couple of them with some ideas, so the time I spent wasn’t wasted.

Of all the speakers, two stood out for me. I think I have written about Steven Essa before, an Aussie who has really taken on webinars as a means to making money. This still piques my interest, even now, after several days of cooling down, as I used to do so many in the corporate world. I have at least identified a final goal of being back on the stage using my speaking skills and webinars come a close second to that. I may still follow up with Steven, he seemed like a genuine character.

The other speaker of note was a guy from the UK who I have not seen before. By trade Andy Harrington is a motivational speaker and his talk fell very much into that category on day 1 of the show. He delivered a great talk to motivate people out of their inactivity but what I liked about his talk (as I say as an ex-speaker myself) was his ability to lead folk down a path in his talk to the point where they were about to fill in his next sentence – and then come out with something at right-angles to that!  So, for example, while talking about fears, he talked about babies only knowing a fear of falling and being isolated at birth (I think…eek where are my notes?) He went on to list something like 10-12 other fears (failure, looking stupid etc etc) and then asked “Do you think these are fears we are born with?….No, they are…” and you could hear the audience say the word “learned”. Andy, on the other hand, didn’t say that, he finished his sentence with the word “Bollocks” – completely breaking the flow of people’s thoughts.   Quite Brilliant!  He did a few other things that left me in no doubt that these were all planned. I will be making sure I don’t miss him if he’s on again.

So, what are your thoughts on all this? Do these seminars serve a purpose for the man in the street? Once again I was staggered by just how low the low end of knowledge really is. People wanting to get into Internet Marketing with almost no knowledge of computers? Wow, that market is just open for training!