Imagine you are about to professionally speak to 30 people on a teleconference call where you can only hear and cannot see the participants. Therefore you cannot read the reactions of your audience to what you say. You only have your ears, your imagination and intuitive senses to guide you. What's the best way to structure the talk to leave a lasting and memorable impression with the listeners?

You can begin by distinguishing between a learning-focused and a lecture-based teleconference call. The number one mistake people make is in thinking all teleconference calls are the same. They most certainly are not and its important to know the differences so you avoid the mistake of planning and implementing all your calls in the same way.

The most popular category of teleconference calls that business professionals such as coaches, consultants and speakers are interested in is those used for telelearning. The most common names for these calls are teleseminars, teleclasses, teleforums, teleprograms or teleworkshops. A structured curriculum is created and delivered as a once-off teleclass or progressively delivered over a series of teleseminars to form a teleprogram.

There are other ways to use teleconference calls such as for telemeetings and group coaching. You can also use webinar technology to deliver a Powerpoint style presentation so that at the same time people are listening on the phone, they are connected via their computers to a visual presentation.

Participants in telelearning calls are typically limited to smaller groups of between 6 and up to a maximum of 30 people for the duration of the program, so that meaningful interaction can take place. While 30 people is a lot to interact with, over the course of a 4, 8 or 12 week teleprogram there will be those who can't attend in some weeks, which naturally lowers the number of participants on the call.

A lot of professionals confuse telelearning calls with a telelecture, where there is a speaker who delivers a speech much like a speaker would at a live event. The larger the number of people on the call, the more that technical issues become a factor.

If you've ever been on a telecall with a lot of background noise, you'll know how annoying this can be and the reason for the speaker using a listen-only format. The downside to cutting out the voices of participants is there is little or no participation with the audience, so the speaker needs to know how to be very engaging in order to captivate an audience they cannot see or interact with.

Telelectures have limited appeal and are usually treated as a verbal download of a lot of information. Generally, the focus is on the speaker delivering their information and there is little skill involved, although there can be, if the speaker engages some of the same core facilitation skills used to make teleseminars memorable.

Conversely, a teleseminar or learning-based teleconference call is interactive and focuses on including the participants in fun and engaging ways, as well as working to ensure participants are inspired to act on what they learned after the call is over.

People who enroll in and attend your teleconference programs want to be inspired and engaged. It takes no skill to lecture at people for an hour, and the last thing participants want is to be bored by a teleleader who sounds monotonous, or hasn't taken the time to structure the telecall for their success.

Avoid the #1 mistake of boring people with a lecture-based format. Instead, structure teleconference calls to be interactive and inclusionary, for a memorable experience that has people coming back to more.