PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

How To Use A Webinar To Build Your List In A Massive Way

We’ve talked alot about using a traditional lead magnet to build your list. But, there is another way. And it could even be more effective. And that’s webinars. Webinars aren’t just a way to make a sales presentation… they also work very well to build your list. In this episode, you’ll learn: – The psychological…

Episode #83 | Episode Date: May 23, 2015


We’ve talked a lot about using a traditional lead magnet to build your list. But, there is another way. And it could even be more effective.

And that’s webinars. Webinars aren’t just a way to make a sales presentation… they also work very well to build your list.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • The psychological reason why webinars (or live events) work so well to create a bond between you and your subscriber.
  • GotoWebinar versus Google Hangouts
  • How to get people to register for a webinar AND join your list at the same time
  • The “no prep” webinar that you can do immediately without any prep work.

I encourage you to give a webinar a try. And record everything. You’re gaining massive leverage by doing so! 😉

So like I said, today we are going to talk about another highly effective way to build up your email list and that is by using a “Webinar.”

Now, you have probably heard about webinars before. There are a lot of people out there doing webinars. Thing is, if you have not considered doing one yourself, you might want to consider doing it.

The Traditional Lead Magnet

Here’s the thing… a lot of people, including myself and we are talking about this now for many episodes, they will offer traditional lead magnets. Now, lead magnets; when most people think of a lead magnet they typically think of a PDF style thing. And I have certainly talked about that a lot. There an absolutely nothing wrong about that at all; in fact it is highly effective. In fact if you go back to the earlier episodes where we talked about lead magnets; I gave you 7 different things to pack them in to your lead magnets and they generally are short and to the point checklist style things and they happen to work really well by PDF. And there is also ways of doing this with videos if you want to offer videos as lead magnets and typically you want to go fairly short in that regard.

The Advantage Of Doing A Webinar

But there is another way to get people onto your list that is not the exact linear funnel that we have been talking about and that is by offering a webinar. Thing is, when people RSVP for a webinar that you are going to be doing, they are getting on to your list; at least if you got that set up right, and we are going to be talking about that in just a little bit; but a webinar is a highly effective way to get people onto your list.

It doesn’t even matter if you intend to sell them anything or not. I mean, that happens to be something that many people do with a webinar, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. The thing is, it is just going to get people onto your list because…

there is a much higher perceived value on a live event than there is in almost anything that you can give them for free with a traditional lead magnet.

Benefits Of A Live Event

Control

Now one of them… and this one I just want to make sure that you understand; it is a little bit of more of a psychological look why webinars work so well… The reason is because webinars by their nature will exercise a little bit of control over your subscribers. Now that might sound a little awkward; the idea of controlling anybody. But here’s the thing, anybody that you have looked up to in your life who has gotten you to do something, they probably exercised some control over you. It could’ve been a teacher, a mentor, your parents; they exercised some control over you. Now you might have been doing what they asked willingly. And in fact, the best control is exactly that way. This is not a negative thing. You are doing it completely and totally with agreement, but it is still control. And the thing is if you want them to do the things you want them to do; and we’re talking about later down the road, you want them to click on your emails, you want them to read your blog posts; you want them to… Yes, buy things from you, you at first have to exercise some control over them. They have got to be accustomed to doing the things that you set up for them.

What better way to do that than by saying, “I have a live event, I have this webinar; it is at such and such a day and such and such a time and if you want that information you have got to be there at that time”. By its very nature as a live event, you are exercising some control. And either they show up or they don’t. But the thing is, if they don’t they are not going to get it. That is the control element. And it also makes much better prospects for anything that you intend to sell but even much better email subscribers.

Build Up Of The KLT Factor

The other thing beyond the control factor is that you have that opportunity on a webinar to build a massive relationship with your new subscribers. And you could do so on a way that no other way is going to do. I mean, you can’t download some PDF checklist from somebody and really feel like you know the person who created it. You just can’t! But with a webinar, you can because you can actually hear the person speaking; you may, in some cases depending on the platform that you are using, you can actually see them speaking to you. You get a real sense for who they are plus you got their attention, hopefully, for a good 45 minutes to an hour. There is just no better way to deliver content and build that relationship than that way of doing it.

It builds the KLT factor which is eventually is “KNOW-LIKE-TRUST”. You probably have heard this before. You want people to know, like and trust you. And in short I just called it the KLT factor. And there’s just no better way to create that sense of “know, like and trust” than via a webinar. They just get a feel for you. Almost like, right now you are listening to my voice via this podcast. And this is a way for people who listen to my podcast; for you, listening to this podcast right now, regardless of what you are doing, you are listening to me. And it builds a bond between you and I that would not be the same than if you were just reading one of my blog posts, okay? And it works even doubly so on a webinar.

Good Sales Opportunity

And the other thing about a webinar is that it happens to make a good sales opportunity as well. Now like I said earlier, you do not have to do it if you are not comfortable with it; it doesn’t mean you have to avoid webinars, but it also happens to make a really good sales opportunity. Okay? You can sell things with them. And again, all the standard rules apply. Make a valuable offer, make it very relevant; something of very high value to them and be cool about it. Don’t ram it down their throat. But you do that on a webinar you are going to typically see conversion rates that are much, much higher than almost in any other way that you will attempt to sell it.

The Logistics

Platforms

There’s Gotowebinar… Gotowebinar is really the de facto go to platform for most people. Now, the thing about Gotowebinar is that it is pretty solid but it is a little bit behind the times in some ways. It is just so dependable that a lot of people go and use it; a lot of people are used to it. Now it ain’t cheap. It starts out at $99 a month and that is for only 100 people on the call at any one time. Now for many of us, 100 people on a call would be fine for $99. Now it goes up from there and in fact if you have the plan that can accommodate 1000 people now will run you almost $500 a month. So it is not cheap but you would just get the plan that you need.

Gotowebinar happens to be my preferred platform right now primarily because it is just trusted and it works, it doesn’t have a lot of weird technical hiccups. Now there are other options that depend on Google Hangouts as their system. Google Hangouts is essentially like YouTube, except that it is live. And then there’s go between systems like Webinar Jam or Easy Webinar and some of these other ones that will work with Google Hangouts or YouTube Live but they inject the middleman on top of it so that you would have things like RSVPs and other typical good features that we associate with running a webinar because the thing is Google Hangouts by itself doesn’t have any of that stuff. You can’t get people to RSVP for it, you can’t even schedule it; it is just a live video. So if you want all the typical mechanics that go along with a webinar you would have to get one of these systems that kind of tack on top.

Now I have not actually run a Google Hangouts before; I’ve been on them before. It works pretty well but there is a delay you have to kind of get used to the delay. I have had some people told me that they’ll speak and it is like 30 or 40 seconds before the people on the other end hear you which is if you are doing a one way webinar might be fine. But if you are trying to do a Q&A that would really wear on you if you know that you say something and it is not until 40 seconds before the people actually hear it. It is going to make really awkward to actually have a two-way dialogue. So I prefer Gotowebinar but for price purposes, a Google Hangouts system is sort of kind of nice.

Getting People To Your List

Now in terms of getting people on your list and getting people on to your webinar at the same time, you need to use a piece of software that will allow you to do it. Now Gotowebinar has a sign up page; it just that it will not add that person to any list. It will just go on to the webinar system as an RSVP. Now obviously the benefit of this is that you are going to get people on your email list. Now if you have a Lead Pages account, that is a very dependable way to have somebody opt-in to something and they get simultaneously added to Gotowebinar. If you use their Lead Boxes functionality it does the exact same thing. So you can, on any page that you want; even in the middle of a blog post, you can trigger a lead box and you can have them opt-in to your list and RSVP for a webinar simultaneously.

So essentially they are opting-in to save a seat on the webinar but they are also being added to your email list. So that is a very dependable way to go. Now if you go with something like Optimize Press, it will do the same thing. You can integrate Optimize Press with Gotowebinar.

If you want to use the Gotowebinar page directly, you might want to check out a service called ZAPIER.COM. Zapier.com is a way of automating different web-based services and making them talk to each other. So basically what you can do, and I think it would require a paid Zappier account, but it is not very expensive at all, is you can have it listen for new registrants to your webinar and then simultaneously turn around and add that person to your email list. So you can use Zappier.com in order to do something like that. But I highly recommend that you go with a solution like a lead box or Optimize Press or something like that. Send them to a squeeze page but the squeeze page isn’t giving a lead magnet in the traditional sense; it is having them register for the webinar.

Autoresponder Sequences

Now being that they are going to get on to your list while also registering for the webinar; then you want to follow up with this person using an autoresponder sequence. So all the stuff that we already talked about; you can do that on these people because you have them on your list. Gotowebinar doesn’t allow you to do this. It sends those generic you know; “Hey thanks for attending” type of emails. But that’s it.

If they are on your list you can control the entire experience, you can even have videos or something that lead up into the webinar to get more people to show up. And then you can have another autoresponder sequence which takes place after the webinar that, let’s say you are making an offer when you can have an autoresponder sequence that gives them a few days to take that offer that they saw on the webinar.

We’re not going to go too much deeper into this topic because it can go really deep with various mechanics, various ways of doing webinars. We are not going to talk about that in this episode but I just want you to be aware of the benefits; the many benefits of actually using webinars to build your list.

More…

Now I want to tell you here toward the end, about a no prep webinar; a webinar that you can actually run immediately without preparing a presentation first or anything like that. This will work with many different kinds of audiences and it is very simple… It’s doing a Q&A. You simply answer their questions live over a webinar. And in fact, if you have them RSVP for this and then send them into a page that has a contact form or gravity form or something like that on there, you can say “Submit your questions in advance” right there. And then they can attend the webinar and get the answers.

Here’s what you can do with this Q&A webinar; you record the entire thing, and in fact, any webinar that you do, even you do the same thing over and over again; I recommend that you record it because you will never know what you are going to do with it. But you can record this Q&A, split it up so there’s one question and one answer per recording and then you just created yourself a new video content to go out in YouTube or Vimeo or what have you, you can post it to your blog… Essentially, by sitting down and doing one Q&A even in a live setting not only were you building your list but you are also creating content in a massive scale just because you sat down and actually did it in a live environment.

So it almost goes back to what we were saying earlier that how the nature of a live environment exercises some control over your prospects and therefore get them to be more bonded with you and your brand. That live event set up works for you; it works to your advantage as well because it is live and you are going to deliver what it is that you said you are going to deliver. And it is just that any procrastination that you might usually come up with, it is out of the window because you sat down and delivered a live event. So the control goes both ways; you are controlling yourself as well. And you can create some content; lots of it, really quick by doing a simple no prep style Q&A webinar and recording it.

Now as we end off here, I want to very suitably enough, to tell you about a new webinar that I am actually going to be delivering. And you can find information on this at blogmonetizationwebinar.com; brand new webinar that I put together where we are going to be talking about, of course, blog monetization; but doing it the right way. We are going to be talking a lot about the ways that are traditionally done now, some of the bad advice that has been given out there and we are going to jump into a completely new mindset that allows a blogger to evolve with the times and operate in the world as it stands today.

That is at blogmonetizationwebinar.com, head on over there, check out what we have got and maybe you can register for the next deliver of that webinar by yours truly. So that’s blogmonetizationwebinar.com and with that thanks again for being here and I’ll see you in the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging! 😉