8 Reasons Why You Should Be Doing Webinars

We are going to start a new series  starting from today. So for the next few episodes, we are actually going to be discussing the topic of WEBINARS and various ins and outs of doing webinars. Now, of course you have probably heard about webinars in the past. It is possible that you have actually done one before. But if not, I want to convince you that you should. 🙂

A Short Webinar Story

First, a little short history on myself. I am not going to go into every webinar I have ever done, obviously. But I have been doing them in one way, shape or form for quite some time. My first webinar; if you want to even call it that, was actually for my technology site that I no longer own… But that tech site is PCMech.com. I sold it like well over a year ago. But one of the first webinars that I ever did there was over Ustream.tv. And so you might have seen Ustream before. It is basically live video, kind of like a Google hangout session, something like that. And so, you might not ever associate webinars with Ustream.tv, but I did it several times to my tech crowd. In fact, there is one instance that comes to mind where I decided to make an offer on that webinar and myself and a guy that worked for me at the time; we hopped on to this Ustream thing that was part of something that we did for just engagement with the community and I decided to make a limited time offer on that Ustream broadcast for the membership that I had on that tech site at PCMech. And long story short, I did about $700 in sales that evening and we did sell it in probably about 2 hours.

Now, not huge money when you consider some of the other stories that you might have heard from other people but that is pretty good for the tech niche. It really is; I am not going to lie. 🙂 The other thing, too, is that this is before a lot of people were even doing things like that and I did over at Ustream. I was able to use a piece of software that puts some things on my screen so I had a limited time thing and you know, I basically told them “In order to get this special deal you got to sign up for the membership while we are still broadcasting” and when we go offline the deal is over. And so that brought scarcity to it in urgency and people took action. And I think it was probably only a… I forgot what I was charging for that; but anyway, we did about $700, maybe $750 bucks.

I also did a webinar one time as part of an official launch of the Blog Masters Club product. This was one of the first webinars I ever did in this particular market for helping bloggers. And with that Blog Masters Club Webinar I ended up doing close to $19,000 in one evening. So, obviously that was something that was kind of cool. It really does show you the potential of webinars.

But even these days, I have got the Blog Monetization Webinar. That is something I am running all the time here at the Blog Marketing Academy. It started out as a live webinar and then around the summer of 2015 my family and I took off for a month in the RV and went up to New England and all that and I am sitting there thinking “Well, I don’t really want this webinar that is bringing in sales to simply stop.” So I went ahead and turned that webinar into an evergreen webinar that began to run on automatic. And I did that primarily so that the webinar will not go down to nothing while I was gone. I actually expected the stats to drop, I expected it to not do particularly well, I have some things that I wanted to perfect on the live webinar before I went to evergreen, but because of this vacation we had scheduled I decided to jump the gun and go to an evergreen webinar; kind of before I thought it was ready.

Well, as it turns out the conversion rates on that webinar really didn’t change! Now, I had less people actually going through the webinar but of the percentages of the people who actually did attend, the conversion rate is pretty much the same. So I am sitting there thinking, “Well, damn! I have got an evergreen webinar and here it is actually not doing too badly.” And so to this day, the Blog Monetization Webinar is evergreen. Now I am getting ready to update it and I’ll probably deliver it live a few times before I go evergreen with that. But that is an evergreen webinar which means that you can attend it on demand, essentially.

So, as you could tell, I have been doing webinars for quite some time. I haven’t always been super-consistent about it and actually, that is probably one of my business regrets; is the fact that I have not been consistent about it, because webinars are a fantastic way to grow your business. It actually has added quite a bit to my bottom line for 2015 and I assume that it will continue to do so in 2016.

So with all that being said, let’s get on with the reasons why you should do webinars…

8 Reasons Why You Should Be Doing Webinars

1. Doing webinars will build your list.

And it is a fantastic way to build your list. Whenever you RSVP for a webinar you are entering your name and your email address and that is how you register. So, obviously that is putting you on to that person’s email list whenever you do it. So it is a lead magnet and essentially you can go and you can create PDFs and videos and training courses if you like, and all these things to build your list but at the end of the day, a webinar is a fantastic way to build that list.

2. The engagement level is really, really high.

It is great, actually. Now, think about the engagement level that you would feel with somebody… You come to somebody’s blog and they offer a webinar on some topic that you are interested in… Now, how much connection do you think that you would feel with that person if you just got a PDF; a little one page PDF and you printed it and you’re like “Huh, okay, great” versus you showed up on their webinar and you just listen to them speak for about an hour. You are going to really get to where you know, like and trust that person a lot better if you just sat there and listen to them for an hour and you were actually engaged in the presentation that they gave.

And so for that reason, you can see that webinars are great for high engagement. It is not only putting people on to your list but you are building that relationship with your list. And even if they do not buy anything from you, they are still going to have that stronger relationship so they might come in and buy something later, they are helluva lot more likely to. They are going to be far more engaged than any other person that you put on your email list. And that is just the way that it is. And so, these two things in combination; the fact that it builds your list and the fact that you have the time engagements and relationship building with those people means that you are going to have a more responsive list. Regardless of whether you sell anything on the webinar or not.

3. It shows a stronger intent on the part of the person who is actually signing up for that webinar.

There is a big difference in mentality between people who are simply downloading free things versus somebody who is basically making a little micro-commitment to show up on one of your webinars. There are a lot of people out there on the internet who just like to collect free stuff. And so if you offer them lead magnets, it is great. You will get more qualified people and that you’ll get people on to your list. And lead magnets; I have talked about them many times, it is a great strategy. But there are those people who are just tire kickers and they like to collect free things… it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are that committed to any particular outcome. Whereas, if somebody signs up for some webinar, they just basically said “Yeah, I’ll show up at some date and some time” and it is a commitment in the future so it shows a stronger intent. It is a live event that they just signed up for and they are committing to actually show up. So that psychology of that stronger intent makes them a much better prospect for you than if they had just downloaded a standard PDF lead magnet.

4. Webinars are awesome for sales.

They really are awesome for sales. I mean, for me to do that pretty hokey little webinar via Ustream, and then I made some $700 in sales and this was many, many years ago, in my tech market which is not an easy market to sell to, let me tell you. All the way up to webinar where I did 19 grand in the course of like 90 minutes; I have seen all different ranges here and it all goes to show that webinars are really, really great for sales. And it makes perfect sense, really, when you have that stronger intent that I just talked about when they sign up, where you have that higher engagement factor with them; they get to know you, they get to hear you… You probably introduced them to you and your background a little bit. You can build up that reputation, maybe get them to laugh a little bit, tell some stories… If you hold their attention to that webinar, they are going to be so much more engaged by the time you get to an offer than they will ever be if they are just reading a sales letter. I mean, let’s face it… Most of us get to a sales letter and we don’t read it anyway. We kind of scroll to the bottom, we try to hunt out the price tag and we’re like “I don’t want to spend that” then you just back button off that thing and you’re gone, right? That is what most people do.

Now, with a really well done sales letter, sometimes you can hold their attention but you do not have any control over the situation. Whereas if they are on that webinar, you can. There are things that you can do to hold their attention and to get them to stick around until the end and build that relationship with them to the point that when you make a sale, you have a much higher likelihood of actually converting them into a customer. And you’ll hear conversion rates on these things that go all over the board. I have heard some people who have single-digit conversion rates into sales, but still, even if they give me a single-digit conversion rate it is still better than a sales letter will do. But then you hear these people who have done; and I have done it before, webinars that convert anywhere between 20% and 30%. Now, imagine, as a sales person on the internet, being able to take any pool of people and between 20 and 30% of them just became a customer of yours. That is really high! It blows most sales videos and almost every sales letter out of the water. And you could do that with the webinar. There doesn’t have to be some big pre-launch thing to get them into it, some long-winded leads, relationship building email sequence… None of these fancy things that can all add to it.

But the beauty of the webinar is that you can actually accomplish all of that in a single presentation and still make that sale. So you might hear this romantic stories of “I converted at 25%, I converted at 30%” That is great if you get there. But the last thing I want you to do is beat up on yourself if you don’t because that is part of the growing process. You might even do a few webinars where you don’t make any sales. You might do some, where you might make one or two sales. I’ve done it. You don’t always knock it out of the park. But if you are in a single digit conversion rate; let’s say you converted 6% or 7% of the people who showed up into a customer, trust me, that 8% is better than most sales letter, you are still coming out ahead. So webinars are great in that regard. And this goes right into our 5th reason why you should be doing webinars and that is…

5. You can sell higher ticket things without the need for preliminary front-end products.

Now, what I mean by that is that you can sell things that are more expensive. And you can go right for it. Somebody can join your email list for the purpose of your webinar and then you can get them on to the webinar and you can go right for a higher ticket sale. And you have a much higher likelihood of actually converting them into a customer. Let’s come up with a random price point… Let’s say it is a $300 price point. If somebody just came to a sales letter, more or less casually, on your page, on your website and they saw a $300 price point and there’s just no ability to handle their originations, it is not interactive; and for all these various reasons, you are not that likely to go direct to a $300 sale right off the bat.

So what you do with the funnel; and I teach this with the Blog Profit Funnel, is that typically you will have a front-end product first, some really low hanging fruit, low price point to allow people to become a customer of yours without a lot of friction. And then you have got the funnel in place and you can get them up to the higher ticket stuff. With the webinar, a lot of times you can skip a lot of that and it is a whole different kind of funnel. You go right for the high ticket. I get people, right now, as it currently sits; and this is probably going to change…

The offer that I present on my Blog Monetization Webinar is a $249 offer. That is not all that high ticket compared to some things, but that being said, it converts. Now, if I just have that offer straight up with no webinar first, the conversion rate will be a lot less than I was getting on that webinar. So you can do it. Go higher than you probably think. It is not just the price point. You got to have an offer than matches the price point, obviously. But that being said, I don’t want you to aim low. I want you to realize that when you got them on a webinar you can ask what you feel that is truly worth. You have these people in an environment that you can do that, you can totally pull it off.

6. You can learn a lot about your audience and also their objections.

This works especially if you are doing a live environment; a live webinar because you have a two-way interaction. You are going to take questions at the end of it, maybe you will take questions throughout, and you are going to be seeing their comments coming-in in the questions box. This is all great intelligence about your market. Now, think about this: You are presenting an offer to them in that webinar and let’s say they don’t buy it… Well, great. Maybe they are asking you some questions… Those questions are gold for you because those are questions that you now need to build-in to your offer because you can handle those objections. And so in that live environment you will get those questions and those objections to your offer and that allows you to go back to the drawing board and re-tweak the offer a little bit in order to handle those objections and get past it.

You also can get content questions on the webinar which you can then turn around and turn into blog content, YouTube videos; whatever it might be. So you got to pay special attention to getting those things; getting those questions and actually logging what they are. If you use GoToWebinar you actually have the ability to go in there and get everything that was typed in to the questions box and you should go download that and check them out because that is stuff that you can use later. So it is not all about “Hey I made a sale” or “I didn’t make a sale” it comes down to what you can learn about your audience that you can then leverage later.

7. A webinar can actually be automated.

Now I am going to be talking more about webinar automation in the future episode here coming up soon, but it is really, really powerful because that means that you have got the benefits of a webinar but you are not even there doing it. You prepped it up in advance. Now, it is very, very important that you realize that I am not condoning any trickery here where you are trying to convince people that it is live when it is really not. There is nothing at all wrong with an on-demand webinar; people do it all the time, it is actually very user friendly because a lot of people prefer to kind of do it on demand or do to do it on a shorter schedule or even in their own time zone so it is convenient for them. Well, logistically, the only way to do that is to automate the webinar because if you had to do it live, it is going to be all tied to your schedule and that is not going to fit other people very well. And so, for that reason automation is a great thing but it also allows you to have people constantly going through your webinar, being presented this offer and you are not even there. It is fantastic.

I can’t count the number of times that I have been out camping in my RV or something like that and my phone will buzz and show me that I made a webinar sale. It’s great! I mean, who wouldn’t like that, right? And sometimes, I get people who are just asking questions on the webinar and it comes in to my email box and I will get back to them. But all these stuff I just said about learning about your audience and getting audience intelligence and learning about their objections; that is all stuff that happens all in automatic. It comes to my email. So, that is an opportunity for leverage. I love being able to leverage things and automate things using the internet technology that we have because it creates a business that is no longer tied to our time. And that is a business that you can scale. And for that reason, webinars are great because with all of the benefits that I just told you, you can actually automate it.

8. You have the opportunity for leverage.

Like what I said earlier, the fact that you can automate it means that you have got a lot of leverage there. Your people can literally be attending your webinar any time of the day regardless of what you are doing. But let us also look at all the various ways that you can use a webinar to leverage it for future content… If you record a live webinar that you do, you can use it for later. So if you do a live webinar, you can record it and then automate it later using that recording. You can also record it and turn it into an online video for your YouTube channel, you can even break the webinar up into multiple videos, you can turn that webinar into blog content by way of transcribing it or even having a written part and then you take a part of it and turn it into a video and embed that in your blog post.

You can see there is a lot of possibilities here… You can also use a webinar for paid training products. I have done this many, many times where I deliver live training over a webinar, record the whole thing and turn that into a product that I can charge for later. In fact, many times what I do is that I charge people just to be on the webinar to begin with. They are paid customers who are going through the training with me live. But then I record it and of course that becomes a product that I can now sell in perpetuity. So by recording every webinar that you do, you have a lot of opportunities to use it later.

So for that reason, I would recommend that you always hit the record button on a webinar. First of all, you should be doing webinars (I hope that part is clearer to you by now) but the other thing is that you should be recording every single one that you do. Even if you do not even know if you are going to use it in the future, you just never know. So record it anyway. And then just kind of put it in to a little archive, on your hard drive, and you’ll never know if you might want to use it.

The other thing too is that when it comes down to automating that webinar, I generally recommend that you perfect that webinar first before you go to automation. So you probably going to want to deliver it several times, live. And then you could find and record every single one of them, by the way. And then you take the one that converted the best or came off the best and you use that as your recording for the automated version. And so, again, you have to record every single one. You’ll never know how it might work out. Maybe there will be a question that came up on a liver webinar that would make a beautiful video that you can use on your YouTube channel. You didn’t know that if it was coming, it was a live question that came to your from one of your attendees. So by recording it, then you can take advantage of anything that happens. So record every single webinar and you can leverage it later.

So those are the big 8 reasons why I feel that you should be dong webinars. There is a lot of opportunity here; people are doing webinars for a long time. And if you are not doing them now, I think that you should begin. It is a form of online training and online content that is not going anywhere anytime soon. The live even structure has been happening for years and years; way before the internet even existed. But the webinar is simply a way that we can bring that same thing to the internet and it is not going to go anywhere. And in fact, there are many markets where webinars are not very common, that is automatic point of advantage over your “competition” is the fact that you can be doing webinars while they are not.

So hopefully, you will start doing some webinars soon or if you have been out of the game for a little bit, maybe start taking it a little bit more seriously because I am definitely glad that I did.

60-Minute Webinar Plan

And so like I promised, I wanted to leave you with something that you can go and download. It is actually not brand new; I created this a few years ago, I just never made it available all that publicly, but it is a graphical outline of how to structure a 60-minute webinar. So if you suffer from that blank slate syndrome where you are like, “Okay, I want to do a 60-minute webinar but the hell do I do?” This will give you a general outline on how you can actually structure that 60-minute webinar so you are not completely going blind. It is downloadable, it is in PDF format, it is graphical.

Thank you so much once again, and I will see you on the next episode where we are going to continue on this topic of webinars. See you then! 😉