The 60-Minute Webinar Plan

So today, what we are actually going to do is we are going to continue on our topic of webinars and we are specifically going to go over a broad outline with some tips of the 60-Minute Webinar Plan.

The 60-Minute Webinar Plan Walk-through

Now, this is actually a download that I have been talking to you about for the last 2 or 3 episodes of the show because we have been talking about webinars. So you can go and grab this PDF image at blogmarketingacademy.com/webinarplan. Once again, that is blogmarketingacademy.com/webinarplan. It is completely free, you just enter your email and we’ll send it to that email address.

So what we are going to do in this show is we are actually going to walk-through that exact graphic and make a few commentaries along the way. This is a 60-Minute webinar formula designed to make sales. And I created this graphic, actually, a few years ago for some training that I had done and I am kind of bringing it forward here because really, the formula has not really changed.

Now, I want to be upfront with you… When we use the word “formula” I don’t want you to think that everything is about filling-in templates and that you have to hold to this timeline exactly, because that’s not the case. It is your webinar. But you will find that this general set up is what a lot of people do. Also, about this whole 60-minute thing; realize that this is a general 60-minute plan but a few webinar is not exactly 60 minutes and that is fine. Some people go longer; I have done and attended many 90 minute webinars. Sometimes it even goes longer than that, depending on Q&A. I’ve seen some shorter. I have done some shorter. So I want you to feel free to do what comes naturally to you. At the end of the day, this is your webinar and I don’t want you to think that because somebody puts the word “formula” on here as I have, that this is the only way to do it and that you have to stay in between the lines, okay? I just want to make that upfront to you.

So let’s get going here…

The 60-Minute Webinar Plan is generally going to be broken down into 3 components which is the Introduction Component which is roughly 10 minutes, the Content as they call it, which is roughly 40 minutes and then we go into the Close which would be roughly 10 minutes. So, 10+40+10 will add up to about 60. Again, these timeframes are very, very loose.

So, generally speaking, with the Introduction; you are going to be spending time introducing yourself, introducing the topic… So this is all about set up and getting them integrated into the webinar.

And then you move in to the Content portion of it. This is where you actually deliver on the promise that you set forth and you promised to them. So looking at the headline and the bullet points that people saw when they signed up for your webinar; now is the time that you deliver that.

And then after that, you go into the Close. Now, this is the portion where typically you are going to make an offer of some kind. Now, this is the portion that a lot of people get a little nervous about and it can get a little weird making that transition from content to close… You know, these are things that you will get better at with practice.

So I don’t want you to think that this is just this huge sudden mind shift like you are going good on the Content and then it comes to Close and all of a sudden you get really passive and really quiet… Don’t do that. If the content is good, they will be ready for the next step. And not only that… You should not make your content and your offer be a complete mismatch, obviously.

You are going to be presenting on some topic and then it’s like “Okay, if you want to take this to the next level, here is how to go about doing it” it will be a natural extension of the content, so therefore, you shouldn’t have to make this big C-shift and not only your tone and attitude; everything, just because you are now presenting them to something that they can buy.

So let’s go back and get into more details…

The Introduction

Here, the point is you want to introduce them to you and/or to the person that you are interviewing. So the idea there would be if you are having a guest present on the webinar; but it is your audience, then what you are going to do is you are going to introduce your guest because you are the one who is known to your audience, so the last thing that you would want to do is to have the guest come on and present to your audience with no setup.

So, you would introduce the guest to your audience, you are kind of lending your credibility to them, so to speak… You tell your audience why you invited them to present, kind of set them up and then you let them get on with them. So it is just a basic introduction. Now, if it is you, delivering to your own audience, then it would be – you, introducing yourself.

Now, you want to take into account here who you are target is. If these are people who are already pretty familiar with you, then there is no reason to go in to “Here’s my background” and all these stuff. Usually, webinars that do that is because that webinar is being presented to people who are not already familiar with the speaker.

If I am running a webinar as a Lead Magnet or I am running an ad up on Facebook to bring people into my webinar, then I will have spent a few minutes talking about my background and kind of introducing myself to them because these are people who might not know me very well, yet. So always take into account your target market there.

The other thing about introducing yourself is that you don’t want to get too long-winded about it. You don’t want to just tell your general biography. You only want to bring in the parts that are relevant to why people are coming to you now. What is the background of you relevant to the topic? And don’t bring up stuff that is not related. And you can also turn this into a storyline if your past actually fits it. You know… You’ll see a lot of people would say “I was having a lot of difficulty in X” whatever your topic might be “Then now, I have found “this”, then now I have this whole another system of how I have accomplished this and today that is what we are going to talk about.” And you kind of build that into your own introduction; your background. And it kind of allows your attendees to get some empathy and some trust of you and why they should be listening to you in this topic. Easily, it is going to move in to introducing them into the topic itself…

The Content

Now, obviously, they already know what you are going to be talking about because they saw the headline in the registration and all that. But now is the time where you are going to reiterate what that is; you are going to make a promise to them as to what they can expect on this webinar. You can maybe set up some teasers on things to look for in that webinar; maybe a bonus that they can get at the end if they stay all the way… Things like that.

As a general tone, you want to make sure that you sound fairly energetic. Don’t sound like you are dead and ready to go to sleep; that is not going to work very well. Using a little bit of humor can kind of loosen people up, it works really, really well. Obviously don’t inject it if you are naturally that way. At the end of the day, I think the best advice here is to simply be natural. Talk to the people who are on your webinar as if they were sitting from across the table. Just don’t make it out to be more than it really is.

A big thing here, too, is that you can overcome the objections of this being a sales webinar because depending on the market, you are going to have some people coming in to this webinar and they are going to be like, “Eh, I am here for the topic because you promised me X, X, X or whatever, but I know you are going to pitch me at the end.” And so, there is a little bit of that “shields up” mentality. But what you can actually do is you can totally deflate that by just letting them know “Yeah, I am going to present to you an offer at the end. It is totally up to you, absolutely no pressure at all. It will be a natural way to move forward on the topic that we are talking about today, but I promise you that you are going to get a lot of value out of this webinar whether you decide to ultimately buy or not. So sit back and let’s get some value out of this webinar.” Something like that. I just made that up off the fly, but I think it is a good idea to directly address the fact that you are going to make an offer on that webinar and kind of deflate that little “shields up” mentality that some people might have.

Now, on the graphic is this little bubble that says “Get them into a “YES” sequence.” Now, all that basically means is that you are setting a little bit of momentum up with them, answering questions in the affirmative; by saying “Yes”. And you could do that by asking them what often are rhetorical questions… These are questions where you pretty much know the answer is going to be “Yes”. So off the top of my head, if I were doing the Blog Monetization Webinar, and I ask people on the webinar… “Would you like to make $10,000 a month with your blog?” I don’t know, it’s just off the top of my head. Obviously, everybody there is going to probably say yes to that, right?

It is that type of thing. It is kind of like you are getting them interested in your topic, you are getting them a little bit jazzed up but you are also doing it by asking them questions that they are going to say “Yes” to. So that is what the “Yes Sequence” is, and what it does is it builds up some momentum to get them to say yes toward the end of the webinar as well, with your offer. If people are making the decisions themselves, rather than convincing them why they need to, it is a very different sales experience. So that is why the Yes Sequence is powerful, because you are making them to make this small, micro commitments in their head and even possibly verbally by saying “Yes, I do want that. Yes, that is true.” It is like they are agreeing to it, they are owning their position on that topic and then that makes it a lot simpler when it gets to the point where obviously they want to take the next step because they just said they wanted to do something about that. It is just a matter of staying consistent on what they have already said and agreed to.

So let’s move in into the Content portion on our 60-Minute Webinar Formula. Now, I am not going to dive too deep into this one because I talked about this in a lot more detail in the last episode; Episode 154 of Coffee Break Blogging. So you can back up one episode if you have not listened to that and we go more into planning out the content portion of the webinar.

But generally speaking, in our template, this is going to be roughly 40 minutes; once again, give or take here, man. But at the same time, you want to air on the side of good content here. I don’t want anybody here to think that content is some formality you got to get through so you could get forward to pitching them. That is not the attitude that one should have. If you are going to do a successful webinar, people can see right through it. People have good BS detectors. So deliver some good, solid stuff here. You want to show them the meat, you want to give them some stuff that they can really walk out of this webinar with some real value whether they buy from you or not.

You want to have some major points that you are going to deliver to them. The graphic here says, 3-6 major points; each one with a slide. Now, I would actually modify this a little bit because as I said in Episode 154, about planning out the content of your webinar; you should have a lot of slides. You don’t want to have it so that you are sitting on one slide for all that long. So don’t do one of these bullet point style slide where you are sitting on the same one for 5 minutes. I have done that many times. It is easy to lose people. I still do it, primarily more on like Training webinars where I am really not worried as much about making an offer or anything like that; it is just info. But if I am really thinking about engagement, getting people in the end, presenting an offer at the end of it; I am a little bit more conscious of not having those big, long-winded points a lot.

A few little notes that I have here on the formula graphic:

One is that you can start up by telling them to get a pen and paper and take some notes. Now, the idea there is to get them to honor their commitment for why they signed up for the webinar, to begin with.

What you are really trying to do is to get them to pay attention to you and not be distracted by their email or Facebook or something like that. But you are doing it by not just saying “Hey, shut off Facebook.” I mean, you can do that, but it is also about (again) getting them to take some ownership of their own decision. They decided to be on your webinar. They came there for a reason. They wanted something that you promised to them and now you are basically inviting them to honor their own commitment, their own decision for showing up and pay attention. And another way you can do that is to say “Take out a pen and paper because we are going to have a few very important points that I really want to make sure you understand and the best way; it is been proven, is to write it down.

The actual act of writing it down on a piece of paper helps you understand and remember that material and actually get more of your side of it later. So I would highly encourage you to get out a pen and paper and when I tell you to write something down; do that. And I do so, for a reason.” Something like that, but not only it is going to help the material impact them a little bit more; which is always good, but it is going to help them remain a lot more engaged with your webinar.

The other point that I have here on the 60-Minute Webinar formula is that if you can tie-in testimonial with each major section of your content, then this works really well for setting up the eventual offer. So let’s say that your content is going to be broken down to 5 main points; like 5 main things that you are going to discuss and show them how to do. If you can end-off each of those things with a real testimonial from people that you have served on how you helped them do exactly that; that is great lead up. Now you are not going in to pitch mode here when you present these testimonials. You are just kind of like a natural thing to show that other people have accomplished what you just showed people how to do in the webinar and you are showing that with a testimonial that of course, says something good about you or whatever it is that you are eventually going to be offering on that webinar. So it is just a little tactic there, very commonly done, but helps a lot.

The Close

Again, I have this as a 10 minute increment; it is give and take. But what I don’t want you to do is think that “I am going to spend 20 or 30 minute on content that I am just going to spend the whole darn thing pitching at them. Don’t do that.

You can make this Close as short as you want as long as you can get the point across or longer if you feel that it is necessary. Now, this Close does not really include the Q&A portion of it; we will talk about that in a little bit.

So let’s make a few points here about what you are doing during this offer presentation Close portion of the webinar…

First thing you are going to do is you want to show the product. You want to like outline the offer that you are offering to them on this webinar. It is good that while you do that, you show the actual product. So if you can get a physical product image made of it, then that is great. Something that shows like a real world tangible value to the offer. So with an info product, very commonly what would be done is you go out and you get an image of like a boxed course or a set of DVD or something like that. Even if that is not the format that you sell it in, it is just nice to have those types of images because it increases perceived value of your course. It is just the way that it is.

Now, if you are doing a service or something like that, another way that you can do this is to give the product its own logo; like branded as its own thing because that increases perceived value and makes it its own brandable thing. So, do you have a logo that is separate from your main company logo or a blog logo? Like, have its own brandable logo for your product and that could be a way to do this as well.

Another thing on the graphic here is it says “Show the list of all products they will get; one slide per item.” The reason it is there is because typically, in order to increase the value of your offer, you want to present to them several different things that they are going to get. And in fact, one of the bubbles here on the 60-Minute Webinar formula is that you can shoot for a 10x pricing factor. So the idea there would be that the value that they are going to get is roughly worth 10 times more than you are asking them to pay.

So let’s say that you are going to charge $100 for this offer on the webinar; how can you give them $1000 worth of value? And how can you demonstrate that $1000’s worth of value?

So typically, your offer is going to be made up of the core thing plus some bonuses and things like that. It is kind of like this bundle thing that you are presenting to them. So for each one of those components of your offer, have a slide that describes it. And you can even put the price of that is worth.

Don’t be one of these weird people like when they say “This product is worth X” that you are just kind of pull out some big mega number out of your butt… I’ve seen a lot of people do that! Make the price realistic. Even better, make it a price that you had actually charged people for in the past. I have seen that with bonus offers. Sometimes the bonus offer will be a product that maybe you sold it in the past, but now it is not technically in the market anymore, but now you are using it as a bonus. Well, you can say what it was legitimately worth; whatever it is that you were charging for it previously because that is what it was being sold for. But don’t be one of these people who – you give them a list of resources; 3 or 4 page PDF and you’ll say “Value: $497!” Pffftt!!! It’s not! It’s a freaking PDF file! So don’t pull stuff out of your butt like that. I’ve seen people do that. And then they’ll end up with this: “Real world value of $30000! You can have it all the day for $97!” It’s not believable! Don’t do stuff like that.

Show them the real price at the end, once you presented everything and you build up this value… You then show them what they can buy if for, today. Present to them the offer. And if it is an offer exclusive to the webinar; special pricing, make damn sure that you tell them that because that gives them that incentive. It is almost like a little “thank you for being on the webinar”.

Now, I highly encourage you, when you present the offer; to offer fast action bonuses. So basically, what this is, is you need to give people that incentive to take action and not sit around and think about it. And so, fast action bonuses are things that people are going to get if they act now.

This is just human nature… A lot of times when it comes to making a decision, a lot of people simply are a little bit afraid to do so especially when it involves money. And so what you need to do is you need to get them to get off the fence. Now, even if they decide ultimately “I’m not going to buy” that’s fine. It is better for them to have made a decision than to sit around stuck on it. And so that is really what you are doing with this fast action bonuses. Now, it certainly helps for that sense of urgency is going to help more people decide in the affirmative to buy. If you present a really good offer and you say “Here’s why you need to buy it right now, instead of waiting.” You are going to get higher conversion rates. It works every single time.

Another thing of bubble that I have got here in the formula is “Get the product for free if they accomplish something with it.” Now, this is a nice little tactic where you can give people the option to get your offer for free if they accomplish certain things with it. So basically, the idea here is that they are going to buy it. You’re asking them to buy it right now. And then you are inviting them to get certain results. And your product; hopefully is set up to enable that to happen.

So what you are doing is you are incentivizing them to actually be one of your best case studies; one of your best testimonials. But we are inviting them like – if they hit that mark; if they accomplish that, you will actually refund to them the cost of their purchase essentially making it free.

So what you are getting out of that is you are going to have higher conversions because you are going to have more people who buy it because there’s now this promise that maybe they can get it for free if they actually execute… that’s the important part. But the good thing is, even if you get some stellar students who take advantage of that and you ultimately do refund their money, you just got one hell of a great case study and testimonial about the effectiveness of your offer which is of course you can build in to that webinar and use it to make more sales later. So it does help. So this is the idea of “get the product for free.” You know, like… “Let’s accomplish some benchmarks and I will refund the cost of that purchase to you. And it is a way of reducing risk in getting people to make that sale now.

The other thing is that at the end of the webinar… There’s a couple of things here… One is that you are going to do a Q&A most likely. And then you are going to end the webinar. Now, you need to pay some attention as to what is on screen when you are doing that. What I like to recommend is that during the Q&A, that you have your call to action slide on the webinar. So, maybe a few bullet points, the product image itself and of course, the link; the place where they need to go to buy it. And that slide stays on the screen while you are doing your Q&A.

Now, I might have mentioned this in a previous episode; I don’t remember… But when it comes to Q&A, you don’t want to be reliant on actual live questions. You want to have some questions that you pre-determined. That way when you go to Q&A you don’t look like a weirdo if you don’t have actual questions sitting there, waiting for you. You don’t want to go to dead air. So what I highly recommend is that you have questions ready. And these questions could be ones that you have gotten from people in the past; that you know are very common questions…

It could be questions that, quite frankly, you wrote – because they handle common sales objections, common confusions about your offer. And you have that list of questions at the ready so that when you go to the Q&A portion of your webinar, you have got somewhere to go with it and then you would intermix it with what happen live on that webinar. But the entire time, you have your call to action slide up there onscreen so that people never lose sight of where you want them to go.

Another thing that I’ve seen people do at this stage, especially if they have fast action bonuses is that you can actually put a timer right on the darn screen.

So that let’s say that you give them 30 minutes to act; and they get certain bonuses if they do it in the first 30 minutes or something like that. You can actually get a 30 minute timer and put it onscreen. Now, the technicals of that I am not going to get into here but I’ve seen downloadable timers, basically a movie file and you can literally embed that right into your slide. And so you can have a timer right there on your slide deck. It is a really good, visible scarcity.

There’s also a service that I use called Deadline Funnel which allows you to have real deadlines. And so you can put timer deadline right on the offer page that is set for 30 minutes and it started by when they first visit that page and it will enforce your deadline. So that is another great way to do this. And it would be totally evergreen which means you can replay this webinar over and over again and everybody would still have that 30 minute deadline. And then after the 30 minute you would automatically move them to another version of the same offer that doesn’t have those fast action bonuses available. So that is how that would work.

Now, one other thing is that after the actual end of the webinar, so this would be after all the Q&A is over, everything is done; you’re done talking… What do you do? Well, most people; honestly most of the time for me, too, will simply just end the webinar like, “Okay, thanks for coming… See you!” What you might want to try doing because you might have some people who are sitting there thinking about it… Most people are going to leave when you leave, but you might have some who for some reason, don’t. And so what I have seen some people do is they will actually go silent, mute the mic and actually leave the webinar technically running for another 15, 20, 30 minutes with the call to action slide sitting there. So it is kind of just running; there’s just nothing happening. But those people that were still strugglers there is sitting there. So that is the kind of idea that you can do that.

A few notes about the offer…

Obviously, make it an irresistible offer; make it something that speaks so strongly to what they are trying to accomplish and the prices so compelling that they just have a hard time declining. That is really where you want to go with that. You want to make it so that they almost feel that they are taking advantage of you when they buy it. That is kind of how you want this to be. If you can accomplish that, you are going to make a lot of sales on your webinar.

Now when it comes to breaking the product up… You know, you got your core offer and you got the various bonuses and various components of your offer; each one of those components should have its own price point. We have mentioned that a little bit earlier.

So, those could be your own products; maybe you are taking several of your products and you are kind of bundling them together into one big, mega product… Well, assign the price to each of those components and then lay it out and then when you present them the offer they are going to pay it is going to be obviously be less than that. Again, make it an irresistible offer. Focus on the benefits, not the features. That’s pretty classic Sales 101 right there. Use presuppositions. There’s a little bubble here that talks about presuppositions…

Basically what this is, is that when you are talking about your offer, you are talking as if you are assuming that they are going to do it. So it is not a matter of “If you take advantage of this offer today…” it is more like “When you take advantage of this offer today.” It is a verbal thing, it is very subdued but basically, you are presupposing that they are going to do this. It makes so much sense for them to take this offer that you are not even taking the possibility that they are not going to do it.

Obviously as you present the offer, use social proofs; testimonials when you can. Now, testimonials have evolved… We have actual, real testimonials that people had submitted to you. If you can put case studies in there that show real world result, that’s great. Don’t always shoot for the big, mega results; you want to go for results that are actually pretty typical. But you can also get people who are just saying cool things about you or your offer on social media and you can just screenshot them… Facebook posts, Twitter; stuff like that. You can screenshot those things and put them into the slides because that is all valid points of social proof.

So that pretty much wraps up some of our main points from the 60-Minute Webinar Formula. Once again, everything that we have just talked about, you can actually download by going over to blogmarketingacademy.com/webinarplan. And then as you have that in front of you, print it out or on your screen; if you want to, listen to this podcast again and you might even get some more value and some more ideas from there.

With that… Thanks so much! If you are getting value out of these episodes, I would highly appreciate it if you run over to iTunes and tell people that you are getting value out of this podcast. I enjoy doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoy actually talking to you.

I will see you next time. We will be talking more about how to get people actually attend to your webinar in the first place.

So, see you on the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging! Talk soon! 😉