In this episode, we’re talking about a strategy near-and-dear to my heart.
It’s something that I love doing. I love shouting it from the rooftops! EVERYBODY! YOU SHOULD DO A WEBINAR!
Here’s why I still think they are the BEST freebie.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE FREE RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
Let’s get started…
If you’ve followed me for more than five minutes, you’ll probably know that I’m a big fan of webinars.
Webinars have gotten a pretty bad rap over the years. It has been so interesting to see the online business world fall in love with them and use them almost exclusively as freebies, and then fall out of love with them before having a resurgence. It’s this rollercoaster love affair that the online business world has with webinars.
But I have stayed true to webinars the whole time in my business.
Over the last five-and-a-half years I have run over a hundred webinars and it has been so much fun for me to do, and I still think they are THE BEST freebie.
I wanted to share that with you and talk about why I love webinars so much, because I want to address some of the objections that people have to webinars, and also help you understand the business benefits beyond just the initial sales that you make when you run one.
1. What is a webinar and why are they so sexy?
A webinar is an online web-based seminar. They can be called anything from a webinar to a masterclass, intro-session, group session or a group workshop.
I’m referring to when you run a free class or workshop online, and you require people to use their email address to register with an upsell at the end of the session.
I love webinars because they are so highly connected as a freebie. If you think about running a challenge, an ebook or listening to an audio when compared to attending a webinar, there’s so much more connection because we’re all in the same space at the same time together.
This also leads to something I hate…
I HATE automated webinars.
For webinars to be connected, they have to be real. If your audience are all putting in the effort to attend at the same time, you should make the effort to show up as well. We can tell as entrepreneurs if you’re actually there live or just playing pretendsies and using automation software to make it look like you’re there live.
You need to be delivering the webinar live and answering peoples questions along the way and at the end after doing your sales pitch.
The reason they’re so sexy is connection. I’m all about connection in business. That connection creates other opportunities and leads into number 2…
2. Conversion
Webinars for me are still the highest converting freebie and lead magnet that I use in my business, hands down.
When I run a webinar live, I’m dealing with peoples’ objections in the chatbox.
They’re so much more likely to purchase the thing I sell at the end if they attend the webinar. I’m helping people through a learning process and helping them to achieve an outcome.
We’re building trust and feeling connected, therefore the conversion rates are way higher.
3. Live messaging feedback
If I’m launching something, spreading the word or trying to discuss a webinar topic and people aren’t interested, I know that I haven’t nailed my messaging. That live feedback by the audience of them signing or not signing up definitely gives me lots of insight into what I’m doing right or wrong with my messaging.
I can use different ways to promote the webinar and change my messaging as I go. I don’t need to roll out the whole process of the webinar and wait to see that I only got four sign-ups. It can be changed on the fly.
It’s such a flexible way to promote something, plus, if it means I need to tweak the content I can do that as well because it’s being delivered live.
This also links back to connection.
If you’re running your webinar live and you’ve finished your sales pitch only to be asked a lot of questions about what you’re offering, but you thought the answers were obvious, there might be something wrong with your messaging. However, since you’re there to receive the live feedback, you can answer peoples’ questions and fix the issue there and then.
Another thing I love about webinars is that I’m taking people through a process.
I’m there to help them achieve a particular outcome – get better at sales, get more clients in the door, teaching Facebook strategy, or whatever else it might be. Any questions I receive during the process, help me refine it further, which also means if I convert the webinar into another kind of freebie, I know it works for people.
This is what I did with the Magnetic Business eBook. The eBook was originally a webinar that I ran three times.
Webinar lead magnet ideas for business start-up
I played with the messaging, the process and the objections some people had. After this, I turned it into an eBook. If I had just created that eBook without testing the webinar first, a lot of people would have got halfway through that eBook and got stuck, not understanding what I was talking about, and not getting the value from it. But because of the webinar and getting the messaging feedback live, I got the feedback on whether it works or not from a live audience, so I know that when people read the Magnetic Business eBook, they become more magnetic in their business.
They know what strategies they need to put in place. THAT is the sexiness of a webinar.
4. Flexibility
I really love that I have a lot of flexibility when it comes to running a webinar.
If I’m running a webinar and want to launch a group program, and the minimum number I need to get in early bird is ten, it’s two days before the webinar and I only have twenty-five sign-ups, I know that the chance of me converting ten people into my online course is really low. What I can do is change my upsell, delay my launch and understand that something is not working, so therefore not commit to this being the start of my launch.
My upsell at the end can be changed to a one-to-one offer or something else and I can delay my launch and offer until I have the sale stuff right.
There’s so much flexibility that I don’t have to commit to “this specific topic equals this specific outcome”. I can tweak and change as I go.
It’s a very powerful way to navigate the early stages of your sales messaging and learn/refine as you go.
5. Focused List Growth
If I run a webinar on facilitating Facebook groups (for example), I know that I’m filling my list with people that are interested in facilitating Facebook groups.
It’s very targeted and focused, so therefore when I run my Get Profesh Sesh on “How to Create and Grow Your Own Facebook Group”, my list is full of people who are interested in that.
When I go to promote and launch the Academy, I can say our focus for the month of November is facilitating your own Facebook group and creating a lot of reach and growth in that Facebook group.
It’s a really beautiful way for you to jam-pack your list with the right people for whatever your next offer or launch might be. It’s great for focused, niched list growth.
Those are my 5 reasons why I love webinars.
I also wanted to talk about some of the objections, resistances and the goods and bads of webinars too…
The biggest thing people say to me is “I hate going to webinars because for the first twenty minutes, the person is just talking about themselves”.
Clearly, that’s not the kind of webinar I am talking about here and that’s not how I run my webinars. I have people who already have all of my courses, who will still come to every free webinar I run because they know they’ll get great value out of it.
I have people who have never purchased anything from me, but they will always come to my live webinars because they know they’ll get great value out of it.
That is a beautiful reputation to have in the online business world.
So yes, you may have some resistance to people signing up and coming to webinars if they’re used to that style, but instead of saying that everyone has ruined webinars for you, let’s take some responsibility and be leaders in this space to show how great webinars are created and delivered.
The other thing is the self-indulgent webinar where you just talk about how amazing you are – making people jump through hoops and NLPing them to think they’re never going to succeed without you.
Again, that’s not the kind of webinar I’m talking about. Nor the automated webinars that have (for example) twelve slots a week.
No one is going to do twelve webinars a week.
These are strategies that have been used to turn webinars from what they’re great at into something that just pushes people through the sales process, and people are wising up to that these days.
I think this is the reason why people fell out of love with webinars, because people weren’t using them to achieve an outcome, just to make sales.
This removed the connection factor and the idea of earning your trust by just trying to “hack” their way through creating that trust when really the best way to create trust with your audience is to help them achieve something.
I have a beautiful little freebie for you today that will help you if you’re now on the webinar train and want to start making your own.
In the ladyposse library, I have a beautiful training called Winning Webinars, and it’s where I take you through my webinar creation process.
We also have two amazing ladies who offered to be guinea pigs for me, and we actually built their webinars together and recorded the entire process.
Laurie Griggs who teaches money strategy, profit first, and bringing together your business and personal finances.
And Kate Arthy who is a personalised health coach from Lifestyle Artists.
We have actually created their webinars together.
You can see the way I unpack the way that the process works, build the structure using the Winning Webinars training, and help people to take their audiences through a TURN process, where you turn people from being curious about your work, to being paying clients.
You can find all of that in the ladyposse library.
One thing I do want to say about this webinar training is that when you apply it, it really does work. I have two beautiful stories to tell you about this.
One lady who jumped in and grabbed the Winning Webinars training and watched Laurie’s build said, “I have run 3 webinars before I built them the way you build them. I have been running my webinars based on a sales coach advice and I have made less than $1,000. I ran a Tash-style webinar and made $2,500 in the 48 hours following the webinar ending.” Sexy, right?
Then I had a recent VIP client who ran an advanced masterclass-style webinar as part of her launch process, and we sold $15,000 worth of her course (which is under $1,000 per spot) simply by using this beautiful webinar process.
This was just the first step of the process. She made way more sales after the follow-up process had ended, but that one webinar made $15k of sales.
This is a really sexy training and when you put it in place it DOES work.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast. I look forward to seeing you promote your webinars and making sure that you’re getting lots of people signed up for them.
If you have any other insights and “aha’s” from this episode, make sure that you use #podcastaha and the episode number (156) when talking about it in the Heart-Centred Soul Driven Entrepreneurs group. I always love seeing any questions or aha’s that come up from each episode.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
