A few days ago I’ve published an important article: “Start Your First Webinar And Create New Clients and Revenues” (if you haven’t read it, I recommend you read it, even before you read this one) and now that you’re completely ready to make your first webinar, to create new clients and high revenues, I want to give you the best practice.
There are 5 segments of creating and running a powerful and profitable webinar:
- The before part, where we plan the webinar, get organized and create the webinar.
- The marketing part where you announce your webinar to your audience and invite them to register and attend the webinar.
- Just a few minutes before the webinar is officially begin, where you connect to your attendees.
- During the webinar, the value & content delivery, the offer of your products and services (if you’ve chosen this webinar profit model) and answer the attendees questions.
- After the webinar ends, follow-ups, replay and automation (to generate additional sales).
Now let’s go into details.
Segment #01 – Planning & Creating
Here are the steps you need to make:
1). Webinar Topic
You need a great topic to attract your audience to your webinar. This is right for the first webinar as well as to all of your next ones.
So how do you craft a great topic to your webinars?
The best strategy we use to craft a great topic to any of our webinars is by thinking about the biggest pains of our audience.
For example, if you are a dietitian and the holidays are coming, your audience biggest pain is how to go from one huge holiday meal to another and not gain weight.
2). Date, Day & Time
When doing a live webinar, the date, day and time are important. After all if you choose wrong, you might end up with just a few attendees registering and showing up.
Date
You need to make sure, as possible as you can, not to have a live webinar right on a special occasion such as holidays and special events.
Holidays – Open a calendar and look on the holidays’ dates. You don’t want to have a live webinar right when people are busy with the holiday.
Special Events – Make sure there is no special event right on your webinar. I remember that we had a live webinar right as the “Big Brother” reality show finale was aired and with 30% rating, we lost a hefty portion of our webinars attendees.
Saying that, at the end of the day, every day something happens and you can’t really work around all of them. Put your common sense into it and select the best date you can.
Day & Time
I’ve put day and time together as the selection of the right day & time is something that can be determined by 3 connected elements:
The first one is common sense and logic.
If your audience is teachers, your webinar should be at night times as during the day your targeted audience is at school teaching and most likely not attend your live webinar. So you’re better doing the live webinar on evening on week days or more flexible on weekends.
Another example would be a stock trading webinar that make sense to being at 8:00 am just before the market opens and possible one in the afternoon as the market ends. Do what makes sense to you niche and audience.
The second one is look what others are doing for the same audience, what times and days they are doing their webinars (always good to learn in your niche).
The third one is testing.
After having over 600 live webinars I can tell you with full confidence that in different hours you get different results.
Think about the school teachers’ example above.
Teachers are not working every day and some of them have time during the day and rather not put the time in the evenings. Meaning if you do a webinar at 10:00 am most teachers won’t show up, but you most likely to get different teachers coming at this time rather in the evening.
We’ve tested starting webinars from 8:00 am until 9:00 pm (we don’t recommend to begin a live webinar outside these hours unless it really makes sense). And like I said, in different hours we get different results.
The main hours we start webinars are:
08:00 am – early morning for people who are busy later the day
09:00 am
10:00 am
11:00 am
14:00 am – after people getting back from launch
Then we take a break until the evening as people are busy with their job, business, their family and kids until they put them to bed.
09:00 pm – last hour we would begin a webinar.
The bottom line is, you need to take the 3 elements of common sense & logic, what others are doing and testing together and find over time the ‘perfect’ time and day for your webinars.
3). Make A Registration Page
Your registration page should be simple that includes:
a). The Webinar’s Title (name) – The webinar title should be also the main benefit of attending the webinar.
For example, if you are a dietitian and you’re doing a webinar on “How To Enjoy The Holiday’s Meal And Not Gain Any Weight”.
b). The Benefits – you need to list out all the benefits of participating in the webinar.
Taking the dietitian example above, you need to break it down and to the smaller benefits like:
* What are the 3 things you must do before you go to any holiday meal.
* How to plan ahead and make sure you have healthy and low calories delicious food wherever you’re going.
* How to choose the best desert for you without you gaining weight.
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I’m sure you get the hang of it.
c). Call For Action – this is a fact people need to be told what to do. Same as you tell them in an email “click here now to…”, also in your registration page, make sure you add a call for action for them to register right now to you live webinar.
4). Create A Email Sequence
You’re starting to get people to register to your webinar – great!!!
It is not the end of it.
You need to remember, it is a free webinar and that means that it is easier to be convinced to register to a webinar but now it is your task to take the steps to make sure that this person who has just registered, is actually going to show to the webinar.
You need to send him an exciting follow-up registration email sequence where you remind him why he registered to the webinar, the benefits and value you’re going to give him and that he must show to get them.
It is like you’re actually “re-selling” him the webinar… but it is important to increase the attendees show.
5). Slideshow Presentation
In order to make the attendees engaged during the webinar, you need to have a slideshow presentation:
a). Words – best presentations should be slim in words. Make the slides with either bullet points or a few words:
Bullet points slide:
A few words slide:
b). Pictures – insert pictures into your presentations. It makes them more vibrant and breaks the pattern of text.
c). Templates – create a clean slide template. Remember, the focus is completely on the valuable content you deliver. You don’t want it to be multi colors and confusing.
You need to make the presentation interesting and full with value. Try to incorporate to the presentation case study, examples and important facts to make it more interesting and more valuable.
Segment #02 – Marketing
You’ve setup the registration page and you’re ready to start the marketing of the webinar. There are many ways to do webinar marketing, but there are 4 main ones you should use to market for your first live webinar:
1) Your Email List
2) Social Media
3) Forums / Discussion Boards
4) Paid Advertising
Segment #03 – A Few Minutes Before The Webinar Begins
The webinar is almost about to begin – great!
Now the actual value delivering begins.
Many times when we do live webinars, we love to go online 5-15 minutes before the actual time where the webinar begins (so if the webinar begins at 09:00 pm we would open our microphones just after 8:45 pm).
Why do we do that?
First you want to connect to your attendees showing them you are a person like anyone else and what a great way to do so by going live and opening the microphone ‘unofficially’ to just communicate and engage with your audience.
What do we do at the ‘unofficial’ time?
Depending on the situation, we ask them where they are right now and acknowledge them, we tell them something cool about the behind the scenes of this webinar, say ‘hi’ on a personal level to the ones who communicate back with you via the text box of the webinar.
You can (and should) ask them to share the webinar right now on the social media. You can prepare a post on your page and send them to like and share it right there on the spot.
You can actually utilize other social tools like facebook live cast, periscope or any other new live casting platform to show them you’re about to begin a webinar, this is a cool way to engage but also to bring more people to join the webinar on the spot.
Lastly we use this time, just before we close the ‘unofficial’ time for what we call the administrative notifications which is the time we ask people to remove all possible interferences they might have during the webinar. So we tell them guys, please close their emails (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook etc), Skype or any type of messengers and put their smart phones on either flight mode or on silent.
This is also the time we’re reminding them to have a notebook to write notes as we’re going to share great knowledge, tips, strategies and more with them. And if you have worksheets, remind them to have them with them now (and if not, provide a link where they can print it right now as they need it to maximize their results from being on your important webinar).
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Segment #04 – During The Webinar
I’d begin with saying you need to start your live webinar, right on time – best practice is to respect the people who showed up on time.
Welcome & Acknowledgement
First step is to begin the webinar with welcoming everyone and acknowledging them for showing up on time and attending the webinar.
Benefits Reminder & Learnings
Second step would be to excite them and remind them why they have registered and showed up to the live webinar.
Basically you’re telling them the same great value and benefits you’ve outlined in the webinar’s registration page.
Tell them the benefit and what they will learn today in you live webinar.
Questions Reminder
Attendees always have questions. The best practice is not to answer questions sent during the main part of the webinar (unless it is something you feel that is extremely important). You need to tell them that you are going to answer each one of their questions at a designated time at “the end of the webinar” (which for you is after you finish offering your product or service).
Your Story
Most of the webinar’s attendees don’t really know you. You need to establish a rapport with them, meaning justify why they should listen to you in the next hour or so and learning from you.
The story should be 3-5 minutes. Don’t make it cheesy (there is a strategy on how to tell your story called “The Hero Story” or “The Disney Story which in the future I will write specifically about).
Content
This is the part where you’re fulfilling your promise.
Meaning this is the time where you give them the great value, benefits and learnings you promised them.
Make it the best content you can give using a slideshow presentation. Make sure it has less words (don’t read the slides – it is boring and people will leave the webinar right away), add pictures, make it educational.
Interact with them, ask them questions during the webinar to keep the interaction and engagement with the attendees.
Don’t sell anything in this part of the webinar. Now it is all about them. If you give them the best value and content you have, they will more likely to buy from you in the next part of the webinar.
Usually the value content part of the webinar is about 40-45 minutes.
Offer
In this part of the live webinar you’re offering them to continue to learn from you and get great value helping them with their pains and goals.
You offer them your product or service in a special price for the live webinar attendees – make sure that if you offer this product or service on your website that the offer on the webinar is much better than what is offered there.
The offer part of the presentation should begin between 45 to 55 minutes after the live webinar began.
Questions
Once you’ve completed offering your product or service, it is time to answer the audience questions (as you’ve outlined at the beginning of the webinar).
I love this part of the webinar.
This is the time where you can relate to each person specifically (something that is more difficult to do during the webinar).
First, acknowledge each person and question. I would say something like: “John is asking, does it make sense to make a webinar on weekends? Thank you John for the question.
Secondly, I will reply the question making sure I am to the point but also trying to broaden the question so I can relate to the other attendees who are listening to the Q&A.
Thirdly, I am going to make a closure to the question saying something like “John, I hope that answers your question and if it didn’t then please tell me”.
How long should the Q&A be?
To answer that I want to share with you an amazing fact. From my over 600 live webinars experience, going past the 20 minutes of answering questions, we are getting a second big wave of sales.
That means you should definitely go over the 20 minutes and answer as long as you have attendees listening, there are new questions that have not been answered and you’re still getting more sales.
On one side don’t make it too long but I’d say you should practice common sense. We did have a live webinar once beginning at 9:00 pm, starting questions at around 10:10 pm and going in to questions until half past midnight since it made lots of sense.
Segment #05 – After The Webinar
You’ve finished the webinar, but it has not completed yet and you can still deliver more value and create additional revenues even after the webinar itself is delivered.
You have 4 groups of people who registered to your webinar that you need to handle:
Group #01 – Registered And Not Attended
The people who registered and didn’t attend the actual live webinar are a big group that did not get the value and the benefits that you’ve shared.
While this group is not the general audience that didn’t even register, the next step for you is to invite them again to the same webinar.
This can be either by doing a live Encore or to a Replay.
Once they re-register, you need to follow the same process above to remind them and “re-sell” the webinar to make sure they attend.
Group #02 – Attended & Left Early
This is the group of attendees who actually came and left early (meaning they left before you were able to offer them your products and services).
The first thing I would do is look at the webinar data to understand at what point in your presentation I had many people drop. This will give you more understanding on how you can improved your webinar presentation to make sure you have less people to leave early.
This group should be handled with a type of message of them leaving early, missing these amazing benefits and invite them to the live Encore or to the replay.
Group #03 – Attended The Full Webinar & Didn’t Buy
This group is a highly targeted group of people that watched your offer to buy your products and services but didn’t buy.
You can approach them in a few ways:
a). Send them a full replay of the webinar (where at the end they can complete the purchase).
b). Send them the recording of only the offer part.
c). You can ask them how can you help them to order your product and services (this can also give you direct feedback from them telling you why they didn’t take you on the offer you’ve made on the live webinar).
Group #04 – Attended & Buy
This group is no different than any new client you had before. You need to fulfill their order as soon as possible (if it is online delivery then make sure it is fulfilled right away and they get instant access).
Like any new buyers, some have, what we call “buyers’ remorse” and you need to take the necessary steps to strength their purchase decision.
Before you’re going to make your first live webinar, I want to invite you to listen to episode #08 of the 10X Your Business Podcast to discover “How To Use Webinars To Boost Your Business Income, Become An Authority & Build Your List”
Now that you are armed with how to make your first webinar, make sure that you do it the right way and have fun (webinars should be fun!!!).
Waiting for your comments here below about the topic of your webinar and when are you going to make the first one.
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