AMY PORTERFIELD: Welcome back to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield. Today we are talking about webinars.
We are starting at the very beginning with the topic and title. A crucial starting point that sends most people down what I like to call the entrepreneurial rabbit hole.
Choosing a webinar topic and deciding on a title is an important step of the webinar creation. But likely not for the reason you think it is. See, the thing is it’s important to nail down your topic and title because it’s the starting point.
You really can’t do everything you want to do to put together a webinar system if you don’t know what the topic’s going to be and you don’t have a really solid title nailed down. It’s just where everything starts.
However, you don’t have to have the most perfect title and you don’t have to have the most perfect topic to make this work. They’ve got to be good and that’s why I’ve dedicated an entire episode to this.
But, if you let’s say, miss the mark just a little all of the other stuff you do to create your system like putting a stellar webinar slide deck together with your amazing content, following up with really good email copy, writing great email copy for your registration page and confirmation page, and doing some really good Facebook ads are where it’s really going to count.
Again, like I said, you’ve got to start at the beginning and that’s why the topic and title are so important. Here’s the deal. Since this is an area that most people will spend way too long actually working it out, I have a challenge for you.
Starting right now, right this second, I want you to allow yourself 72 hours to make these two decisions: Topic and title. That’s just three days and then you’re moving on.
Like I said, I’d rather you spend way more time on that webinar slide deck content and all of the other stuff that’s going to make you have an amazing, successful webinar system that you can do over and over and over again.
Although the topic and title are important to get you started, it is actually easier than you think. Well, easy enough if you have the how-to behind it and this is what this episode is all about.
I’m quickly going to walk you through what to do when you are choosing a topic: The things to think about, what to consider, and just the overall how-to. Then I’m going to walk you through crafting a title based on your topic.
We will then get to the good stuff. Once you have your topic and title I want you to review 13 questions that I use for all my topics and all my titles to insure that I’ve nailed it and have really got it right.
Listen up because this part’s important. Because you’ll likely be using those 13 questions later I’m going to go over them now. But you’re going to want to pull them out once you have your topic and title actually on a piece of paper thinking it’s the way you’re going to go. Then you will use the 13 questions to evaluate if you’ve nailed it.
I figured you are going to need the 13 questions written up for you so that you have them ready. That’s why they are the cheat sheet for today’s mini training. You will get the 13 questions plus what I’ve added in the cheat sheet, a little bit of troubleshooting, you need to be answering “yes” to each of the 13 questions I’m going to talk about in this episode. But let’s say you answer “no.” In the cheat sheet I will give you some troubleshooting tips and tricks so that you can fix the mistake and keep moving on.
That’s what you’ll get in the freebie that you won’t get in this episode. To get the 13- question freebie all you need to do is go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/ 145download or text the phrase 145download to 33444.
Let’s go ahead and dive in to the topic and title.
First we’re going to talk about the webinar topic. Here’s what you need to know. Your topic needs to be irresistible, relevant, and actionable. It also needs to be focused on just one thing to grab your audience’s attention instantly.
I want to tell you a quick story because I learn best when I get in the trenches and actually do this. One of the things that has built my business, I really only teach what I know and what I’ve done in my own business. Of course, I’ve created many webinar topics and titles but it’s been a while since I started from scratch.
I recently helped a friend, who is more like a family member, come up with her webinar topic and title. It was good for me because it was a topic that I wouldn’t know how to teach.
She is a matchmaker by trade and she does one-on-one consulting for matchmaking and has recently created an online training program to take her one-on-one business to one-to-many. It’s about dating based on the philosophies and principles she’s learned in the self-help world from Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, and so many others so it has a really unique twist to it.
She created her online training program and I told her I would help her with her webinar. We had to sit and start with the title and topic. I was thinking we would sit down for an hour, hash it out, and we would be done.
It didn’t really happen that way. We sat down for an hour and she had all of these ideas and is very close to her content. Sometimes you get too close to your content and you get so deep into it that you can’t think strategically.
It’s not that she can’t think strategically but I will say that I had to kind of pull it out of her because she’s more into her content than the strategy of marketing. I think some of you can relate.
Because of that I had to talk to her about the principles of creating a topic and title. We still struggled through it. She came up with a few ideas and I asked her a few questions. But it felt entirely too messy.
I told her we would meet in a few days and we could come back to this. In the meantime I went through my arsenal of all of my webinar tips and secrets and strategies. I pulled out everything I’ve ever taught about titles and topics because I had to review it for myself.
Something didn’t seem very streamlined about the process we went through so I needed to go back to the principles of what it takes to create a good topic and title.
That’s how this episode came about because I got organized again and thought it would be a great episode to teach on a podcast now that I’ve been through the process again.
With that, I want to go over three principles that helped my friend and I get to her topic and title. I’ll share a little more about that process as we get into each of these. But I think they will help you get started in the right direction.
Three principles for your webinar topic:
Principle #1: Your topic must lead to a desired result
The desired result can be a mindset shift, a new opportunity, a physical shift, a new behavior. I want you to ask yourself, “If I were to ask my ideal, perfect potential customer ‘What do you really want’ what would he or she say?”
The answer to that question is not necessarily your webinar topic. Here’s where it gets a little bit tricky. Let’s say I asked my friend what her ideal potential customer really, really wanted. Her answer was the solution that she gives in her online training program.
They want to find love. They want to do it in an authentic way. They want to be their best selves and put their best selves forward so they can attract the person that was meant for them.
That’s what she teaches in her course. So she got frustrated and said she couldn’t teach that in her webinar if she is teaching it in her course. I asked her to step back a little bit and when her ideal audience is talking about a challenge, a problem, or something they are frustrated with what do they usually say?
She said they definitely struggle with online dating and attracting the right people and always attracting a guy that’s totally unavailable. They aren’t really sure if this is a red flag or that’s a red flag.
We started to talk about all of the different things she came up with and she started to text some of her friends that were in the dating world now and started running things by them. It became really interactive as I asked this question of her.
She realized she can get out in front of her solution. If her solution is how to find your happily ever after and do it in a way that really feels good to you, she said there were things people struggle with to get there. Those things became some of our webinar topic ideas.
It was things like how to put a really good dating profile together, how to identify the red flags when you’re dating, or how to get the conversation started.
We started to throw out ideas and then we came to more of an overarching topic. Let’s get into the next principle and I’ll share that with you.
Principle #1 was that your topic must lead to a desired result.
Principle #2: The more complicated you make it the more difficult it is to grab your audience’s attention
There is so much you want to share. I totally get it. But I want to encourage you to refrain from sharing too much because it’s going to become completely overwhelming. Not only is your title going to become overwhelming, your topic in general will be overwhelming.
As my friend started throwing out all of these ideas, my goal was to find the overarching topic that all of those could fit under. She said she knew people wanted to be more authentic in a really inauthentic dating world.
Right there she loved that one. She said she was really tied to that, how to be authentic in an inauthentic dating world. She said that one came to mind because she could teach different ways to be authentic.
She could teach how to change their profile to really show who they are or how to start a conversation in a way that doesn’t feel really fake. Or she could talk about how to put your best self forward on a first date or even what you wear, what you say, how you show up. She could teach them how to do that in a more authentic way.
That’s when we started to get down to it. With Principle #2, how to relate it back to your own stuff, if things feel complicated and you have a lot of ideas, start to try to find
a pattern. Could some of the ideas you have for a webinar topic fit under a bigger umbrella?
With all of the dating tips my friend said it was really about dating authentically in an inauthentic dating world so we got a little closer there.
Principle #3: Give away some of your best stuff
My friend didn’t struggle with this. She will give it all away and I love that. But sometimes people struggle with this and I remember when I was just starting out. Eben Pagan, who came up with the whole idea (at least in my time he did) where he started to talk about giving your best stuff away for free.
I would get frustrated. I would say that if I gave all of my best stuff away for free I would have nothing to sell. But along the way I have learned that there is more where that came from. That is a mantra I live by when it comes to content.
It if have one great idea I can promise you another piece of content is going to come from that so I’m never in a place of scarcity with content as long as I keep fueling my brain with books and podcasts and ideas from other people that get me going and inspired. I will always come up with new content.
The second thing is, if you put something in a webinar that doesn’t mean it can’t go in your online training course. In fact, I teach topic and title inside my course Webinars That Convert. I teach it in a little bit of a different way that has a better flow with my course. I also teach it in a specific order.
One of the reasons people buy my courses is that I walk them through step by step, action by action. They don’t just know how to do it but when to do it. That’s huge when you’re building an online marketing funnel in general like a webinar system.
Don’t be afraid to share some of your content in a webinar that might be in more detail or taught in a different way in your course. I’m always adding bells and whistles in a course that I might not do in a podcast episode that’s free.
Just don’t be afraid of giving your best stuff away for free. I promise you that you will stand out above everybody else.
I’ve got this mantra before I go on any live webinar. I say to myself, “No matter if they buy or not they walk away today feeling inspired, excited, an driven to take action.” I say that once, twice, maybe three times depending on how nervous I am about a live webinar.
It just puts me in a place that so that I won’t hold back and am going to give my best stuff away for free. My hope is always that I’m going to knock their socks off so that they think, “Holy cow, if this webinar’s free and the content is that good, imagine what the paid stuff looks like.”
When your audience starts to say that you start to sell more programs. You showed up to do the work. That is just something to think about. Those principles, again, when you’re starting to think of your topic are
- Your topic must lead to a desired result,
- The more complicated you make it the more difficult it is to grab your audience’s attention, and
- Give away some of your best stuff.
I now want to move into your webinar title and talk about choosing an irresistible webinar title your audience can’t resist. I teach these together because before you come up with your topic I also want you to hear my tips and strategies around a title. The two work hand in hand, of course.
I think you need to see the big picture before you sit down and do a brainstorming session to come up with your title.
The first tip I want to share with you is that every word in your title counts. When you get too wordy in a webinar title things get way too confusing and you overwhelm your audience.
After you’ve crafted a few webinar topics, you want a few options, plus I’m going to give you a little strategy to play with a few options. Let’s come up with three different webinar topics and titles. Then I want you to look at every single word in the title and ask yourself if it is worth it.
Trigger words are always a safe bet. If you use some action words, words that inspire, words that are really descriptive, that will help you out immensely in your title. I want you to think about that…every word counts.
The second tip is to be as specific as possible. Specificity is the name of the game when choosing a successful webinar title. The best webinar titles focus on just one concept and use descriptive words to vividly paint the picture.
I’m going to give you a few examples but before that I want to take you back to my friend and the whole dating webinar topic title process she went through. She came up with a few different titles.
One was about being an authentic dater in an inauthentic world. I think it was Being an Authentic Dater in an Inauthentic Dating World. She knew a lot of the women, because she related to women, would totally relate to that.
I told her I liked the concept. We were going to survey to make sure her audience liked it and I will get to that in a moment. But I told her it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t specific enough to make people say, “Oh, I get it. I get what you’re going to teach me.”
With that, she needed a subtitle. For those of you who need a little more than just a title to be specific and make it inspirational or exciting or interesting or whatever word you want to use for your title, you’ve got to make it punch. In order to do that a subtitle would be perfect.
I have three examples for you. Two have subtitles. These aren’t related to dating, they are other topics. The first one, when we’re talking about being specific, How To Book Ten Coaching Clients in Ten Weeks. That’s the title.
The subtitle is The Simple Portfolio Trick That Makes New Bookings Effortless. Notice there are some good words in there: Simple, trick, effortless. There is also a subtitle to make it more specific. I am a big lover of subtitles when you need them so don’t hesitate to play around with that.
Here’s another one and it is about dating. I lied. I included this. It didn’t make the cut. I will share the one that made the cut in a minute, but this one was a contender. The title was Raise Your Dating IQ. The subtitle, Leave the Fear, Frustration, and False Starts in the Past and Fast Track Your Way to Love.
I really liked this one because of the play on Fs. There is something kind of lyrical about Leave the Fear, Frustration, and False Starts in the Past. You could play on that, for sure. She also says, “fast track.”
As I was asking her a bunch of questions I was asking what one of the struggles was. She said for some it just takes too long and they are frustrated. That’s where she came up with “fast track.”
That’s why you want to really play with this. That is why I want to give you three days to do it. You want to have the conversations with people, people you trust, maybe your ideal client, which would be even better.
You want to play around with a few things in order to really get it right. Options are good. Again, I would love to see you come up with three different topics and three different titles because the third tip I have for you is to survey your audience on social media.
Here’s the thing, if you’re feeling stuck and you’re just not sure if you’ve nailed down the right topic and title then this is a perfect practice for you to put into play. You’re going to get some amazing feedback, for sure.
For those of you who already have a webinar topic and title but you’re not having a lot of success with hit, I would love to see you go back and brainstorm two more topics with the title and put all three on social media and do a survey.
You can do this on Facebook and Twitter. You can even do this with Insta Stories and make a video about it or anywhere else you want to put it. The goal is to get out in front of your ideal, perfect audience for your webinar, because they are choosing the webinar topic.
Two things happen when you survey something like this. You get awesome feedback from the people that matter the most, those that are hopefully going to be signing up for your webinar.
When you ask for feedback you might just ask them to pick the title they like best. But most often people will tell you why they chose a title. You don’t even need to ask them to do it. Many people will just volunteer that information and that gives you even more information to work with.
That’s the #1 reason surveys work great for something like this. The #2 reason is kind of like icing on the cake. When you eventually do come out with your webinar those people that helped you choose a title feel like they are invested in it. They are a part of it and are more likely to come along the journey with you and sign up for the webinar.
Another thing about the icing on the cake, when you ask people about your webinar topics and titles you get the opportunity to tease that something great is coming soon. I always love the opportunity to talk about something when I’m working on it
just to kind of prime the pump a little bit and let my audience know what’s coming down the pipeline.
This is exactly what we did with my friend in her dating topics and titles. We had seven of them because she had a lot of ideas. After we had seven or maybe eight or nine I suggested that we choose just three of them.
We made a graphic on Canva. We just went on Canva and found a graphic that might stand out with a good border and literally just copied and pasted the three titles. I put 1), 2), and 3) next to the titles.
She posted it on Facebook because that’s where most of her audience is. She said, “I’m passionate about helping you date smarter and more authentically in the new year. As a first step I’m creating a free live workshop just for you. QUESTION. Which topic below would help you the most right now?”
I think that’s the exact question you can ask in your post. QUESTION. Which topic below would help you the most right now?
She asked them to post the number next to the topic they like best in the comments. She also asked them, “If you want to share this with other single ladies, please do. The more insight I get the better.”
It was a really short post. That’s important. You can’t write too much because people will get lost in your post and not even help you because they are distracted. Write just a little bit to get people to take action.
The key point here is that we were not asking them why they chose that one or to talk about their challenges and to tell us this or that. We just asked them to post the number next to the topic they like best.
If you ask them to do just a little they will do that and many will do even more, like give you extra insight. If you ask too much of them they will likely not participate. That is just a little thing that has gone a long way when I do surveys so I wanted to share that with you.
Basically, she just posted that on her Facebook page. Like we suspected, she got a lot of feedback. She didn’t just get the numbers but people were saying, “I like this but I also like this.” Then they started to kind of piece things together.
She had title and subtitle so they started to say that they liked one title but were really interested in another subtitle. They might not have called it title and subtitle but they pointed out the topics they liked the best.
They kind of started to pull apart her three different options and that was okay because it gave her something to work with. The examples she put up actually morphed into something new after she got her survey.
She didn’t get tons and tons of people to give her feedback. I am going to guess it was maybe 30 to 40 people after she posted on social media and then emailed a few of her ideal customers that she knew would have some good insight.
She kind of really went above and beyond to get the feedback. She collected it all and realized she had the title and subtitle but needed to play with them and move them around just a little bit.
I’ll give it to you just because it’s kind of fun to know where people end up. After about seven to ten different options she had, the title that she’s actually doing in early February is Raise Your Dating IQ, How to be an Authentic Dater in an Inauthentic Dating World: Seven Simple Shifts You Can Make Right Now to Fast Track Your Way to Happily Ever After.
I want to dissect this a little bit just so you can see how it might play into your own business as you are creating your topic and title. A lot of the people in the survey said they loved the idea of raising their dating IQ. Right away we knew that was a good one.
But if you were to look at this you will see that she kind of has a title, subtitle, and subtitle. She has Raise Your Dating IQ. That would be the title. How to be an Authentic Dater in an Inauthentic Dating World is, quite honestly, the whole title. It is a little bit of a longer title.
We needed the next part, Seven Simple Shifts You Can Make Right Now to Fast Track Your Way to Happily Ever After, because she needed to be more specific. She is going to give them seven simple shifts and is going to talk about fast tracking their way to what they want, happily ever after.
I want to show you that this definitely took us 72 hours going back and forth, talking to her audience, surveying, playing with the words, taking some out, and adding some in. But she got it.
Here’s the magical thing when you nail down your title. You feel like everything else can now fall into place. Even though that’s not totally true, you can work on some other pieces of your webinar system without having the topic and title nailed down, but it’s difficult.
It’s a little bit of a mindset shift where it feels like game on. Because we got to sit side by side when we finally came to a point where I said, “This is it. This is your title and your subtitle. We are done,” I saw that she physically sat up a little bit straighter.
She had a huge smile on her face and it felt like it was finally real. I think that’s why I wanted to talk about topic and title with you so much. Once you nail it, it feels real, and when it feels real it’s game on. All of the other stuff starts to fall into place.
That’s why I think this part is just so incredibly important. Again, it takes 72 hours. The reason I brought that up in the beginning and I keep mentioning it, I had to do that for her. It was late one night when she texted me. She asked how about “this” or how about “that”.
I told her we had 24 more hours. At this point we were two days in. I said 24 more hours and we are done with this. Do whatever you want, ask whoever you want to ask, but we were going to nail it down “tomorrow night”.
I think that gave her permission to agree she needed to be done with it. As entrepreneurs it is sometimes hard to say we are done with anything we feel is important in our business. That’s why you want to put constraints on yourself. I do it to myself all the time.
I’m only allowed to work on these podcast notes until 3 o’clock “today” and then I’ve got to record it. I play this game in my head all the time because I know I want to make it better all the time. I want to make it perfect but it doesn’t always have to be perfect to be really, really valuable.
What I want to say to kind of wrap this all up and get into the 13 questions is that sometimes having some title formulas will help you with your webinar title. I decided to give you three of my favorites so that it could kind of breathe some inspiration into the process for you.
The #1 way I love to craft webinar titles is with a how-to focus. That is perfect for my brand. I’m the how-to girl. I show you how to do it step by step, action by action. So this one speaks to me, of course. But people are always fascinated with how to do it.
I think in the online marketing world, especially in my industry, what’s missing is the how to. People talk about the big ideas and what to do and that you should run out there and try this and that. But how do I even get started?
I think how to, in my industry, is important. But in so many different industries, I bet some of you can relate as well. Here’s an example. How Not To Lose Students Over Summer: Discover How Busy Studios Keep 85% of Their Students With This Four-Step System.
Since we’re audio and you can’t see it, I want to repeat it one more time because I want you to listen for the theme of the how to, listen for the specificity, listen for the detailed words, the trigger words, and how detailed it is for this audience.
This audience, as you can probably figure out, is for a dance studio owner that is really worried now that summer comes everyone drops out of their classes to go on family vacations and have trips. They are worried right now.
The title is How Not To Lose Students Over Summer: Discover How Busy Studios Keep 85% of Their Students With This Four-Step System. Good? I thought that was a really good one.
Here’s another theme or formula you can use to get started. Frequently asked questions. When you know your audience well and you pay attention to what they ask you your webinar practically writes itself. Just take the recurring questions and comments and craft them into a really great solution-oriented webinar title.
This one is also a how to but is based on frequently asked questions that one of my students had. How To Make $5,000 or More a Month as a Freelancer Without Taking Soul-Sucking Gigs: These Six Simple Strategies Are Game Changers.
She is specific about $5,000 extra month as a freelancer but she gets to the heart of the matter, a lot of her students ask how they keep doing it without feeling as if they are getting soul-sucking gigs that they do not want. They are not doing the kind of business they want to be doing.
She knew that was a topic that kept coming up over and over again so she addressed it head on to make it really relevant to her ideal potential customer. When you know the questions you get asked all the time relate that back to your topic and title.
The third formula is to ask what’s working now? In this instance you can use the behind-the-scenes approach while also showing your audience what you’ve been doing to get the results that they want.
I love going behind the scenes showing people what I’ve done. If your business is similar in that respect this is a good one. I call this formula What’s Working Now because you want to think about what’s really relevant, what’s trending, what’s top of mind right now for your audience.
The key is to touch on a topic that’s getting talked about a lot. For example, I have a good friend, Zach Spuckler. I actually just interviewed him so you might have heard his episode last week (Episode #144). Zach was doing webinars around five-day challenges.
One thing I love about Zach is that he figures something out, does it in his business, gets the results he wants, then teaches it. He does this really quickly. He doesn’t sit on the idea for a year and then teach it because he knows what’s hot and relevant at the moment.
With five-day challenges, right away, challenges in the marketing world got really popular. Everybody was doing different challenges. He put his own spin on it and did a webinar about it. I think timeliness is important here.
If you can think of a topic that’s very timely to your audience that is definitely the way to go. It’s going to get a little extra attention because it’s top of mind for them.
Now that I’ve given you some formulas to play around with, there’s a whole bunch of others you can use but I just wanted to give you a few to start thinking about, I want to give you those 13 questions I promised will help you nail down your winning webinar topic and title.
The first six questions are related to your topic. The next seven questions are related to your title. Remember, I’m going to go over these quickly but I put them into a cheat sheet and then I’ve given you some troubleshooting tips if you get stuck.
The goal of these 13 questions is to answer “yes” to all of them. But if you answer “no” to any of them I want to give you some troubleshooting tips to move forward. That’s all in the cheat sheet. So go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/145download or, if you like to text, just text the phrase 145download to 33444.
Really quickly, here are the questions. I want you to hear them once and then I want you to get the download, print it out, and use it when you’re ready.
- Have you heard your ideal, potential customer talk about the exact topic you’ve chosen for your webinar? If the answer is “no” you may need to dig a little bit deeper. At some point you need to make sure they’ve had a conversation around a challenge, a need, a want, an opportunity related to the topic you’ve chosen.
- Is your topic focusing on just one thing? There has to be an overarching one thing in your webinar topic. Your title can have a title and subtitle and talk about seven different things to XYZ. But the XYZ is your one thing. You’ve got to make sure it’s there.
- Did you choose a topic you feel confident you can teach in detail? I’ve been here before where I’ve chosen a topic that just isn’t coming together. I realized I wasn’t the expert in the topic and I don’t know why I chose it. I got a little too overzealous and it didn’t feel good to me.
- Did you choose a topic you can easily include stories, imagery, and insights to make the topic actionable to your audience? If you’re not comfortable with the topic you’re likely not going to have stories that roll off your tongue and examples you can share with imagery and all that good stuff. You know you nailed your topic when it’s easy to teach. It might not be easy to put your slide deck together. That’s kind of an art that you get better at over time. But the topic has to be easy for you because you know it well.
- Did you choose a topic that is broad enough to attract a large audience yet targeted enough to provide actionable advice that attendees can implement? You don’t have to get so specific that a large part of your audience won’t be able to relate or be attracted to the topic. Again, I’m going to read that. You want to choose a topic that’s broad enough to attract a larger piece of your audience, maybe not all of them but a larger piece of them, yet targeted enough to provide actionable advice. That’swhere the words you choose, the trigger words, and the specificity comes into play. It has to be targeted enough to really be actionable.
- Is your topic aligned with what you plan to sell on your webinar? This is a big one. I didn’t get into this in a lot of detail when it came to your topic because I wanted to talk about it here. Again, is your topic aligned with what you plan to sell on your webinar? After you teach your topic is your product or program that you’re selling on the webinar the next logical step? Whatever you teach on your webinar, you need to make sure you can make a smooth transition, something like, “If you’re excited about this opportunity and finally see how it can all come together, you know you can take action here. But you want to go deeper and want to know exactly how to do it and want someone to go on this journey with you to show you step by step. I want to then introduce you to my brand new program, XYZ.” There’s got to be an alignment so you an easily transition. If you love “this” you’re going to “love” this. If you love the free content you’re going to want to buy my program. You’re not going to say it like that but you get the point. That’s a big one when it comes to your topic.
We will now transition into the final seven questions related to your title.
- Are there any unnecessary words used in your title that you can totally eliminate? Go through the title word by word. Is this word needed? Is it important? Can I change it around and have fewer words? The fewer words in your title the better. The title we ended up with for my friend was probably way too long. Again, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It will do the trick. She probably won’t use the subtitle on all of her marketing and Facebook ads so she can use an abbreviated title when needed. Again, it doesn’t need to be perfect but make sure every word counts.
- If your title feels too long can you break it into a title and subtitle? That’s exactly what we did with hers and that’s what you might want to do with yours.
- Are you using descriptive words that will ignite excitement, interest, inspire, and/or grab attention? All of the above or a few of those, but you need to make sure you are using very descriptive words. I call these trigger words.
- Are you using the exact words your potential customer uses when talking about their challenge or desire or opportunity or whatever it is? I love to do this. I love to survey my audience in a bigger sense of surveying and really pay attention to the words they use. My audience uses profits over revenue. Both of them kind of mean the same thing but they tend to say “profits.” They also say “customers” versus “clients.” These are little things I have learned along the way. They go a long way. I want you to really make sure you are using the words they would use. When I did this exercise with my friend she would say things and I would ask if they are really saying that? This is what I always love to ask a student, late at night your potential customer is laying in bed thinking about this challenge they are having. Are they going to say to themselves, “blah, blah, blah,” however you have worded it? Would they really say that? The answer is usually “no, they wouldn’t say that.” You need to make it more simple most of the time or get a little bit more gritty or real. Ask yourself if they are really using the words you have put in your title.
- Is your title specific and detailed enough? I added this one and it might sound like some of the others I have mentioned. But I mean to ask if it’s specific and detailed for your audience. Can you say that you can do “this” in six days or 60 days or can you talk about a certain dollar amount or a certain amount of pounds or whatever you’re talking about? For me, one of my master classes is How to Confidently Create Your First Online Course in 60 Days. I would never say 60 days if I didn’t sit down for a whole week and map out how to get it done and put it together in a worksheet and see that it can really be done in 60 days. You’ve got to be very honest with the numbers you throw out there. If you can, do it. In my friend’s case she did the Seven Simple Shifts. She made it specific and used a trigger word, shift, because she knew her audience wanted to make that shift. That’s another example of specific and detailed.
- Does your title promise a result? Go back and make sure you are promising something. Whether they buy or not, at the end of the webinar they need to walk away with something that they can take action on. That’s really important. This is true to my heart. They have to walk away feeling they can give “it” a try. They won’t have every answer. You don’t go on one of my master classes and walk away being able to do an entire webinar funnel. But you are very clear about how to get started, what’s included, and the pieces you will need. Now you feel it is doable. Then, in my paid program I walk you through step by step. That’s really important.
- Did you choose three topics and three possible titles for the topics and survey your audience to get their feedback and insight? Even if ten people give you feedback it at least gets the conversation going. People are going to see it and not respond so it plants a seed that you have something coming up. They will see that it’s kind of cool and will pay attention to it. I would do it on a few different social media sites. I would make a video on Insta Stories. I would do a Facebook Live. I would go all out. If I struggled with getting enough people to survey I would use all of my resources to get as much feedback as possible. Remember, the key to surveys is to make it really, really easy for them to respond.
There you have it, the 13 questions to ask yourself to nail down a winning webinar topic and title. Again, to get that cheat sheet and some troubleshooting tips if you get stuck along the way go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/145download and grab it right away.
Here’s the last thing I’ll leave you with. Nothing, absolutely nothing has truly moved the needle in my business until I cracked the code on webinars. Then I incorporated all of the other stuff I do in my business around the foundation of webinars.
Today webinars are the backbone of my business model. They allow me consistent revenue, freedom to build the kind of business I always wanted and never thought was possible, and webinars give me the ability to make a massive impact in other people’s lives. That’s saying something. That’s what it’s really all about.
One thing I know for sure is that I definitely am not extra special. Sure, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve perfected the craft of webinars. But that doesn’t’ mean I’ve got something up on you that you can’t get started and make webinars the foundation in your business as well.
It starts with the webinar topic and title and now you have the how to at your fingertips. Remember my challenge, 72 hours and put it to rest. Good luck in everything you do related to your webinars and your online business.
I cannot wait to connect with you again next week. Bye for now.