TRANSCRIPT

Transcript: How to Troubleshoot Your Biggest Webinar Challenges

June 22, 2017

AMY PORTERFIELD: Well hey there, welcome back to another episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield. Today we’re talking about how to troubleshoot your biggest webinar challenges. 

If you are doing webinars right now and things aren’t going as you had hoped, or if you’re thinking about doing webinars, or you’ve done webinars in the past and the results were less than dismal so you’re a little gun shy to do them again, then you, my friend, are in the perfect place right now. This is a must-listen-to podcast if you are in any of those scenarios. 

Before we get into the troubleshooting areas I want to dive into today, I want to talk to you about something that came up in one of my Facebook groups. Recently, I have been reworking my List-Builder’s Lab program. 

If you’re in List-Builder’s Lab you’re going to get a whole lot of brand new content coming your way. If you’ve been thinking about joining my list-building program it’s going to be brand new very, very soon. I’ll talk about that when we go live with the brand new stuff. 

I’ve been diving into surveys about the program from my students, ways to make it better, where they’re struggling, if they’re not getting to the finish line, why is that? I have over 350 (at this point it might be more like 400 surveys) that I’ve collected and am literally pouring over all of the details. 

I took all of that information and asked more questions in my List-Builder’s Lab Facebook group to really narrow down some of the big topics. As a side note, next week’s episode is how I reworked an existing online training program. 

Since I’m doing it right now with List-Builder’s Lab I thought I would share with you exactly how I rework a program. That’s next week’s episode, #166. That’s a side note. 

I’ve been in the thick of redoing this program, looking over surveys, and here’s something that’s come up again and again and again…The word “overwhelm,” any which way you want to say it, “I’m overwhelmed,” “this is feeling overwhelming,” “overwhelm is taking over,” overwhelm, overwhelm, overwhelm. 

I hear that word probably 20 times a day from the students in my groups and then the word is probably the most used word throughout all of these surveys. Because I was really intensely into these surveys the other day it really stuck out to me that we use this word way too much to hold us back. 

I’m brining it up here, I hope the students in my group who have already heard this will forgive me and stay with me, but the reason I’m bringing it up now is that you can’t keep telling yourself that you’re overwhelmed all the time. 

Guess what’s going to happen? You’re going to stay overwhelmed. There’s nothing good that could come out of telling yourself everyday, “I’m stressed out. I’m overwhelmed. This is too hard. I can’t figure out the tech.” 

I mentioned this somewhere else, I don’t think it was on the podcast, but I recently had lunch with a good friend of mine, Elizabeth  Dialto. Elizabeth and I go way back to our Marie Forleo mastermind days. 

She said she hears this a lot in her groups as well. She’s a tough little New Yorker and she said that she tells her students, “If you’re so overwhelmed, if you’re so stressed out, if you’re miserable, then maybe you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. Maybe you should go back to your 9-to-5 job or just quit this whole idea altogether. Just don’t do it because no one said you have to do this. You definitely do not have to build a business online. You do not have to be an entrepreneur.” 

She said when she tells them that she notices that she instantly gets push back. She loves it. She says she wants the push back. She wants to tell her students, “Fine. Don’t do it.” She wants them to say, “No way! You can’t take this away from me. I am going to build this business. I am going to be a bad-ass entrepreneur. This is mine. Watch out world.” 

She wants them to have that fire. The other conversation they are having of being overwhelmed and that it’s too hard and stressful is going to get them nowhere but stuck. 

I wanted to share this with you because I thought it was so important for you to hear today. This is a lesson I have to learn as well. We can’t keep talking about the overwhelm. It’s too much. We’re saying it too much. We’re living it too much. You’ve got to change the conversation. 

You know it’s all about mindset. You know that in your bones. However, we still stay stuck in our mind. Today, instead of saying, “This is overwhelming. This is too much. This is too stressful. I’m overwhelmed,” let’s flip the switch on the conversation we’re having in our head. 

Instead, try something like, “Today I’m going to figure out this one thing. I’m going to take action on one thing today that’s going to move me forward.” You get to do this. That’s another thing my husband, Hobie, talks about a lot with me. 

When I go to Negative Town, because I definitely do, and I say, “I have to do this,” or “Babe, I can’t go to the movies with you right now because I’ve got to get this done and I have to do this,” he always helps me. I encourage him to do so. 

He says, “Let’s flip the switch on that and say you GET to because you don’t have to do anything, Amy, you are the boss.” Or he will tease me that I should talk to my boss and tell her this is crap and I’m working too much. 

Right away it kind of puts me back into the state that I am calling the shots here. Let’s start talking about what we get to do and taking action and putting our head down and doing the work versus talking about how stressed out and overwhelmed we are. Does that sound good? 

Just today. Just focus on today. Watch what you’re saying to yourself. Be really careful what you’re saying to your husband, wife, friends, and yourself in your head. Let’s flip the switch on the conversation because it’s getting us nowhere. Deal? 

Let’s get into today’s episode all about troubleshooting your biggest webinar challenges. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, if you’ve ever had challenges with webinars or if you want to do webinars and you’re a little bit worried about how much work they take or how complicated they might be, today is like a checklist of different areas that you can troubleshoot to make sure if you’re stuck you can move through it; and, if you haven’t tried it yet, that you can side step some of these big mistakes. 

Of course I have a freebie for this episode because I want to make it incredibly actionable for you. The freebie is called: Your Webinar Problem-Solving Toolkit. It is a series of checklists categorized by different categories that we’re going to go over in in this episode today that will help you become a webinar detective, carefully zeroing in on those areas that aren’t working quite as they should be. 

You’re going to love the webinar problem-solving toolkit because, if you’re in webinars right now, you can literally use it in this moment or you can save it on your computer and when you are doing webinars next take it out and really use it to make sure you’ve got everything covered. 

To get your hands on the Webinar Problem-Solving Toolkit go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/165download or you can text the phrase 164download to 33444. I’ll talk about the freebie a little bit more at the end but let’s get to it. 

It’s important that you actually listen to this episode, not just grab the freebie and say, “I’m not doing webinars right now, I’ll get to it later.” I’m going to share with you a very personal experience that I’ve gone through and something I’ve never talked about before but a strategy I’m using right now to troubleshoot a challenge in my business. 

It’s going to be the very last strategy I share with you today because it kind of sums up everything that might be going wrong in a campaign you’re doing and it identifies what’s going wrong. Even if it’s not a webinar campaign, maybe you’re doing a challenge or video series or email marketing campaign, this final strategy I’m going to share with you on this episode could totally identify exactly what is not working. It’s good but I want to save it until the end. 

Let’s go ahead and dive into three areas of troubleshooting your webinar. 

Challenge #1: My Facebook Ads Aren’t Converting 

Challenge #2: My Webinar Registration Page Isn’t Converting Challenge #3: My Webinar Isn’t Converting 

When I get to Challenge #3 that’s when I’m going to share this very personal troubleshooting strategy that I’ve been using in my business and that I want you to use in yours as well. Are you ready? Let’s get to it. 

Challenge #1: My Facebook Ads Aren’t Converting 

I’m going to go over a few areas, the most important areas you want to pay close attention to, if you’re webinar ads aren’t turning into webinar registration leads. However, in the freebie, I add even more areas that you can look into. 

The freebie is going to have a lot more included but this episode is going to get more into detail about the areas that are most important for you to troubleshoot. 

When it comes to ads, you can probably guess the first conversation I want to have with you is around targeting. If you’re having trouble getting your ideal audience to actually click on your ad and you feel there might be very little interest in your webinar topic because you ads are running and nobody’s paying attention, one reason might be your ad targeting. 

Another reason for this might be that you missed the mark on your webinar topic and we’re going to talk about that a little bit later. Let’s just say you might have missed the mark on who you’re putting your ad in front of on Facebook. 

Let’s talk about that. In terms of targeting, if there’s one area in your business, not just with ads, where I want you to become an expert it’s ad targeting. Even if you plan to hire someone to do your ads I want you to hand over a list of targeting opportunities that you’ve personally researched, at least to give the person who’s doing your ads a jumping off point. 

I love the idea of using a Google Doc to keep a running list of all of your targeting ideas, a list of all the pages on Facebook you’ve either tested yourself already or you want somebody to test for you and all of the retargeting combinations you’ve thought of as possibilities. 

Again, you want to master this area in order to optimize every penny you spend on ads. When it comes to the fact that nobody is paying attention to your ads, they’re just not even clicking on your ads or very few people are clicking on your ads and nobody’s actually opting into your webinar, I would start with the targeting. 

I would make sure you’re using multiple ways to target on Facebook. I want to make sure you are targeting other people’s Facebook pages. I want to make sure you’re targeting your own Facebook fans, you’re targeting your own email list if you have one, and most importantly, I think, is that you are retargeting. 

Retarget everybody that does click the ad and goes to the registration page but doesn’t actually opt in. Retarget everybody that comes to your website or comes to specific pages on your website that have to do with your webinar topic. Retarget in any way possible. 

You can even retarget the people that are engaging on your Facebook page. I’ve talked a lot about retargeting anybody who views one of your  Facebook  Live recordings on your Facebook page. You could retarget all of those  video  views whether they watched live or they watch the recording. 

Retargeting is definitely where it’s at. If you’re not doing all of these things  you definitely are not doing enough with your Facebook ads and this is one area that you can troubleshoot. This is where I want you to start if your ads are not converting well. 

I have some resources for you. If you think you really haven’t honed in on the targeting opportunities for your ads it’s not really fair to say they aren’t working because “my targeting sucks.” That’s okay, you can say that. Sometimes that happens. 

Because of that I want you to listen to Episode #92, Facebook Ad Targeting 101. I did that episode with Rick Mulready and it’s one of my favorite episodes. I also want you to listen to Episode #138 of Rick’s podcast. Rick did an episode recently called Facebook Ad “Objectives”: What They Mean and How to Use Them. 

Even before you get to targeting you have to choose the ad objective. The ad objective works in hand with your ad targeting and that’s why I wanted to bring it up here. Rick literally just texted me yesterday and said he did a really good podcast episode. 

People had been asking me about how to choose the objective for their actual ad campaigns. It was perfect timing because I wanted to tell my audience about that. I’m going to give you a lot of links in this episode and I’m going to include all of the links in the show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/165 and it can be your one- stop shop with everything you need to know in terms of links. It will all be waiting for you there at the end of the show notes. 

Before I go any further I want to tell you that I’m going to give you a lot of troubleshooting opportunities today. This is a really good mini training for you to troubleshoot your webinar. But you can’t get off the webinar and say, “I’m so overwhelmed,” because the goal is for you to choose one area and only focus on that first. 

If I give you a list of ten ways to troubleshoot your webinar you are only allowed to choose one and say, “I’m just going to focus there. I’m going to have blinders on to the other nine things Amy has said.” I don’t actually know if it’s ten because I didn’t count but you get the idea. 

Just put on blinders and don’t think about the nine other things. Just focus on one thing. That’s how you beat overwhelm. You don’t allow yourself to swim in all of the opportunities and all of the ideas. You choose just one. Promise me, pinkie swear, you are only going to do one of the things that I suggest today. 

After you do that you can move on to the next thing. That’s why I created the freebie for you so that you won’t forget what the next thing is you want to move on to with troubleshooting. It will just be there in a beautifully designed PDF. 

Moving on. We talked about targeting. When it comes to your Facebook ads if they’re not converting well it might be your ad image or your ad copy. If you’re running a static image ad I definitely want you to try out a few different ad images just to make sure you’re putting some options out there. 

For one ad campaign we might typically create four or five different ad images. We will test those images against the exact same copy. We’re only comparing apples to apples. We’ll run it for a day or two and pretty quickly we’ll know which ad images are actually pulling in the right audience. We’ll then kill the other ones and won’t run them. 

I want you to make sure you come to the table with a few different ad images to test and not just start out with one. Also, be very careful you’re not using stock images that are way too stocky. You don’t want them to look like the typical stock images. No guys in briefcases in a board room or a bunch of people in business suits giving high fives. We know to stay away from that cheesy kind of stuff. 

Even more so now, I feel you can play around with your images and try stuff you’ve never done before. By that I mean that I want you to look in your newsfeed and pay attention to the images that are really grabbing your attention. That’s the best way to figure out what’s working now. So many people are running ads that there’s no way you’re not seeing them in your newsfeed. 

Here’s another little tip. If you’re not seeing a lot of ads in your newsfeed maybe you need to “like” a bunch more pages on Facebook. Definitely “like” your competitors’ pages because if they’re running ads you definitely want to see them. 

A lot of people, speaking of targeting earlier, will target other Facebook pages. If you’re a fan of a certain Facebook page you’re likely going to see ads in your newsfeed. I make sure I’m a fan of a lot of different Facebook pages, a lot of different niches, so I can see a lot of variety of Facebook ads. I want to see the ads in my newsfeed because I’m a student of Facebook ads. I want you to do the same. 

Coming back to images, I don’t want you to use those stock images that are really cheesy. I’ve put together a short list of resources for stock images that don’t look cheesy. I’m using such a technical term here, right? 

My designer, Jessica Rea, has some great resources that she shared with me. I’m going to put them in the show notes. I think there’s at least three different sites I’m going to send you to. They’re not all free but they’re worth investing in and you can look at these images and see if they’re going to be something that you want to check out. 

Moving on to copy. When you’re troubleshooting why your ad is not working you definitely have to pay attention to the copy as well. Remember, you’re not going to change up the image and the copy at the same time because then you don’t know which one wasn’t working. You’re doing these things one by one. 

When it comes to copy it’s got to be conversational. It has to be attention grabbing. Again, when you’re in the newsfeed if you see an ad that grabs your attention, it’s going to likely grab your attention because it’s a video ad or it has a good image. 

Second to that, when you start reading the ad copy, is it good? Does it grab your attention, does it pull you in, does it make you want to click? If not, if it’s boring, what is boring about it? Pay attention to that as well. 

Here’s what I do and I want you to take this action. I want everybody listening to take this action. I want you to make sure you use something like Jing or SnagIt or Stitch. All of them allow you to take screen grabs of whatever you’re seeing on your computer. 

Beyond just taking a screen grab, the reason I like Stitch the best, I think it takes the most crisp pictures of all three tools. Stitch allows me to take an image and then quickly save it as a JPEG or PNG on my computer. 

I actually want to save it as a file because if you use Dropbox I want you to create a Dropbox folder that says, “Facebook Ad Examples.” In that Dropbox folder I want you to have three folders from there. One that says, “Ad Images”, on says, “Ad Copy”, and one says, “Other”. 

Every time you see a really good ad that has great copy or great imagery or something different about the ad that you love take a snapshot of it and save it right then and there. I’m taking it one step further and telling you to get organized in your Dropbox, how many times have you taken a snapshot of something you wanted to remember and you have no idea where it lives on your computer right now? We’ve all been guilty of that. 

Get organized. You’re becoming a student of Facebook ads. I want you to take those snapshots and file them right away in the folders so that the next time you sit down to create your ads you’ve got a great swipe file of all of the examples you really find valuable and you can use them for inspiration. 

I want you to do that today. That is one action I want you to take right away. 

Moving on. When we’re talking about troubleshooting your Facebook ads, if you’ve been using static image ads since the day you started running ads then I want you to consider doing a video ad instead. In almost every instance that I’ve seen in my business, a video ad will convert way better than a static image ad. 

If you’re going to do a video ad I would make sure you look at some resources and get some tips on doing video ads. Rick Mulready talks about them on his podcast. Digital Marketer has a podcast called Perpetual Traffic and they talk about video ads. Before you do them, learn a little bit about how to do a video ad and one million percent it is worth your time and effort to do so. 

Running a video ad to talk about your webinar and encourage people to sign up for it is a game changer in most situations. I want you to look into that if you’re not doing it yet. 

The final thing I’ll say about troubleshooting your webinar registration ads is you’ve got to make sure you have a pixel in all the right places. Rick and I just did a podcast episode (Episode #163) all about the pixel. 

If you’re just starting out, we talk about the pixel and what it is and why it matters. But, if you’ve been at it for a while and you’ve already placed your pixel in the right places we talk about troubleshooting just to make sure you did it right and that you’re optimizing. 

You have to use the pixel. There’s no way around it. If you’re running Facebook ads to fill up a webinar you must, must , must be using your Facebook pixel. We talk about it in Episode #163. 

At this point I want you to take a deep breath, shake it out a little, shake your body, and know that I just went over a lot of different ways you can test your Facebook ad if it’s not converting to get webinar registrants. You’re only going to choose one of those at a time and I would say to focus on targeting, for sure. 

Challenge #2: My Webinar Registration Page Isn’t Converting 

Let’s just say you’re running a Facebook ad and it’s doing well. People are clicking on it and they are coming over to your registration page. Your challenge is that nobody’s signing up for your webinar once they hit your webinar registration page. This one happens a lot. 

I hear this from my students a lot. They say they are getting clicks. 500 people have clicked on the ad and only two have actually registered for the webinar. This is frustrating because I know it takes a lot of work to set up your ad campaign, set up your registration page, and set up all the emails that follow a webinar registration page. 

You’ve done a lot of work to this point and now you’re literally spending money on your ads. People are clicking but then they’re not signing up. Let’s talk about it. 

You’ve got to look at your messaging. Is there an ad-to-registration-page mismatch? Is the copy in your ad aligned with the copy on your landing page? If there’s not a clear connection and the conversation doesn’t pick up from the ad onto the registration page, people are not going to trust you enough to give you their valuable asset (name and email). 

First you have to make sure the conversation is aligned. Something I would love to see you try out is something we’ve done in our own business and have seen really good results with. For most of my webinar registration pages we have taken out all of the copy on the registration page. 

For the most part you will rarely see bullet points on our registration page. Instead, we put all of the goods in the Facebook ad copy including the webinar title, what you’re going to learn, the bullet points. 

We put all of that information in the ad copy so that when you click on the ad and come over to our registration page we usually use some good imagery (I’ll talk about that in a second), the title of the webinar, a subtitle, and a button. That’s all you’re going to find there. 

I want to show you what this looks like. In the show notes we actually have an image of one of my webinar registration pages that is exactly like I just explained it. Sometimes it’s easier to see it than just to hear it. 

We do this because when somebody clicks on the ad we want it to be a no-brainer decision to sign up. When you go to a registration page and you already have the information about what you’re going to learn, the only thing you need to do is click and sign up. 

You don’t need to read everything on the registration page. You don’t need to decide if this is something you want to do. You already decided because of the actual ad. This no-brainer decision gets people to sign up right away, BOOM, you’re signed up. 

We’ve seen huge increase in conversions from ad to actual landing page signups when we started this. We have been doing this for over a year now and it works really well. It doesn’t work for everybody. It works for my business but I want you to experiment to see if it works for your business as well. 

You could run two different ads going to two different landing pages. Then you can see if it’s the longer landing page that works best with shorter copy in your ad or if it’s a combination of a different way to do it. You get the point. 

I want you to try that, for sure. Again, an example of the landing page, an image of it, will be at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/165. 

Speaking of your landing page, I mentioned we usually use an image that’s appealing to my audience. It may be an image of me so that they can identify that they are signing up for my webinar or sometimes it’s not an image of me at all. Actually, let me see if I can grab two images. I’m making no promises but I think I can find two different images. One includes me and the other doesn’t. I want you to see the difference because both of them are converting well. 

Imagery matters. LeadPages is my tool of choice and if you go to http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/leadpages you can check out the tool I use for all of my landing pages. They have a template that is meant for just one big image and a little bit of copy. It’s one of their highest converting templates and it’s worth looking into. 

There is one more thing I want you to think about. If you are going to use more copy on your landing page I think it’s wise to have a little section about who you are, especially if you’re marketing to a cold audience. 

If you do add more copy on the landing page, at the very bottom (it doesn’t always have to be a the very bottom but it typically makes the most sense) put a little blurb about why you are the best person to teach this content. 

Here’s where it gets a little bit tricky. It’s not a bio. It’s not five or six sentences of your bio. You’re writing it specifically for the webinar you’re teaching. If you’re teaching on a certain topic then the bio should be two or three sentences that basically explain why you are the guy or girl to be teaching this topic. 

There is something in your experience or skill set that makes you the expert to teach. You’ve got to talk about that in the little clip about you with maybe a picture of you included so that people can connect with you. 

I think that’s important, especially if you’re just getting started and your audience is not yet your audience. You are still trying to attract them and they might want to know who you are and why it matters to the topic they are going to learn about. 

I have two resources for you that I want you to check out. They are both blog articles that are incredibly valuable. They were written by LeadPages, the company that knows what converts. 

I want you to one million percent check out these two blog posts. The first one is Help! Why Isn’t My Landing Page Working, 17 Common Flaws That May Be Blocking Your Success. I read it and thought it was stellar. 

The second one is Six Clear Signs It’s Time For A Landing  Page  Redesign. If you’ve been using the same landing page for a while and it has just stopped working or if you’ve been using one and it’s not working at all both of these articles will be valuable. I’ll post them in the show notes. 

Challenge #3: My Webinar Isn’t Converting 

We’ve already gone over the challenge that my ads aren’t converting and we’ve gone over the challenge that my landing page isn’t converting. What if you are getting people to the landing page, whether you’re using ads or social media free traffic, they’re signing up for your webinar and now your webinar itself isn’t converting? 

I’m going to back up a little bit. You might even be saying it’s not that your webinar isn’t converting. You aren’t sure if it converts because nobody’s showing up. They are signing up for the webinar but aren’t showing up. 

First, let me address that. I encourage my students inside the program Webinars That Convert to get to 40% and I give them a lot of tools and tips to do so. But 25% is the average. If you’re getting people to sign up for your webinar but you’re not seeing that then a few things might be happening. 

You might be having people sign up for your webinar too soon. Typically, if it’s more than ten days before the live webinar that’s a no go. I even think ten days is probably too long. I like to fall into the window of seven to five days. Then I know if you sign up for my webinar two or three days before I go live you’re actually more likely to show up live. 

If I sign up for your webinar 12 days before you go live I’ve lost interest by the time the webinar hits. I don’t remember why I was so excited and the 20 action items on my list that day are going to get in the way of me actually showing up. Then I’ll have great intentions to check out the replay but I likely never will. 

This happens to people every single day on my webinars, your webinars, it’s happening. One thing I do is try to get the most signups right before I go live. I might increase my ad budget just a few days before a live webinar. We’re talking live webinars at this point. 

I’ll increase my ad spend just a few days before or I will do a few webinars and give them two or three webinar dates to choose from. They are usually back to back on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. I am marketing leading up to it just days before each of those. 

Another thing, you must have a pre-webinar email sequence in place. All of my students in Webinars That Convert already know this but if you’re not in my program, let’s talk about it really quickly. 

It’s important that when someone signs up for your webinar, up until the day of your live webinar, you’re sending emails to encourage them to get on live. That’s not all you’re doing. You’re obviously sending them the registration email. 

Instantly after they sign up you send the email telling them you’re excited they are registered. It tells them what to do next. It might be to download a workbook that will be used in the webinar or a blog post they can check out in the meantime. You are giving them the registration information and having them mark their calendar. 

As you are getting closer to the live webinar you’re sending emails, “It’s almost here. I’m so excited. I’m putting the final touches on it. Let me give you a little snapshot of what you’re going to learn.” You might tell them a story. You’re engaging with them and building a relationship even before they get on the live webinar. 

Your pre-webinar email sequence is incredibly important. It will help you get more people on live. 

Another thing we’ve done is actually send out an email the morning of a live webinar. We’re only sending it to those that registered for the webinar and we might use an image of a clock or timer or something like that. 

The copy is, “Your webinar is today! The countdown has begun. You have just a few hours. Make sure to check your email. I’ve sent you all the information again just to have it at your fingertips.” 

You are talking to the people that signed up for your webinar and that’s a really great way to remind them the webinar is today. You can even make a video ad if you want. 

Or, you can make a quick little video and email it to all of your webinar registrants saying, “Today’s the day. I know you’re going to get busy. I know an email is going to distract you. I know your kids are going to run into the office and you’re going to think you don’t have time for this. But let me tell you why that’s a bad decision.” 

You actually talk about the things that are going to get in the way and then cut it off when you talk about why it’s important they show up live. 

Let’s say you are getting people on your webinar live. They are actually showing up. The webinar just isn’t converting. The first thing I want you to think about is your offer. You need to make sure the free content they signed up for, what you’re teaching in the webinar, is actually aligned with what you’re selling. 

This is a biggie. This is why it’s important to really take the time to build out some great free content in your webinar and make sure it seamlessly aligns with whatever it is you’re selling. Whether you say it this way on a webinar or not, this is what the transition should look like. 

If you love this free content and it’s something you really could get on board with, you want these results, you want to do this, you want to do that, then your next step it to join me in my program where I will show you exactly how to get these results. 

Now that they see the opportunity and they’re excited, their next step is to buy the program. You obviously wouldn’t say it like that on the webinar but that’s the behind- the-scenes conversation that needs to show up in your webinar. 

If you can’t make that really seamless alignment between the two something is probably off there. I just want to put that out there that it’s something you want to look at. 

Your webinar itself, I take a lot of pride in my webinar presentation and making sure I’m giving great, valuable content. I have a motto and all of my students know this. When someone gets on a live webinar, before I go live, I say, “No matter if they buy or not they walk away from my webinar feeling excited, inspired, and driven to take action. No matter if they buy or not.” 

That’s important to me because I don’t want them leaving a webinar thinking, “That was a huge pitch fest the whole time. She promised she would teach me this, this, and that and all she did was talk about the program she wants to sell me.” 

That’s the last thing you ever want to happen on a webinar. So I put an episode together back at #130. The episode was called How To Sell On A Webinar Without Being Overly Salesy. I want you to listen to that if you feel you are getting people on your webinar but it’s just not converting into sales. 

It might mean you are pitching in a way that’s turning your audience off. Episode #130 is one you definitely want to listen to. 

Again, if they’re getting on your webinar and it’s not converting it could have to do with your offer not being aligned with the free content you’re teaching, you could be selling in a way that feels awkward to them or not genuine or too salesy. We can combat that with Episode #130. 

You’ve also just got to pay attention to the flow of your webinar. You’ve got to keep them engaged throughout the entire thing so that when you get to the selling portion of your webinar they are still right there with you. 

One of the ways you do that is to make sure that in your free content you are keeping them engaged. You do that by asking them questions throughout the webinar. That’s another tip. During the webinar, are you asking them questions? Are you having them type into the chat? Are you responding to those chats, if it’s a live webinar? 

It’s really, really important. But in addition to that, I always tell my students they want to have at least 80 slides for a 60-minute webinar. Some people hear that and think I’m crazy. In this case, less is more. 

If you’re doing a webinar for a full hour, use at least 80 slides. I like to use 100 but I know that really freaks out some of my new students. Let’s start with 80 and move to 100 as you get a little bit better with it. 

That means you might have an image with one word on each slide. You might just have an example of a screen shot you took. You might just punctuate with a quick little quote. But you don’t have a bunch of stuff on your slides. 

In my opinion, you hardly have any bullet points whatsoever. If you have a slide with six bullet points and you build, you aren’t showing all of those bullet points at once. You click return and build up on the slide. 

Instead of building through bullet points, make that six different slides with just a few words on each slide to punctuate your point. That makes a really big difference. You are constantly moving your slides and that brings them into the presentation. 

If they are distracted by an email but you’re moving your slides, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, and you’re saying some really great stuff that’s valuable to them and they’re learning, they’re going to come back to you. If they get distracted they are going to come back in. 

At any point during your webinar you can say, “If you’re multitasking right now and something else has grabbed your attention, come back to me because this next tip I’m going to teach is so invaluable that you never want to miss it.” 

You can be a little playful with that but just know part of the reason you might not be converting on your webinar is that it’s disorganized or boring or it just isn’t keeping their attention. By the time you get to the selling portion you’ve lost them. 

It’s important that you pay attention to the flow. I’m going to link to some resources in my show notes where I’ve talked about putting your presentation together just to make sure you have it designed in a way that’s going to be incredibly valuable for your audience and in a way that keeps their attention throughout the entire presentation. 

Remember at the very beginning of this episode I promised you a strategy that I’m literally doing in my business right now? It’s really, really good and you can use it with webinars or any campaign you’re running. 

Here it is. I have to deliver on my promise. We recently had a situation where we were running an automated webinar that was converting like crazy. But it’s been running for a long time and we’ve exhausted some of our best targeting options. 

We noticed it’s just not converting into sales like it used to. We decided to do a full- funnel evaluation/audit. I wanted to share this with you because it’s something you can do as well. 

Let me explain what you would do. If your webinar is just not converting and you know some of these troubleshooting tips I just gave you could be helpful but you feel maybe it’s a bigger thing and you’re just missing something, something seems off and you’re not really sure what it is. 

You might want to start with a funnel audit or funnel evaluation. Let’s just call it an audit. 

You would hire somebody or use somebody on your team that knows your audience, understands the program or service you’re selling, and has a good eye for copy that converts. 

In some cases you may be using a copywriter you feel really comfortable with, you know, they understand you, and have written copy for you before. They understand your audience so you could use a copywriter. 

You could use somebody on your team that’s really well versed in everything your program is all about. You could hire somebody and fill in the holes for them if you know they are a really talented marketer with a good eye for this. 

You can decide who you want to use but once I explain what the audit looks like it will probably be clear to you who you want to use. 

Here’s what you will do. You will have somebody go through your entire campaign. I am using the word campaign and funnel interchangeably. 

He or she will start at the entry point of your funnel. For me that means they started with my Facebook ads. They looked at the Facebook ads that were leading to the webinar registration. This person starts at the beginning of your funnel and they experience it just like a potential student or potential customer would experience it. 

They start and look at your ad. They read your ad or watch your video ad or whatever it might be. Then they click over to the webinar registration page. They evaluate the entire webinar registration page making sure there is alignment between what the ad says and what the registration page says. They opt in and get all of the pre-webinar emails. 

You can do this in real time or you can just give them everything and show them what the flow looks like. They can opt in like they are really going to be someone that’s registering for your webinar or you can just give them everything to review. 

They then look at all of your pre-webinar emails. From there they get on the webinar, they watch the entire webinar, and then they get all of the post-webinar emails, the promo emails you’re sending out, and pay close attention to the offer as well, the sales page where you are sending them. 

They pay close attention to the replay page that people are going to see if they didn’t see the live webinar. They look at every asset as though they are going through the funnel to possibly become a customer of yours. 

They are doing the audit with an eye on whether it is the right messaging and whether it makes sense. Is it compelling enough? 

Let me give you an example of what this is going to possibly uncover for you. One thing we noticed with one of my funnels was that we were targeting entrepreneurial newbies with the ad and with my free content to even start the funnel. 

We were attracting entrepreneurial newbies, people just starting out, and the ad was about just starting out, the landing page was about just starting out, even the webinar talked about just starting out. Then after the webinar some of the post-webinar emails, the promo emails, were talking a little bit more about whether you stopped and started along the way, if you tried something but it hasn’t worked, then the program is for “you”. 

There was a disconnect. The person that identified this asked, “Is this for those who have stopped and started and have been at it for a while? Do they want to take things to the next level but aren’t sure where they should change things? Or, is this truly for a newbie?” 

The newbie has been attracted but the messaging changed in the post-webinar email. Another thing we uncovered, the testimonials on the sales page talked about people that had been at it for a while but shifted something and saw big results. 

That’s not an entrepreneurial newbie. I had to sit down and ask who the program was for. It can’t be for everybody. How do I need to tweak my messaging to make sure it’s aligned from the get go throughout the entire funnel? 

I think this is a mistake that many of us have made. I think sometimes it happens because we tweak funnels a lot. If you have been at it a while you’ve likely changed your emails around and updated your sales page. You put new testimonials up there. This is what happened to me. 

We tweaked here and there to make it better but somehow along the way our messaging got mixed up. This audit uncovers all of that kind of stuff. 

It will uncover things for you like what’s not working on your landing page. I talked about reading those articles about how to fix the landing page. Whoever is doing the audit should be well versed in understanding what converts on a landing page so they can identify that you’ve got “this” here and “that” there and “this button” is in the wrong place. 

I would rather you pay someone for a few hours of their time if they’re skilled in online marketing to point out some mismatches you might have. Again, I don’t have it all figured out on who you should hire. You can figure that out. But they do need to be experienced so they can identify something not working with an ad image or ad copy. 

If they can look at your targeting, great, but I didn’t actually do that. I just had them look at it as though a potential customer was looking at it. Of course, they had the skill set to know my landing page was off because of “this” or “that”, if that is the case. It wasn’t in my case. 

This audit could be really valuable for you. You want to make sure they’re set up and have all of the information they need. Then they just go to town. You can get on the phone with them or they can deliver a report to you and then you go and test. 

You just change one thing at a time because if you change ten things you’ll never know if one is really working and one is a huge waste of time. Again, take baby steps, one thing at a time. Have blinders for the rest of it. 

That dreaded “O” word, overwhelm, doesn’t even come into play. 

Let’s go ahead and wrap it up. There you have it. We troubleshoot your biggest webinar challenges. We talked about Facebook ads, webinar registration pages, and your webinar itself. Remember, you are just going to choose one thing at a time and then tackle it to see if that was the issue. If it wasn’t then, move on to the next issue. 

To help you stay organized I created your webinar problem-solving tool kit where I listed everything I talked about with you here. I also added extra things you can troubleshoot. I want you to have a really comprehensive list. 

We broke it up into categories like your ads, your landing page, your webinar slide deck, your webinar offer, your post-webinar emails. I even went into some of that in this checklist. You definitely want to grab it instantly. 

If you’re not doing webinars yet, save it for when you are ready to tackle a new webinar campaign. Your webinar problem-solving tool kit is at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/165download. If you want to check out some of the links I talked about today you can go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/165. You’ll get the freebie there as well and that might just be your one-stop shop. 

Everything including the freebie and all of the links and the example of the registration page I promised you can be found at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/ 165. 

There you have it. I started the conversation today talking about the fact we’ve got to flip the switch on the conversations we’re having in our head. Now that we’ve gone through this entire episode promise me, if you do nothing else today, just be very aware of how you talk to yourself and express what you’re feeling and what’s going on in your business. 

See if you can flip the switch to have a different conversation. I promise you if it does nothing else it’s going to make sure you have a better day and that you’re kinder to yourself and kinder to those people in your life that matter the most. So be very careful with those conversations. 

I cannot wait to meet you here again next week. Next week’s episode, #166, is a play- by-play of how I rework an existing online training program to make it better. I’ve been in the thick of it with List-Builder’s Lab and I want to talk to you about how I rework a program. 

I don’t have to start from scratch but I’ve got to make it better. I’ll tell you how I do that in Episode #166 next week. I cannot wait to see you here again. Have a wonderful week. Bye for now. 

Follow Me On The Gram

@amyporterfield