AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Thanks, so much, for tuning in. I truly appreciate you being here.
Today we are talking all about webinars. If you have ever thought about doing a webinar but just haven’t really jumped into the webinar game or maybe you have been doing webinars for a while but you want to up your game and want to add some more advanced strategies to convert better on your webinars, then this episode is for you.
It is equally good for those that have never done a webinar or those who have been doing webinars for a while but just want them to be better and more successful. So if you are in either of those camps you are in the right place today.
Webinars have dramatically changed my business, especially when I moved from being a consultant into creating online training courses. Webinars really work for both camps. If you are a coach or consultant and want to sell your services webinars can be highly valuable. If you have an online training course, in my opinion, webinars are a must.
We are going to talk about the myths and mistakes. There are a lot of myths when it comes to webinars. Webinars have dramatically changed over the years. We will talk about how to approach webinars in a way that will give you your biggest bang for your buck. But I have also made a lot of mistakes along the way.
There are five really crucial mistakes that I am certain have cost me a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of heartache. I am going to give you those mistakes so you do not need to make them.
I am the first to say that my business grew so rapidly because of webinars. First I used webinars to grow my email list. But then when that email list started to grow I really focused on webinars to generate sales. All of my webinars, really from Day One, have always had a selling element. I always promoted something at the end. But they didn’t really take off and get going strong until after I did a few and got really clear on how this whole strategy works. And, after my list grew a little bit, people got used to seeing my webinars and knew they could trust me and trust that I was putting out good content.
For you, if you are just starting out with webinars, I say to really focus on the list- building part of webinars. Your list will explode if you put a webinar strategy together in terms of great free content that your audience can’t live without. They will get on your list to get that webinar.
From there you can continue to perfect your webinar strategy and you can be a selling machine. If you have something great to sell and you’ve got a great message giving away great content first this whole strategy could be a big huge business changer for you.
I am really passionate about it because I know that many businesses are struggling to sell online. This is a great way to first build trust, connection, and really put your best stuff out there and earn the right to promote. At the end of a webinar you promote your program, product, or service. If you do the webinar in a really specific way and put a strategy to it the selling part becomes part of the flow.
First of all, let’s talk about why many people don’t want to get into the webinar game or where those who have gotten into it do struggle. Usually it is three things:
- Technology. A lot of people are afraid of technology or feel that it is too expensive. People say GoToWebinar is too expensive or they don’t understand the technology and don’t know what goes here and there and how to put it all together. They are really afraid of big technical challenges when they are live so they stay away from it. I will say there are a lot of moving parts. We’ll talk about that in the myth section when we get there.
- People are really uncomfortable with the selling side of webinars. They start to give away their great valuable content on a webinar and then when it comes to selling they come to a complete stop and have to make a 360 into selling and it becomes super awkward. We’ll talk about that. So if you have ever had the concern between the content, the free stuff, the selling, and the angst that you might feel between that, we are going to get there.
- You might not have started to create a webinar strategy or maybe your webinars haven’t been working because you actually are really concerned that either people won’t show up or you have done them and no one really shows up. Or, you feel that before you get into a webinar strategy you definitely need to build your email list, need a sales funnel, and a lot of other things you need to do before you even think about webinars. You decide to work on all of that and then get to webinars later. The thing is, later might be years down the road and you will be missing out on a huge great opportunity that you could start now.
That’s why I’m so passionate about the topic of webinars. Again, it can be a big business changer. Let’s talk about the myths first and then we will get into some of my big mistakes that you do not need to make because I am going to tell you how to avoid them.
MYTHS
The number one myth with webinars is that a lot of people look at webinars as just a marketing strategy but not necessarily a whole system. If you’ve been following my podcast for some time now you know that I am a big fan of creating a social media sales funnel starting with some kind of free giveaway, using Facebook ads to drive traffic to that giveaway, building an email list, really building a strong relationship with that email list, and then using that email list to promote your products, programs, and services.
When it comes to webinars, webinars fit very nicely into a social media sales funnel. A lot of people will just do one-off webinars. They will do a webinar, have a little bit of followup, and be done. When done right, webinars actually take a little time to put together.
The last thing you want to do is throw a webinar together and just be done with it and move on to the next strategy. If you’re going to be putting your time and effort into something, you want to really generate real revenue and build a really solid email list. Why not approach it as a system?
For me, I look at webinars as a whole system, kind of like their own sales funnel, inside my business. You can have multiple sales funnels inside your business. When I put together a webinar I actually go through five stages.
The first stage is planning. There is some planning that goes into your webinar. What is your topic going to be? What are you going to sell on the webinar? Who is your target market? There are some things that go into the planning, like actually creating the content for the webinar.
Once you get things planned out then I go into what I call the pre-webinar phase, which is basically getting people on a live webinar. You promote it, use Facebook ads, post on social media, maybe make a video inviting people to come check out your live webinar.
The next phase of the five key stages/phases is live. I am a big believer that when you create a webinar strategy you want to do a few live first. I am a big believer in doing automated webinars. However, if I am teaching someone from scratch I always like to get a few webinars under my belt. I can promise you it is the fastest way to grow your confidence around your content to fine tune your content in a way that you will never get the opportunity to do in other strategies you use for your marketing.
In addition to that, having that live correspondence or communication with your audience during a webinar is priceless. Even if you have 20 people on the webinar it is still really valuable.
I always say to first plan it out, then get people on live, then you go live. There are a lot of elements with the live: Making sure the technology is working, engaging your audience live on the webinar, obviously that will be where you do your live Q&A and you will be selling and all that good stuff.
That happens live. It actually gives you a good boost of revenue in the moment, especially when you put a lot of effort into getting quality people on the webinar. Then there is the whole post phase. The post phase is sending out the replay and following up with really good, valuable emails to remind people about what you spoke about on the webinar and encourage them to buy.
A lot of people will buy on your webinar, especially when you get really good at them, but then a lot of people will still be on the fence and want to think about it. It’s your job to let them know the benefits, the features, the case studies, the stories all related to why they should take a deeper dive with you and buy your program that you talked about on the webinar.
From there, we move into the automated phase. Once you get a few live webinars under your belt it is time to take that webinar that you have perfected and turn it into an automated webinar. Because you’ve already gone through the planning phase, the pre-webinar phase, the live phase, the post phase, there are just some small tweaks you need to make to turn it into an automated webinar that people can basically sign up for at any time of the day, any day of the week. They can find a day and time that works for them and can then get on and it still has the live feeling.
You can even add a chat to an automated webinar if you want. We won’t get into all of the details today. But you can add some live features to a recorded webinar. When you do that you are then serving a bigger audience that you could ever reach with just your live webinars. And you have perfected it along the way so it will convert really well.
That is our end result, always (not always, usually) to get to that automated webinar that could be running any time of the day, any day of the week, and you could be generating more leads and more sales.
Getting back to Myth #1, your webinar really shouldn’t just be a marketing strategy where you do it, get it over with, and move on to another strategy. I want you to look at webinars as a social media sales funnel, maybe an extra one that you add if you have other things going. But it could be a truly big foundation in terms of your selling process in your business.
I don’t want you to look at it as just a one-off thing to do. It is really a system. I am actually going to do another episode about webinars to dive deeper into that system I am talking about. I will do that in a few weeks. But first I just want to lay the landscape here to get your mind thinking about webinars in a different way.
Myth #2 is that webinars are a ton of effort and involve too much expensive technology. I will say that webinars are not simple. They are not the easiest thing you can do. However, I will say that the amount of work you put into creating a webinar system can pay off 100 times more if you do it right the first time and you get it out there and eventually get it automated. The time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears you put into it truly do pay off.
That’s the kind of stuff I like to do in my business. I am all about hard work but making sure it is going to last down the road so that I don’t have to be doing that kind of hard work every single week.
Let’s be honest, do you ever get sick to the point of feeling as though you are spinning your wheels in your business? Are you always trying new things and thinking of new strategies and working on new email sequences and new Facebook ads and creating another product because one didn’t work and you begin to think that something has to give?
What I love about webinars, if you stick to putting together a system and really put the time and effort into it up front it can just pay off for you over and over again. You just fine-tune it.
If you are part of my Profit Lab program (it’s not open right now but you might have joined earlier this year) you know I am all about getting your foundation set and then just tweaking it to make it better and refine it. That’s what you can do with a webinar system as well. You can refine it and make it better. But it’s something you don’t have to keep recreating over and over again.
Back to the myth about webinars being a ton of effort and involving too much expensive technology, they are a ton of effort in the beginning but the expensive technology is not a must. You could do them for free in terms of using live Google Hangouts. You can keep it really simple without a ton of bells and whistles and have the webinar convert for you at a very rapid rate.
To me, where I want you to put your focus when it comes to webinars, is content and how to put the slide deck together. We will talk about that in the next episode about webinars in a few weeks. We will talk about slide deck/content and how much you put on your slides and how much time you spend on each slide and stuff like that. That’s the important stuff because that’s where the connection, relationship, and selling is going to happen.
Don’t worry about too much expensive technology. That is not true. There is some expensive technology you can use but it depends on your budget and where you are in your business. I personally use GoToWebinar and I also use EasyWebinar for my automated webinars. But you don’t have to use those. There are a whole bunch of other technologies you can use.
We will talk about that in a later episode. We are laying the foundation here. But just don’t get stuck in the myth that it has to be expensive because it does not. I can promise you that it does not need to be expensive. And, stick with me as I walk you through, over the next few weeks, how to do webinars in a way to make it really easy so you don’t need to get overwhelmed.
I am coming out with a webinar program in a few weeks and that is why I have been buried in webinar content. Buried sounds negative but I have been buried in a good way. I have been pouring over webinar content and putting my best free content possible together. So, whether you buy my program or not you are still going to get some immense value about webinars in the next few weeks on my blog, on my podcast, and my webinar about webinars. All of this will be free so you can get some really great valuable content in terms of how to create your webinar.
If you have ever thought about webinars stick with me over the next few weeks because I have definitely got you covered.
Myth #3: I’m fine, I learned about webinars years ago, I know what I need to know; I haven’t started webinars but I have the information. That is a myth because webinars have changed dramatically over the years.
Attention spans have changed thanks to Netflix. We are binge-watching shows. Commercials are a joke. When was the last time you really saw a commercial? Information can be delivered to us instantly as fast as we want it and that has changed how people approach webinar watching.
We have seen that there is a decline in terms of people showing up live for your webinar whether they are showing up for a recorded or live webinar. We have seen a decline in that but it doesn’t have to be. I have actually seen an increase of people actually showing up for my live webinars. We will talk about that in the mistake section and how I created it. But, things are changing. You have to adapt.
The webinar you might have known a few years ago looks very different today. We have learned a lot, especially people like me who have done many webinars, we know you have to shift with how social media has shifted and how people are taking in information and the technology around it.
If you learned about webinars years ago or if you have been thinking about it over the years and think you know enough but you just need to dive in, stick with me because webinars have definitely changed. I am going to be talking about that a lot.
I will tell you the number one thing that has changed, like I mentioned, it is attention span. When I do my webinars I have a lot of slides for an hour webinar. If I am going to do a whole hour of content on a webinar for free I at least have 80 to 100 slides, if not more. That might seem like a lot but you can’t stay on one slide too long. You have to constantly be going boom, boom, boom going through the slides and using the slides as triggers for conversations that you will have with your audience versus reading every word on the screen.
Because attention spans are shorter than they have ever been in history, you do not want a slide full of content that you sit on for a long time. You want to know what will happen? People are going to multitask until the sun comes up. That is all they will be doing. You will never have their attention.
Because of that you have to be really clear that there is a certain way to deliver your content so that you can keep them engaged through the whole thing. When we get to mistakes in a minute I will give you some tips about how to keep people engaged.
Myth #4 is the final one, it’s too late, I have already missed the boat on webinars. The thing is you might have missed the boat on webinars as a tactic but there is always another boat coming in. That has to do with the complete sales funnel as a webinar.
Webinars of the past have gone away. You have not missed the boat though. There is a new type of webinar now. That’s where I started out with Myth #1 that it is more of a complete system versus a tactic. But it is never too late to do webinars.
Don’t listen to anybody that tells you webinars are a thing of the past or that they aren’t as popular as they used to be and that people aren’t showing up for webinars anymore. That is true for some people. But it doesn’t have to be true for you.
There are things you can do to create a webinar that not only grows your list by thousands but skyrockets your revenue. Here is something that is really cool: When you do webinars right (when I get into the mistakes I have made you will get into the tactics and how to do them right) it is amazing how people feel super connected to you.
If you regularly listen to my podcast then you already know that hearing my voice in podcasts regularly makes you feel more connected to me. A lot of times when I am out in the world I will run into somebody in real life and they will feel like they know me. I have probably mentioned this on a podcast before but I remember the first time I got to spend some quality time with Michael Hyatt. I just closed my eyes and listened to his voice (sounds creepy, I know, but I did) and I felt like I had known him forever because I had been listening to his voice forever.
The same kind of thing happens with webinars. People really connect to you at a level you will never get anywhere else. A blog post won’t do it, a telesummit won’t do it, social media won’t do it. You will create bonds with people beyond anything you have ever experienced when you do a webinar right. So don’t listen to anybody who says webinars are a thing of the past. That is crazy. You can generate thousands of dollars a week on webinars when you do them right.
Let’s talk about doing webinars right. This is my favorite part. I want to get into the mistakes that you can easily make. And that’s the freebie for today. I am going to go over them but I have gone into more detail about these five rookie webinar mistakes and how to avoid them. If you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/70download or text the phrase 70download to 33444 you can get the freebie right away Five Rookie Webinar Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.
I am briefly going to go over the mistakes now but make sure you grab the giveaway because the cheat sheet offers a lot more examples and detail.
MISTAKES
These are the mistakes I have made over the years that I don’t want you to make so I want to explain them to you here.
Mistake #1 is that you fear the transition from content to sales. Have you ever had the feeling that you have to shift into sales? When I was doing webinars in the early days I would be sailing along delivering free, impeccable content that I worked on for weeks and felt really confident about. I would give great examples and stories and bam, bam, bam. I was on my game. Then the slide would come up where it was time to sell. And you would hear nothing…crickets.
I would take a deep breath and the words wouldn’t come out. Then I would be frantically looking for some words to transition into the sales part. My voice would change, the tone would change and that would dramatically take the energy down.
In addition to that, it would be so awkward that I would literally see people jump off. When you are on GoToWebinar, the tool I use for live webinars, I can see when the numbers go down. That is kind of a bad thing. You shouldn’t even look at that when you are live on a webinar because it will throw you off.
In my early days I would look at that and I could see people jumping off right away when I went into sales. That would totally derail me. So my first tip is when you do a live webinar do not look at stats. I don’t want you looking at how many people are on, how many people are jumping off when you go into the sales part of it, I don’t even want you to look at comments.
There are two things I want you to do:
- Focus on the transition (we will talk about it in a moment), and
- Have just one person there with you physically or remotely that is looking over everything. I have Trivinia on my team, my assistant, and we have a system when I am on a live webinar I know she is on monitoring all comments and making sure the audio sounds good, the technology is working, and all that good stuff.
I usually have two computers. If I don’t have two computers I have my computer and my iPhone. On my iPhone or the other computer I have Skype. Trivinia will Skype me the minute anything is wrong so I often glance over to Skype. She doesn’t bother me during the webinar with Skype if nothing is wrong.
But, if people can’t hear me, if we are having a frozen issue where something went frozen, or if there is a question that everyone is asking (if they are totally confused) she will Skype me. In addition to that, Trivinia uses Skype during the Q&A. We will get into that with another mistake I used to make.
My mindset and practical tips for you so that you don’t have to make that same mistake are:
- You have to know that you have earned it; you’ve done the work. If you put the effort into creating a really great valuable webinar and put really great effort into it and know the content is going to be good you have now earned the right to sell. You have given them something they can’t get anywhere else and you have given it to them for free. So now you have an opportunity for those that want to dive deeper with you.
- You also need to truly believe in what you are selling. If you know it is good, it can change lives, it can knock their socks off. It can transform their life, their business, their marriage, whatever it is that your product does. If you know it works then you should be really proud that you are going to put it out there as an opportunity for them so that they can dive deeper with you and get results.
If you believe in what you are selling that transition becomes a whole lot easier. It might mean you have to give yourself a little bit of a pep talk.
Another thing I want you to think about is that when you create content (this is where we will talk about content even more in the next episode in a few weeks about webinars – but I still want to talk about it a little bit here) that is completely aligned with your product that transition from content to selling is almost seamless.
I truly believe this. This is something I screwed up a bunch until the last few years in terms of whether the content seamlessly moves into the sale. One great example is the Profit Lab, if you have ever been on my webinar about the Profit Lab. In my paid program, Profit Lab, I teach seven steps to a social media sales funnel.
The webinar is all about those seven steps. I go over each step and dive deeper into a few of them and go over the surface of the others. But I paint the picture that these are the seven steps. I give this for free and explain these are the things you need to do to create a social media sales funnel.
My product dives into each of those steps. It holds your hand and shows you exactly how to do it and includes cheat sheets, blueprints, examples, how-tos, and all that good stuff in the paid program. If you believe you can create these seven steps I outline for you in the free webinar and you want to implement it that is where my program comes into play. Do you see the nice transition there?
That is what I want you to do. Do you want to know how to know if you have created an amazing webinar? Are you ready for this? If you want the feeling that your webinar is amazing and good and you can’t wait to get it out to the world you will usually feel a little uncomfortable that you are giving away so much for free. That is the time I know I am on to something really good.
If you have a nagging voice that asks if you are giving away too much good stuff that is usually a good indicator that it is going to be a kick-butt webinar. It is just something to think about.
Once you do that content that is fully aligned with what you are selling the transition become really, really simple. I can promise you that.
Mistake #2 is that I used to put tons of content on each of my slides. What happened in my early days is that I would have a slide deck for an hour (I usually talk for an hour on my webinar and I had 30 slides). What does that mean? I was staying on each slide for two minutes. That is deadly to any webinar.
I remember, and I can tell you this story because I know he has talked about it publicly too, but there was one thing I got to teach Michael Hyatt (who has taught me a million and one things) and I am really proud of it because he came to me and asked me if I would look over some slides.
He was going to do a webinar about his Platform University program. Michael asked if I would look over his slides. His slides are gorgeous. If you want to see some really great slides, Michael Hyatt knows webinar slides.
He sent me the slides and they were gorgeous but I swear he may have had 23 slides. We were going to talk for over an hour. So right away I said the number one thing you need to know about webinars, you need three times that many slides. He is such a good little student.
Of course he goes above and beyond and delivers the most impeccable first webinar I have ever seen someone deliver. That guy is an overachiever for sure. But he took the advice. He came back and had a lot more slides.
You want to have a lot of slides because you don’t want to stay on each slide very long. You also do not want to put too much content on each slide because you then tend to read it. When you deliver a webinar the last thing I want you to do is put a slide up and read exactly what the slide says.
You want each slide to remind you of the content you are going to teach. It is a trigger. So think of your webinar slides as a trigger. That means you need to practice before you actually deliver or record the webinar (if you are going for automated – like I said, I like people to try out a few live webinars first). You have to practice it.
I usually practice and practice and then record it and then go over it to make sure it makes sense. It is kind of like if you are going to go on stage, you practice your presentation from start to finish. If you do that with a webinar I can promise you that you will find about five transitions in there that are so awkward that you will think it makes no sense and you will fix it before you actually deliver it to your audience.
Practice makes perfect, just like everything else. But for Mistake #2, having too much on a slide, make sure to only use the slides to punctuate. It might just be an image,
one word, a quote, a phrase, or a screen grab of an example. That is the kind of stuff I like to put on slides.
Don’t read the slides word for word and don’t put too much on the slide so that you are staying on the slide for too long.
Mistake #3 is a lack of an onboarding process. This is a big one for me. I went through a phase when I was doing webinars in the early days. It wasn’t really hard to get 60-70% of people that signed up for a webinar on the webinar live. In my early days, the hey days, those were amazing days.
Webinars have changed. Way more people do webinars now and people are used to getting your replay. Some people don’t even give replays now because they want to make sure people show up live. But I always give replays.
We found that most people won’t even watch the replay. Only a small fraction of people that didn’t show up live will actually watch the replay. Your whole goal is to get somebody on live. If you are doing automated you still want them to show up for the date and time they signed up for. In my mind that is like them showing up live.
It is very important the majority of people that sign up for your webinar are there at the date and time they have chosen to be there. Do not rely heavily on the replay process.
This onboarding process is all about getting people to show up live with you. These days if you are at about 40% you are doing really good. So if about 40% of people that opt in or register for your webinar actually show up, that’s good. Between 30 and 40% is actually really good.
For a while my attendance dipped down to 20% and I was devastated. Nothing will ruin your energy more than when you are ready to go live on a webinar and you realize hardly anyone has shown up. Suppose you have 1,000 people register and 50 people are there, that will really affect your psyche right away.
I would say either don’t look or, if you have to look, let’s do a little work in the beginning to make sure more people show up live. It is the onboarding sequence. What I do, when you sign up for one of my webinars you get an email right away with a confirmation from me. If you are using a tool like GoToWebinar or EasyWebinar those tools will actually send out a confirmation email because people need the link to get on when you actually go live.
In addition to that, I send out my own email. I usually offer a workbook and offer the workbook as a download with a tease of some of the content that will be taught. The workbook has some fill-in-the-blank spaces that they will fill out when we go live. This teases the content of the webinar.
I then send an email a few days later and might tell a story or talk about the importance of showing up live because we will do this, this, and this. Or, I might give a valuable tip or trick about the content that I am going to teach. I am offering value.
The day of the webinar I tend to send one email really early in the morning and again ten minutes before we go live. It is important that you actually followup with this communication because to get somebody live on a webinar you have to do some work these days. Again, webinars have changed. But when they show up live that is where you will make the biggest impact in terms of connection and in sales.
It is important, whether it is an automated or live webinar, to have them show up for the date and time they have designated. It is very important. The onboarding sequence will do just that.
Mistake #4 (I have two more mistakes here) is weak followup. One thing I did in the early days and that I see a lot of my students do now, they say they didn’t do really well on their webinar and just sold a few. I ask what their followup sequence looked like. They tell me they sent out a replay.
I just think, oh my gosh, you missed a huge opportunity. If you do this right you will definitely get sales on your webinar. But there are a majority, like I mentioned earlier, who will be on the fence and will need a little bit more. They need to know they can trust you and will need some more information.
One of the things you can do is create a sales page and send people to a sales page in the followup sequence. The emails to follow your webinar are crucial. I always like to send the replay out right away but with a deadline, the replay will only be available for a few days.
From there, I send a series of emails to follow the replay. The series of emails are all about the program that I introduce them to on the webinar. My email will tell how I talked about my brand new program on the webinar about XYZ and will list three things you can learn when you sign up. I might give benefits, features, and case studies.
It is a series of three or four emails to follow, if not more, depending on how long your cycle is that you are promoting something. You can do this with automated webinars and live webinars. But those emails to follow are golden. You must have a sequence that sells and you want scarcity in those emails.
If you are part of my Profit Lab program you already know that in the followup emails after someone opts in to get a freebie the scarcity is what is really a make or break kind of situation. Maybe you have a bonus that is going away or maybe the doors are closing and people can’t enroll after a certain date (that is what I usually do with my big launches).
The doors are going to close so that is always some bit of scarcity. But I like to add bonuses. I like to do a price increase at some time during the promotion. There are a lot of different reasons people should buy right away and you want to give them incentives.
The followup after a webinar is so very valuable.
Mistake #5 is a weird one that I didn’t actually think was true until I really tested it. In my early days of webinars, I always did a live Q&A at the end for about ten minutes. I would do an hour webinar where I would deliver free, valuable content for 45 minutes and for ten minutes I would sell something, then I would do a five or ten minute Q&A.
Here is the deal with selling and how long you want to spend on selling. I really do believe it comes down to the price point and how much explanation is needed in order for people to really see the value. If I am selling a $97 program on a webinar I might sell for ten minutes to go into the benefits, features, case studies, all that good stuff. Then I will show people inside the program in the members area. I like to do that inside the webinar as well when I am selling.
But, if I am selling $1,000 program you can be sure I am going to talk longer than ten minutes. I am not going to just say buy, buy, buy. I am going to give reasons people should buy to really help them understand what is included and why I have included it and how it will work and the results they can expect.
I go into a lot more detail when it is a more expensive program to sell. That is kind of how I decide. You need to make sure you give yourself space inside the webinar to really explain the value of your program.
In addition to that, there is usually a Q&A at the end of most webinars. In the past I would spend five or ten minutes answering a few quick questions and then I would jump off. When I jumped off I would have 400 people still on the webinar.
I had a good friend say those people are golden to my opportunity to sell more. They are the people who are going to buy if they are given the attention and time they need. So if you see that you still have people on you have to decide what that number looks like. Let’s say you are just staring out and you have 100 people on your webinar and when you get into the Q&A you still have 30 people on and you are ready to jump off.
I wouldn’t jump off if I started with 100 people total and there were still 30 on in the Q&A. These are the people that genuinely are interested and want to know more. Take the time to answer their questions. Go over any objections that you know they are having but maybe not asking.
Go over the product again after you have answered some questions, go back to the product again and go over it one more time. These are the people that are paying attention and who want to know more information from you. So don’t jump off your Q&A too early so that they actually don’t get all that value from you in terms of answering the questions in order for them to make a decision that they feel good about in terms of buying.
When you do a Q&A, if you have a lot of people on (you will get there once you have done a few webinars), choose questions that are going to add value to the full audience. At the very end of a Q&A I can usually see myself answering more specific questions that might not relate to everybody. But in the beginning of the Q&A I make sure I either have a few questions in the can that I know get asked often and I just answer those right away.
These are valuable questions like, “How long do I have inside your program?” or “Who is this program best suited for?” Those questions come up a lot so I will answer those right when I get into the Q&A because I know that’s when I have the most people on before people start jumping off. Get to the best questions first.
You might want to encourage them by telling them questions that can really value the whole audience are your favorite type of questions so that a lot of people can get value from the responses. You will get some really good questions that way.
Always have a few questions in the can just in case you don’t have a big audience yet and you need to answer some questions. Think about the biggest objections they will have to buying your product. Turn those into questions to answer during the Q&A. But don’t jump off too early because there is some magic happening there. You could lose some pretty amazing people that are still staying on that really want to hear from you and you want to give them the attention they need in order to make the decision to buy.
Okay, we went over the four myths and the five mistakes. Remember, I go into these five mistakes in even more detail in the free giveaway. All you need to do is go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/70download or text 70download to 33444 and you can get the free giveaway, The Five Rookie Mistakes You Can Make on a Webinar and How to Avoid Them. I will go into more detail when you get the PDF.
I hope you have enjoyed this episode all about webinars. We are just setting the foundation in this episode. We will get into even more detail in a few weeks about how to craft your webinar slides and what slides you can include to go from the content to selling.
There are actually some slides you can add to the mix to make a really good transition. We will also go into other strategies related to webinars and how to fill up your seats, how to find your audience, why you want to do live versus automated, the difference between live and automated, the good and bad of webinars, and all that kind of stuff. That is coming down the pipeline.
I want you to stay with me if you are thinking about webinars or if you want to up your webinar game. I am your girl. I can’t wait to share more and more content with you related to webinars. It is probably one of my very favorite topics to share with you and I can’t wait to dive in even deeper.
Thank you so much for being here. I can’t wait to connect with you again next week. Until we do, make it a great week. Bye for now.
