I’ve tried it all… autoresponder sequences, in-post links, social media promotion, and outright advertisements.
The #1 way that I’ve found to sell an online course or informational product is through a webinar.
Webinars are an AMAZING way to communicate free value, answer questions, and convert passive website visitors into raving fans.
Here are a few reasons webinars beat “free” courses and other autoresponder techniques:
- They provide instant results. You don’t have to wait two weeks to see whether or not a customer buys the product.
- They create instant social proof. With tens or hundreds of other attendees, you gain clear social proof in the eyes of your customer.
- You immediately qualify prospects. People who sign up to attend your webinar are clearly interested in the subject. If they stick around for an hour long webinar, they go from cold leads to warm leads.
- They’re scalable. In the future, you can automate the webinars. You don’t have to sell each prospect individually. You can sell to entire room full of potential customers.
I always found it SO STRANGE that people are willing to stick around for an hour or hour and a half long webinar when they can barely muster enough attention to watch a 5 minute YouTube video.
Weird, huh?
But it’s totally true.
Webinars command a high degree of attention because they’re live! The people who attend are setting aside an hour of their day to learn more about this subject. They’re invested in the process.
I wanted to put together an article on generating sales from webinars because they’ve fundamentally changed my life.
I never thought I’d be able to make $1,000 in an hour, but I have with a webinar. I want to show you how to do the same.
1. Pick a Profitable Webinar Topic
You don’t want to spend hours of your time putting together a webinar on a topic that no one’s interested in.
Similarly, you don’t want to take time out of your day to present a webinar to a group of people without having some kind of a product or service to sell to them.
It will just be a waste of time.
Finally, if you don’t pick a profitable webinar topic and you don’t have some kind of way to monetize the webinar, you’re going to be even more upset when you find out that it costs money to get people on your webinar.
Well, not always. I’ve filled up many webinars based on the organic traffic to my blog.
However, if you intend to create a successful online business, you’ll likely be using tactics like Facebook ads to fill up your webinars with interested students.
2. Use Effective Tools
There are a lot of tools out there that you can use to create, host, and broadcast the webinar.
The traditional way to get people to sign up to your webinar is to create a webinar registration page aka a landing page.
You’ll then send paid or organic traffic to that landing page and track the number of sign ups you’re getting.
You can use simple software like Leadpages to create this page. I’ll include an example below.
Once people sign up to your webinar, they’ll be added to your email list provider. If you don’t have an email list provider yet, you’re gonna want to sign up for MailChimp.
Leading up to the webinar, you’ll be sending out several reminder emails and eventually the link to where they can actually sign into the live or recorded webinar.
If you’re just getting started, you can use something simple like YouTube hangouts to host your webinar. This is a great solution! I’ve made hundreds and hundreds of dollars using this.
To host the webinar, you can use:
3. The Law of Webinar Conversion
The law of webinar conversion states that if you’re a beginner, you can expect about 1% of your webinar signups to buy your product.
That means if you have 100 people who sign up for the webinar, you should be able to generate 1 sale.
Of course, you can improve these conversion rates over time.
You can use autoresponder sequences after the webinar. You’ll get better at speaking and presenting. You’ll also have testimonials and key persuasion tools.
Why is that?
Well, if 100 people sign up for the webinar then probably only 20-30% will actually show up for the presentation!
You can also increase these conversion rates to get as many people watching the live webinar as possible.
3. Sell on The Webinar
You aren’t going to start with sales. You never start with sales.
First you’re going to deliver VALUE to the audience. You’re going to educate them and give them strategies that they can use to get better results in their business or life.
You’re also going to use storytelling to show your attendees how students or clients similar to them have bought your products or used your services and gotten results.
It’s important that you not only inform the attendees about the product, but also persuade them about their ability to get results with the product.
Lastly, there must be a compelling and urgent reason for them to take action NOW as opposed to later. Otherwise, they’re just going to put it on their to-do list and never get back to it again.
4. Answer Questions and Address Concerns
This is the best opportunity to give your attendees the feeling of individualized attention.
When you answer someone’s specific question, you are giving them a small amount of your time. That is the start of a powerful relationship.
As you go about answering questions, you’ll actually be eliminating reasons for people to NOT take action. You’ll be cutting through all of those sales objections.
Remember that as you’re answering questions from attendees, it’s important to choose questions that are going to benefit the entire group and that underscore the importance of your product or service.
Don’t forget to continue to bring people’s attention back to the core offer so that you’ll continue to get sales.
5. Craft a Compelling Offer
Let’s say that you have the RIGHT people on your webinar.
These are potential customers that are eagerly seeking the result that you’re promising with your products or services.
Is that enough? No!
You must also put together an “offer” or package that will get them excited about taking out their wallet and buying on the webinar.
Naturally, there are a few components to this offer that will make it more likely they’ll take action now rather than later. Consider:
- What results are you promising and how long will it take for them to get them?
- What is actually contained in the program? Videos?
- What supplemental bonus materials will you offer? Checklists? Templates? Worksheets?
- What “support” do you offer those who enroll? Will there be a private Facebook group?
- What urgency triggers have you included? Is this a limited time offer?
You don’t have to include all of these elements, but including several of them will certainly convince more webinar attendees to become customers.
Rather than creating a list of what you’re going to offer, I’d first start with the price point.
Let’s say that you’re selling an online course for $399.
That’s a lot of money to most people. How are you going to justify that price point?
Of course, you’ll justify it with the results that students can expect. If, by enrolling in your course, they’ll end up making $3,999, then that’s a great transaction.
You can also justify the price with the various bonuses that you include and all of the content that they’re going to gain access to.
Work backwards and ask yourself what you can include in the offering to make the decision seem like a no brainer.
6. Cut Out Risk
One of the biggest reasons that people fail to take action when purchasing a product is the perception of RISK.
It’s risky to buy something new from someone that you have only known for a short time.
You don’t know if it will work.
You don’t know if they’re trustworthy.
You’re not even sure if the material is good or not until you see it.
The easiest way to elimiate risk is to offer a money-back guarantee with your offering. Typically, this is going to be for informational or physical products, not services.
The money back guarantee cuts through this typical objection that making the purchase is “risky.”
Instead, they’ll be more likely to make the purchase on the spot and then justify later that they can always get a refund if they don’t like it, which is true!
7. Re-Target Customers
This is the most powerful and most underutilized part of online marketing.
Your previous customers are always going to be more likely to buy from you than new customers.
This is because they already know what to expect. You’ve solved one of their problems in the past. As long as it was a good experience, they’re likely to buy from you again.
You can re-target your customer using sophisticated methods like Facebook ads, or your can simply send emails to customers that are in your database.
I would recommend doing this leading up to the webinar. That way, they have the benefit of both their previous relationship with you and all the great content you’ll deliver on the webinar.
8. Focus on Your Customers
Do you want to know something that isn’t talked about very much?
I believe that most people who are naturally good at sales aren’t good at the process BEFORE and AFTER the sale occurs.
This includes:
– The creation of the product
– Customer service
– Following up with customers for continued results.
I also believe that entrepreneurs who are GOOD at the above skills tend to be bad at sales. It’s rare that I come across someone who is good at both.
It’s very important that after the webinar, you continue to follow up with the prospects that haven’t yet bought from you. They might just need that little extra nudge to take action.
In addition, for those that have become your customers, you need to follow all the way through with the product experience. Make sure that they come away with a positive experience so that you can use their testimonial and they’ll uy from you again.
This is easier said than done.
This last point and all of the points that we discussed in this blog post will help you make more money from your very first webinar.
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