11 Mistakes I Made and 4 Secrets I Learned by Doing 53 Webinars Last Year…
I do a lot of webinars. Whether it’s JV promotions, internal promotions, teaching webinars, or people promoting my stuff, there’s something about the webinar format that’s extremely powerful.
This article will give you my best practices and tools and lessons that I’ve learned from doing 53 webinars in the last year.
But first, if you’re not already doing webinars, let me tell you, you’re missing out:
Can you spot the 6 things I’m doing in this graphic to spike webinar attendance?
6 Great Reasons You Should be Doing Webinars
1. Build a relationship with your audience
A live webinar is the perfect medium to interact with your audience. Through chat, answering questions, and sharing your story, it’s a great way to reach a large audience while still keeping a personal feel.
2. Deliver content and value
When you do a webinar, your audience is eagerly waiting for what you have to teach them…and it’s up to you to deliver that value. While that might sound challenging, if you know your stuff and your presentation is solid, you shouldn’t have to worry about running out of things to say. Just the opposite–you’ll be hard pressed to pack everything you want to teach into a 90 minute presentation.
3. Answer objections live
This is a huge advantage to the webinar format over, say, a sales letter or a video, because people are bringing their questions and objections to you in real time. The way you handle those objections proves to the audience that you are the real deal.
4. Get in front of new tribes
When you do a partner webinar, you get a perfect opportunity to introduce yourself to other people’s tribes. Choose the right partners that are a fit for what you do, and these can be very profitable events for you.
5. The next best thing to live sales
While the best way to sell is live in person, a webinar is the next best thing.
6. Hone your message first
Practice makes perfect. Do enough webinars, and you can hone your sales message to perfection before you invest time and money into doing a sales letter or VSL.
Webinars give you plenty of rehearsal time to get your messaging just right.
So you want to do a webinar…congratulations! Now it’s time to start thinking about…
What the Heck am I Going to Say?
Most successful webinars follow a similar structure:
1. Introduction and engagement:
Before you get started, be sure to do a “check-in” and have your audience type something in the chat box to get some engagement going.
2. Build credibility:
Introduce yourself and share WHY you are the best person to present this information. Establish your credentials and then segue into…
3. Tell a story:
Let people know WHY this information is so important. Stories are a powerful tool, use them!
4. Provide value and demonstrate expertise with useful but incomplete content:
Basically, cover as much as you can in the time you have, but make it clear that for anyone who wants to go deeper, there’s more to this. Which you’ll cover in…
5. The Pitch (Optional):
Not every webinar has a pitch. Many do. This is your chance to sell your product, and if you’ve hit a home run with your webinar content, this part should be pretty easy.
6. Q&A:
Your chance to answer any objections that may come up, or clarify information from the webinar content itself. We’ll usually run a “Deep Dive Survey” on the thank you page after someone registers, asking them what their biggest challenge or problem with XYZ is. Then we’ll know exactly which questions need to be addressed during the webinar.
That’s the basic structure. But beyond the basic structure, I’ve found that it’s the little things that make a big difference. Here’s what I personally do in all of my webinars to boost sales:
1. Clickable Links:
Make every link easy to type and clickable from the webinar chat
2. Links on Slides:
Put the URL on every slide during the close
3. Ask for Clicks:
ASK people to click on that link to let you know it’s working
4. Invisible Close:
Use the Invisible Close, which I learned fromLisa Sasevich.
What Is the Invisible Close?
Basically, you say, “Listen, here’s what I want to do. We’ve only had a short time together, and you might be wondering, is this for you or not? Don’t try to decide today if it’s right for you. Instead, take advantage of the opportunity to check it out risk free. Go through all the materials, look it over, and if it’s for you, keep it.
If it’s not for you for any reason at all just send a one-line email to my customer service director and we’ll offer you a full refund.”
That defers the decision and makes it into more of a trial, and increases your conversions from each webinar.
Okay, so you’ve got your presentation ready to go. What about the logistics?
Rules of the Road and Best Practices
With that in mind, with help from members of myNext Level Mastermind Community, here are some tips and best practices for running webinars:
Webinar Checklist
Getting Butts in the Seats
You’ve got a killer presentation, you’ve worked out all the technical kinks, so how do you make sure people show up for the webinar itself?
Well, first of all make sure that the speaker and the webinar topic are a good fit for your audience.
And if the topic is a good fit, then you want to design an email campaign to position the webinar and get people excited. We do this using pre-launch content, usually video or audio, explaining WHY this webinar is so relevant to why your audience found you in the first place and your core offer.
For example, we did a promotion with Jonathan Mizel, who teaches how to get traffic using rented email lists.
This strategy is ideal for people who want to run a Deep Dive Survey but have no list…
So we set up a trial campaign using Jonathan’s method and ran a Deep Dive, then created video pre-launch content around that concept.
We revealed the exact process on the webinar…and it was a home run. People loved it.
Going the extra mile to customize your email promo back to your core offer means that, instead of just blasting the standard swipes to your list, people see something that’s customized, that we’ve put a lot of effort into, and they know we’ll be delivering immense value at the webinar as well.
So, we send the pre-launch content the week before the webinar, then spend 3-4 days promoting the webinar itself and getting people to sign up.
On the day of the webinar we do 3 reminder blasts, one in the morning, one a few hours before, and one right before the webinar.
And we also use a tip from>Big Jason Henderson where we send out a text message to their phone shortly before/after the webinar starts (people sign up for this on the webinar registration page).
Often, we’ll also send out an FAQ email during the replay period that covers the main questions and objections that people might have, and overcomes those objections.
The Big Takeaway
The first time I did a webinar for my Survey Funnel Formula course, it didn’t go as well as I planned. It ran overtime, I rambled and got distracted, and I had a hard time keeping people engaged.
So then I did it another 30 times…and now it’s clean, tight, and compelling.
Doing a webinar 10, 20, 30, even 50 times gives you a chance to tweak it and improve your presentation each time based on the feedback you get.
There’s just no shortcut for getting your reps in.
Just like a play, a ballet, or any other performance, a great webinar takes practice to get right. Don’t get discouraged if your first attempts are less-than-impressive…if you keep doing it…you’ll get better.
What’s your #1 tip for doing webinars? Share your wisdom in the comments below…I’d love to hear from you!
Peace out,
Ryan 🙂
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