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In today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you how to use webinars to grow your online business.
Webinars are a great way to interact with your audience in a more intimate and personal manner.
This helps you develop a new level of trust, and there’s no hotter lead than one from a webinar.
You will learn:
- What is a webinar?
- How to set up a webinar with Google Hangouts using LeadPages
- How to add a chat room for your webinar
- The best way to make slides for your webinar
- Tips for chat room management
- Why it’s important to let your audience ask questions and share their experiences
- How to strategically sell while still offering value
- BONUS: Webinar video: Click the image below
Free Bonus Video: How to Host a Webinar
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- LeadPages – Best solution for sales and webinar pages
- Google Hangouts on Air – Used to present a webinar
- Prezi.com – Presentation software, way cooler than PowerPoint
- Chatroll.com – Best solution for chat rooms on your webinar pages
- Sample Webinar: ElementaryLibrarian.com/webinar
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you how to use webinars to grow your online business.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let’s get started. What’s going on, guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It’s great to be back with you again this week. We’ve got an awesome topic for you today. We get a lot of questions about webinars. Webinars are kind of one of those buzzwords that are going on in the online marketing industry right now and we are going to talk about how we use webinars in our business and really how webinars took our sales and everything we do online to an entirely another level when we started using them. The first thing we’re going to do every week, we’re going to read our iTunes review. Jocelyn has got that for us today.
JOCELYN: Alright. Today’s iTunes review is from Zeke from Texas. He gives a five-star review. He says, “Good folks who make great products.” His review says, “This is the best podcast out there for dreamers like myself who are married to doers like my wife. I am in the beginning stages of convincing my wife that it can be done. Shane and Jocelyn bring the dream to reality for regular folks. Sometimes, listening to other entrepreneurs can get overwhelming. Most of them started their business before spouses and kids. These guys did it while raising two small children and having a full-time job. Thank y’all for what you’re doing.” We appreciate that Zeke and to all of our listeners around the world who have been leaving us reviews for our podcast if you have not left a review, we would love to read yours. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast so you won’t miss a single episode. We truly appreciate your reviews. We read every single one. Thank you so very much if you have left one.
SHANE: Alright. Let’s jump straight into our topic now. Today, we’re going to be talking about webinars and some of you may not know exactly what they are or why you would do them so we decided to start this little conversation here at the beginning of what a webinar is and kind of why it can be good for your business. So Jocelyn is going to tell you a little bit more about that.
JOCELYN: Alright. So you’ve probably been hearing a lot about webinars. If you have been following online business for any amount of time, webinars, as Shane said earlier, are very hot in the online business world right now. So we want to just start out by talking about what is a webinar because we probably have people listening who may not know. A webinar is basically just a seminar that is conducted over the internet. So maybe like a lecture that you might attend at a university, some type of live event. It’s basically that same kind of concept but it’s just presented over the internet. So theoretically, people from all over the world could join your webinar. I started using webinars this summer to coincide with a product launch for my Elementary Librarian site. You can do webinars. You can do them prerecorded or you can do them live. All of my webinars have been live so far. I like webinars because they allow you to really interact with your audience in a time efficient way. You can just tell your audience to meet you on a webinar, they can ask questions. You are not trying to respond to 100 emails that people are sending you and things of that nature. You can just say to your audience, “I’m going to be live on this webinar. If you have a question for me, come on over and ask it.” It can really just help you to answer the same questions that a lot of different people have in the same place at the same time. It can also give your audience an opportunity to share their expertise. So that way you can ask them a question. What do you do in this situation? They can answer and help the rest of your audience who may be having the same kind of issue. It is an event. Webinars can get lots of potential customers in the same place at the same time. That’s definitely a good thing if you are trying to sell something. It has been said by several different people in the online business world that there is no hotter lead than a person who is on a live webinar or a webinar at all for that matter. That’s why we started experimenting with them and we’ve had a lot of success so far.
SHANE: Webinars are really good just for getting a lot of people in one place at one time. One thing that we struggle with is we have so many people asking us how to do certain things or asking us questions. There is no way that we could meet individually with every single person in our audience and help them. We would love to do that but that would be really hard, but if we have a webinar and maybe we take all of the questions that we get and we say, “You know, these five questions are getting asked over and over again,” then we can address those questions to our audience, then we can answer those questions and get a lot of that done at once instead of just going and answering the same question over and over in our emails. So it’s just an awesome event. Another reason that you should run a webinar is like Jocelyn said, you will never have a hotter lead than on a webinar. The conversion rate on a webinar is the highest of anywhere else that you are going to find in any other outlet to talk to your audience. It’s higher than email, it’s higher than social media, it’s higher than everything. If people show up at a live event, they are much more inclined to buy a product or service if you serve them well in your webinar. But a webinar is not the easiest thing to put on. There is some technical knowledge that you are going to need if you are going to be able to conduct a webinar. It’s not like you can just turn on your web camera and hit play, and people are going to be able to just show up and watch you do that. So what we want to do in the next segment of this podcast is briefly outline how to put on a webinar. We are going to tell you how we do it. We do not use an expensive service like GoToWebinar or Webinar Jam or anything like that. There is nothing wrong with those services. I’m sure that they have their merits but we have found no reason to do that because we actually just use a tool that we already have called LeadPages.net to put on our webinars. We can use our Sales Page Creator. That’s what Lead Pages is designed to do is designed to create sales pages where you can put all the information about your product, maybe videos, and things like that. People can go, they can learn about your product, and they can either buy it – not buy it from that page – but you can actually use Lead Pages to create a webinar and actually broadcast that live. They have templates in Lead Pages that are specifically designed for hosting webinars. The great thing about using Lead Pages to host your webinars is that Lead Pages already has buttons in it that you can make for selling your products right there underneath the video or right there beside the chat box in your webinar where all your attendees are talking. You can do things like share links and you can integrate it with other sales pages to push people along your funnel. If you are inside of a webinar and you are selling a product, they can click a button and go straight to your other landing pages within Lead Pages and they are already right there to buy your product. So Lead Pages is our tool of choice for creating a webinar. The first thing that we do when we are setting up a webinar in Lead Pages is we choose one of the templates that they have for creating webinars. There is a very specific one called G+ hangout page, and that uses Google+ Hangouts on air to create the webinars. They have a bunch of different templates. There is actually an entire category in Lead Pages called webinars. You can just go to LeadPages.net, log in, click on webinars, and you are going to have a ton of options for webinar pages. This is the one we like. It’s very clean. It’s got the video on top with a title. It’s got a button that you can put right under it for selling your product and you can throw in a chat box and you’re pretty much ready to roll. S, we like that one for its simplicity. It’s very minimalistic and it’s really easy to get started and get people in. Once we select our template, the next thing we do is we go to Google+ and we create a Google Hangouts on Air. Basically, what Google Hangouts on Air does is it lets you broadcast to the world. You can show yourself, you can share your screen, you can play video, you can play audio and all the people that are on the page with the video can watch whatever you are doing. If you are doing some kind of instruction, you can teach right on Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts on air works through YouTube so just like you can share YouTube video on your Facebook page or you can embed a video on your blog, you can take that embed code and you can actually put your video from your Google Hangouts on your Lead Pages webinar page. That way, you can show the video not on Google+ or not over on YouTube, you can actually show it from the Lead Pages. When people log in, they watch your video right there. The cool thing about Google Hangouts is it’s completely free. As long as you have a Google account, you can log in and anybody can start Google Hangouts on Air. You just go in, set it up, and you actually can schedule a start time. So if you are going to do your webinar Sunday at 8 PM or something like that, then you can go in and it will have a timer on it that counts down to when your webinar is about to happen and you can see that directly from your Lead Page. Once you get your Google Hangouts set up, you just drop that video into your webinar page and your participants are actually ready to go and watch your video.
JOCELYN: We should mention that the benefit of doing a Lead Page is so you can actually have the webinar on your own site. You are not hosting it on Google Hangouts or somewhere else. That’s just so people know it’s you, they know it’s your site. It’s just nicer for them to be able to come to www.ElementaryLibrarian.com/webinar for instance, than to try to find you on a Google Hangout.
SHANE: Yeah and Lead Pages lets you customize the page so you can take the color scheme from your blog and you can just use that color scheme so everything kind of blends together and your brand has continuity, basically. If people are just going to your Google Hangout and watching it on YouTube, it just doesn’t feel as professional and it doesn’t kind of feel like it’s your event. It feels like you are just on YouTube. So that’s a great point just to bring it to your website and be able to show that information on your stuff. After you get your video in, you can set up your title and your buttons, and then the last thing you do is just put in a chat room. We use a service called ChatRoll.com. What that does is you go to Chat Roll, you can set up a chat room called My Webinar or whatever you want to call it, and you can do the same thing. You can just share that link. You can get the little embed code just like you would share a YouTube video and you just paste that into the Lead Page. When you load that page up, you can see not only the video at the top of your webinar, you can see the chat box and people can go in. They can log in with Facebook and they can talk during your webinar. Now, you don’t have to have a chat box. You can actually turn that off if you want to. I know a lot of people that make good arguments for not having a Chat Roll down in the bottom. People can get kind of destructive and things like that, but we do use chat boxes because it allows us to communicate with people during the webinar and the best tool that we have found for that is over at ChatRoll.com. It’s super easy to use. They’ve got great tutorials on how to set it all up and integrate that with Lead Pages. That’s pretty much it. Once you get your video going, your Chat Roll going, and you’ve got your button on your Lead Page that you are hosting your webinar on linked to your product that you are selling during the webinar, you pretty much are ready to go. When it’s time for your webinar to launch like whenever you scheduled it to happen, people just come. They come to the web page. As long as they are on the page, they can watch the video. They don’t have to actually log in or do anything to see the webinar and once they do that, they just hit play and you give your presentation and you can try to sell your product.
JOCELYN: That was a lot of technical information that we just threw out there. So if you are thinking to yourself that sounds really confusing, Shane is actually going to make a video about doing this – showing you exactly the steps that you need to take to do a webinar the way that we set them up. If you are interested in learning more about that, you can head on over to the show notes for today’s podcast and that you can find that at FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast19. This is number 19, so it’s FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast19. Next, we are going to move into actual management of the webinar. Once you have all of the little moving pieces ready to go on your webinar, next you are going to need to actually present the webinar and figure out how you are going to manage the webinar while it’s going on. To prepare for the webinar, you will possibly want to create a presentation of some kind and it’s really kind of wide open of how you do that – you could do it in PowerPoint, you can do it in Keynote, you could even make a video or you could also use an outline, a document. My favorite thing to use is a Prezi and that’s Prezi.com. I started using this a couple of years ago. I like Prezi because you can make slides just like a PowerPoint or a Keynote presentation, but they are a lot more interactive. They can move around, they can zoom, it turns sideways. Just a lot more visually stimulating and it’s just more modern looking, I think. It’s totally up to you which one you decide to use but I like to use Prezi. If you have never used Prezi before, go check it out. It’s pretty cool. I like to have lots of slides in my presentation and the reason for that is because the presentation is always moving. If the presentation is not moving or if you don’t have something actually going on, on the screen, people will think that it’s frozen and you’ll get lots of comments in the chat, “My presentation is frozen. It’s not doing anything.” So you don’t want people to think that you are not just having anything going on during your webinar.
SHANE: When you have a lot of slides, another key thing – this is kind of a presentation tip – don’t put a ton of text and stuff on the slides. You just want to break up all of your information where you can change the look and feel of what’s happening on the screen every so often. You don’t have to have like a ton of text on each slide. You can just put a sentence, a word, or a picture on the slide, but you just want to be able to change those slides often to keep things kind of interesting for your audience.
JOCELYN: I use images on mine pretty often. So that’s something else you can do is just put a lot of different kinds of images so it’s not all text all the time. Just think about when you are sitting in a presentation yourself, you don’t want it to be the same thing and just super boring. Just try to make it diverse and interesting so that people who are watching find it interesting as well. You can also actually appear in the video if you want. If you want to do a live video of your face while you are doing the webinar, that’s totally cool. For me, that is not my thing. I really don’t like to be on video.
SHANE: She would not be on camera if I tried to pair.
JOCELYN: I do it from time to time but it’s not my favorite thing. If you want to do that then that’s totally fine. You can do that as well. I will say, make sure you have a good internet connection if you are going to do that because you don’t want people to have frozen video and things like that. You might want to test that out ahead of time if you are going to plan to be on there live. Another thing you want to think about is the chat room management. If you are going to have a chat room, it’s really best if you can have somebody else moderate it. Shane and I do this for one another, I moderate his webinars, and he moderates mine. It works out really nice because if you are trying to watch the live questions while you are trying to talk at the same time, you can trust me that it just doesn’t work.
SHANE: The cool thing about having someone moderate the chat is it gives you a way to promote your products and to sell during your webinar, in a very passive kind of out of the way, I guess. While Jocelyn is presenting content, a lot of times what I will do is just when she mentions something that’s related to a product that we are trying to sell, I can drop a link into the chat room in a very passive way that says, “Hey, Jocelyn just mentioned something like this product. You can find that product at this link.” Or if people can’t see the video, Jocelyn doesn’t have to stop to help everybody get their video back. I can kind of handle that for her. We learned this the hard way when we first started doing webinars. Jocelyn was trying to hang out in the chat and watch the video, or I would try to answer questions while giving my presentation. It was a total disaster. If you can get someone to run the chat room, that’s going to make managing your webinar a whole lot easier.
JOCELYN: Another tip for the chat, you can ask the chat participants to keep the discussion limited to the topic. That really helps a lot because you don’t have people asking questions about like totally random things. We’ve had that happen a lot so it doesn’t guarantee you that they will stick to the topic, but asking them to do so, it does help. I would recommend that for sure. You can also ask your audience specific questions during the webinar. If you are talking about a particular topic, you can throw it out there, “What do you do in this situation?” Let people share their expertise and their experience, and people really love that. SHANE: What we do during the webinar is when Jocelyn asks the participants questions, whoever you get to moderate your chat room for you, have them open a Google Doc that you share, don’t just rely on looking – if you are going to do a Q&A, don’t look down into the chat box and find the questions. I will copy and paste those questions into a Google Doc and we will both have it open. That way, Jocelyn can just look in one place during her webinar and all the questions are right there for her, or when she does it for me, all the questions are right in front of me. That way, I don’t have to look in the chat box and scan through and pause and not talk. Because you don’t want any dead air or silence while you are looking through those questions. That’s just a quick tip that you can use during your webinar to get those questions to the presenter.
JOCELYN: I actually use two different computers to do that. It’s best to do that if you can. You can even use your phone if you can’t use two computers because the thing about it is you are probably screen sharing on your hangout. So if you open a Google Doc while you are screen sharing, your audience is going to see all those other questions. Depending on what you are doing it might not be a bad thing, but I prefer to have it where I can just see the questions, so just something to think about on that. Another tip for managing the webinar is don’t talk the entire time yourself. Give the audience the opportunity to ask you questions and like I said before, also share their own experiences. Some of the most successful webinars are the ones where I let other people talk about their expertise and share their experiences. People love to hear about what other people are doing and it really takes a lot of the pressure off you as well because you don’t feel like you are having to deliver all of this wonderful content. You are giving other people the opportunity to talk about things that they are interested in and that other people might be interested in as well. I really like that part of doing webinars. That has been some of the better webinars that I’ve had. SHANE: An example of that would be like, Jocelyn sometimes will say, “I don’t know the answer to the question that someone just asked me. Does anybody know that?” I remember from one specific webinar, someone was asking how to use a specific tool or something in somebody’s library. and Jocelyn had never heard of the tool but then she asked the audience. She said, “Does anyone know about this?” Someone wrote like a two paragraph thing in the chat room and I just copied that and dropped it onto Jocelyn’s Google Doc, and she just said, “Okay, let me read the answer from so and so.” She got to mention that person on air. The person got their question answered and a lot of other people in the chat room were like, “Cool, high five. Good job, thanks for the answer.” It was really a team effort to kind of share that content and just provide it even more value and got to kind of highlight a member of her audience. You can do it in the Google Doc that you are sharing your Q&A with. You can put those experiences in the same place.
JOCELYN: The final thing that you need to consider when you are managing your webinar is the recording of the webinar. When you do a Google Hangout on Air, it will automatically record to YouTube and you can choose whether or not you want to be able to share that link with other people. A lot of people do this a lot of different ways. Some people make it available for 24 hours after. Some people make it available for a week after. I actually make mine available indefinitely right now and the reason for that is just because I talk about some of my products during the webinars, so I figure that it’s a way for me to provide my audience with value and also to let them know about some of the products that I have that they may not have known about. It’s totally up to you as far as the playback goes. If you don’t want anybody to be able to play it back, if you want it to be a thing that’s special for live attendees then that’s totally fine too. You just have to decide that ahead of time and make sure that you make that a private YouTube link if you don’t want it to be shared.
SHANE: One last tip also for recording your webinars is go into it with a set time limit. Make sure if you are going to have a 45-minute webinar that you stick to that, not only to respect your own time but just for the time of other people that may plan to be there for a certain amount of time. What happened when we first started doing webinars is we just kept going on and on and on. We had planned on having a 45-minute webinar when we did our first one and we were there for an hour and a half, hanging out in the chat room, and we didn’t want to create that expectation that our time was not valuable and that we were just going to be there indefinitely. So go into it with a set time limit and make sure that you communicate that with your audience that you are only going to be doing this for 45 minutes. You are only going to take five or six questions or something like that and then kind of maybe you can just leave it on like a cliffhanger, like, “In my next webinar, I’ll have more time to get to this,” but really, set your time limit and stick to it, and create that expectation that “I’ve got to be there during that 45 minutes so I can get everything going.”
JOCELYN: Next we want to get into how to sell on a webinar, but webinars are not just for selling. In fact, I do very little selling on mine. I do sell a little bit at the beginning and the end, which Shane is going to talk about in a few minutes. Webinars for me are really all about providing value to my audience. I find a pain point, something that they are struggling with, and I spend 45 minutes to an hour talking about it and how I can help them or how my website or products can help them. That’s really what webinars should be about. It shouldn’t be a big sales pitch the entire time. Your webinar can solve a problem for your audience that is a great way to hold one. For me, I do one at the beginning of school for librarians who what want some open house ideas, how to incorporate the library into their school’s open house. I also do one for librarians who are hosting book fairs. That’s a very stressful time and I give them some tips and actionable ideas that they can use during their book fair to make life a little bit easier for them. The good thing about those types of webinars is that they are not necessarily selling things like in their title but you can bring people into those webinars who might be interested in making their lives easier but weren’t really planning to buy anything, but you can make them aware of your products and services where they may not have been aware before. Webinars are just a great way to get an audience in who are 100% interested in your products and services, and just build their awareness and help them to know about things that your website or your brand has to offer.
SHANE: Basically if you solve one problem then you are going to probably have the solution for their other problems. So like Jocelyn said, she brings people in about her book fair. If she can make their book fair run smoother, well then all of a sudden, they are going to look at her product and say, “Wow. Maybe those lesson plans will make my class run smoother.” When I have a webinar, I might do a webinar about how to stop a certain football play. If I provide a solution to a football coach and he says, “That really will stop that football play then his playbook will probably stop a lot of other football plays. Maybe I should go ahead and buy that too.” Really focus on providing the value first when you are thinking about selling on your webinar because if you can solve a problem and you can help that person during the webinar, then when you present your product to them, they are going to be a lot more likely to buy. Alright, we’ve talked a little bit about content now during the webinar and how you don’t want to pitch the entire time. So really how often should you sell on your webinar? How are you going to do this where it doesn’t sound like sales-y and sleazy and “Oh I’m just here to sell something.” The key to this is to remember that people know that you are in this as a business and people are not going to get mad at you for selling during a webinar. People know that you have to make a living that you are giving away an hour of your time, you are going to ask for something back for that and it’s not as big a deal as you think it is. Don’t be shy about selling on a webinar just be strategic about it. This is kind of how we do it in most of our webinars, not all, but this is kind of the template that we have laid out. You want to mention your product at the beginning and end of your webinar. Definitely, at the very beginning, you want to say, “Hey, I’ve got a special on this product and if you pick it up, it’s this much money. Alright, let’s get to our content.” And at the end, you want to make a little bit longer pitch for whatever you are trying to sell. We also mention usually quickly in the middle of the webinar like Jocelyn, especially when she does hers, she always does a Q&A around the middle of the webinar. So at the 30-minute mark, she must say, “I’m going to take questions and as I’m looking over these questions, I just wanted to point out that we are having a sale today and it’s on this product.” It’s just kind of a quick mention to remind people during the webinar that there is something for sale. Don’t be afraid to sell on your webinar, people need to know that there is a product. If you don’t tell them there is something to buy, then they are probably going to overlook that and they are not going to realize it. Make sure at strategic points throughout the webinar – beginning, middle, and the end – you are giving people an opportunity to thank you for the webinar by buying your product. A good rule is kind of the 80-20 rule. You want 80% of your webinar content to be valuable information that helps your audience in real time, solve a real problem they have in their life quickly, give them that quick win, give them that solution and that 80% of your content and about 20% of the content of your webinar should be about mentioning your product or service. Let’s look at a 45-minute webinar. About 10 minutes of the entire webinar should be dedicated to presenting or selling your product and about 35 minutes of a 45-minute webinar could be content related. What you could do, you could do 2 minutes, in the beginning, to just say, “Hey, this is a product I’m selling. This solves this problem for you. It might not be related to what we are talking about today but I just want to make you aware that I’ve got this for sale.” Then you might want to stop about halfway through the webinar and for about 3 minutes, remind your audience, “Hey, remember that product I talked about at the beginning? I just want to let you know I’ve got a sale going on right now. It’s good during the webinar. You’ve got 30 more minutes to pick that up before the sale is over and it solves this problem. Here it is.” So you just spend about 2 or 3 minutes in the beginning and about two or three minutes in the middle of your 45- minute webinar talking about your product. Then once you wrap everything up at the end, the last 5 minutes or so should be either telling about your product or taking questions from the audience about your product. You can say, “Hey, I’m going to be here for about 5 more minutes. If anybody else has any questions about X product, please go ahead and put it in the chat room right now and I’ll be happy to answer that on air.” That’s going to kind of identify the hot leads that you’ve got during the webinar and allow you to kind of address that, and help them kind of move over towards buying your product. You don’t want to spend half your time talking about your product but if you are doing about 20% of the time that you’ve allotted for your webinar as product sales and you are doing it in a way that’s kind of just presenting it to them, then you are going to have a lot of success selling on your webinar. If you spend 35 minutes talking about your product and 10 minutes talking about solutions to their problems, you are probably not going to sell a whole lot. That’s kind of how we break it up when we are trying to sell during the webinar.
JOCELYN: One thing I always do is to offer a time-sensitive discount that’s only available during the webinar and offer it for a few minutes afterward as well. I always say, “Okay, during the webinar, I’m going to give you this discount but it will be gone 30 minutes after the webinar.” Actually, I usually just say during the webinar that this discount is applicable and that incentive can sometimes push people over the edge. If they thinking about purchasing your product anyway, it just gives them a good incentive to do that during that hour of 45 minutes or however long your webinar is. Make sure that you stick to that. Don’t extend it for two days after that because that gives people no urgency to do anything during the live webinar. Another thing that I do is I give a special give away. I do a special giveaway for people who buy during the webinar. If you purchased during the webinar you get entered into a drawing for another product that I have. I also give away other door prizes that are just for people who are in attendance because I don’t want people to feel like if they’ve already bought my product that I don’t want them there or that selling them something is the only reason that I’m doing the webinar. It’s a big reason I’m doing the webinar but it’s not the only reason. I always do some general door prizes that I give away at the very end and like I said, that’s to any attendees and then I also do a contest only for people who purchase.
SHANE: And also, it incentivizes people to show up at your webinar. If you are giving away prizes during the webinar, you can’t win the prize on the replay. You have to be there live so that’s going to get more people there when you are actually doing the webinar and get those leads ready to go right there in front of you. When you are giving away those prizes make sure that you stress, “This is only for people who show up at the live webinar.” A cool prize that Jocelyn did one time is Jocelyn has a product that’s like $400 and she said, “Anyone who buys this product during this webinar, I’m going to go back and do a drawing of those people only and I’m going to totally refund one person’s money.” So she made a ton of sales on that because there was a massive amount of incentive to go ahead and get that done during the webinar because she was going to give somebody’s money back and you wanted that chance to do that. There are all kinds of neat tips and tricks that you can do to get people not only at your webinar but kind of push them over the edge when you get there by giving them a lot of value and they’ll probably buy your product. Just remember that the truth of the matter is for selling on webinars when you get people to show up at a live event, you need to try to sell them something because they are hot leads. They have taken 45 minutes to an hour out of their life to spend it with you. They are demonstrating a massive interest in the content that you are offering. You can’t just do it as a goodwill gesture. If you are just doing everything from a charity perspective online, you are not going to be able to make any money because people are going to come to the webinar and leave and that lead is going to cool off. You’ve got to sell on your webinar. You don’t have to be pushy or over the top, but you have to let your audience know that you do have something to sell, that the purpose for giving you the free content was so “I could present my paid product to you and maybe they can solve more of your problems.” Make sure that you are selling on your webinar. Give crazy value and pitch it. Go pitch something at the end and make sure people know that you’ve got something to sell.
JOCELYN: We hope that was helpful for you in learning how to set up a webinar. We’ve had this question very, very often so I hope that that helps you to figure out what we do and why we do webinars, and even a little bit of how we do it. We are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. We do this at the end of every show. We talk about opportunities that might not have been possible before we started our online business.
SHANE: My Can’t Miss Moment I think the other day was when I was in an arcade with Anna and I was by myself with her and we were just hanging out and playing games. I’m a big kid. I love video games and air hockey and ski ball and all that stuff. We were sitting there playing air hockey and Anna has no clue how it works. Sometimes she will just grab the little hockey puck and throw it on her own goal and she will just start jumping up and down like she scored. But we were hitting the air hockey thing back and forth and she just had so much fun and she was jumping up and down. It was just an awesome time to be able to just like hang out with her and to spend some time with her and play some air hockey and just be with her.
JOCELYN: For me this week, it was actually sort of a bad situation. There was a death in my family but I was able to go visit some of my family that I haven’t seen in a really long time. That was good because I didn’t have to ask anybody for a day off because it wasn’t really an immediate family member. This was my grandmother’s sister who passed. I was also able to go see my almost 95-year-old great grandmother. That was really fun. I don’t get to see her really, really often but she lives right there in the area. We get to go and just hang out with her and see her and just visit with her. That was just a really good time for me this week.
SHANE: That was really important moment for me too, Jocelyn, because I realized that I can remember times when we were working for other people where just because someone is not your brother or your sister or your mom or dad, like if you have a death in your family, like Jocelyn really respected her aunt and she loved her. I can remember times when we had deaths in the family and things like that and we couldn’t get like days or paid days off work or something like that, our bosses were kind of like hardcore about it, like that didn’t matter. It was really cool to be able to say, “It’s the middle of the week, we’ve had a tragedy happen. We are going,” and we don’t have to ask anybody about it. I just felt really blessed that we got to be able to do that.
JOCELYN: Definitely. Marie was just so special to me my whole life. I just have really fond memories of going over to her house when I was a little girl and she taught me how to make her brown sugar baked ham which was…
SHANE: We eat all the time.
JOCELYN: Awesome. It was nice to be able to go pay my respects to her and also see some of my other family members who I don’t get to see very often.
SHANE: Alright guys, that’s it for this week. Hope you learned a little bit about webinars. Don’t forget to go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast19 and check out the free video that I have made for you that shows you exactly step-by-step how we use Lead Pages to set up and host our webinars, and we will also link to a few sample webinars that we have put on in the past if you would like to go see how we do those in our football coaching and teaching niches. You can find that over at FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast19. Also, you don’t want to miss next week’s show. This week, we showed you how to set up a webinar and we told you a little bit about why you should run a webinar and what to do to get your webinar ready, but a webinar is kind of a useless thing if you don’t have any people attend it. So in our next podcast, we are going to bring in a good friend of mine. His name is Joe Daniel from FootballDefense.com. Joe has been running webinars for years – literally years- way before it was a buzz topic with all the “gurus”, way before everybody was casting out, “This is the year of the webinar and all those things. He has been making his entire living selling to football coaches on webinars and he has literally hosted dozens and dozens of them. He has made a lot of money off of webinars and he is an expert at getting people to come to your webinar. So Joe is going to come on to the show and he is going to talk about all of his tips and tactics and strategies for getting people to come to your webinar, how to market the event of your webinar, and you don’t even have to have a huge list to do it. He’s going to show you how to do it with a list or if you have no audience at all, how he gets people to come to new products or new offerings that he has. It’s going to be an awesome discussion. You can take what we have talked to you about today about how to host a webinar, put it together with what we’re present next week about how to get people to your webinar, and it’s going to give you a great way to take your business to the next level. Until then, as always, we will catch you all on the flipside. Thank you for listening. See you later. Bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Tinne says
Great advice, guys! I think webinars can be really great leads to sales when hosted correctly.
Unfortunately the only webinars I attended were something like 20 minutes filled with promises about loads of super awesome content was going to be shared (me thinking: But when will you finally start sharing the content?) followed by 5 minutes of “tips” that every savvy business newbie knows already (me thinking again: But when will you finally start sharing the super awesome content?) followed by a 25 minutes sales pitch. Waste of time, very off-putting and I probably will never go there again.
Which is great, since those were life examples how NOT to host webinars in the future. I totally agree with the 80/20 rule. What a relief when I heard you guys mention that! Keep it up!
Shane Sams says
No doubt! I hate that stuff Tinne. That is why we do webinars to actually TEACH something. Are our products related…yep. But if you are going to get people to show up live, they deserve something amazing! We are going to have a webinar soon, we will show you how its done right! 🙂
Matt Greenburg says
Do you think webinars would work for a physical product? I have done a few trade shows and my products does great. What I don’t like about trade shows is the time away from my wife and kids.
Shane Sams says
We have sold physical products (books) on webinars for sure!