Webinars

11 Easy-to-Implement Ideas for Your Next Webinar to Ensure Maximum Attendance, Interest, and Profit

If you have not yet run your very first webinar, you are clearly missing out. Webinars are the fastest, easiest and most fun way to create video training and is also a great way to build a relationship, get the following and make some sales. I want you to pick one of the following 11 ideas and implement this on your next webinar.

Idea #11: Poll your audience before going in. The best webinars I've run are not ones where I've thought of the topic. It's where someone else gave me the topic to use. If you're going to be presenting a webinar about product creation, poll your list or your audience about what big problem they're having or what you should talk about. This way, the webinar will be about them instead of about you.

Idea #10: Ask the audience if they have heard of you. On every webinar I give, I ask the audience have they heard of me or have they been on a webinar with me. This lets me know where the traffic came from. Did this webinar – can this come from my list or from someone else's list.

This seems like a silly thing to do but it's very easy to add a poll to a webinar and I have been surprised by the results. On some webinars, I have only had 10% unknown people and on others, I have up to 80% of people who had never heard of me. In fact, one time when I gave a webinar for someone else's subscribers, more attendees on the call had heard of me as opposed to the list owner who got his subscribers on that exact same call.

Idea #9: Send extra reminders to attend. How many times have you signed up for someone's webinar and simply forgot about it until days or weeks later? I know I do all the time. For that reason, you need to send extra reminders for people to attend. I know that many webinar services such as GoToWebinar already send out reminders but those are cookie cutter emails that all look the same.

You're special. You're different. You can tell people what time webinar is in different time zones. You can tell people to set an alarm clock. You can give people extra reasons to attend and you can email them an hour or two before the webinar starts to make sure they are on right this second.

Idea #8: Start the webinar early with a countdown timer. Something that's kind of cheesy that I see on other people's webinars is if I join the webinar early, they might say something like, "Welcome to the webinar. We've got 6 minutes to go until we start." And then they repeat the same exact thing: "Welcome to the webinar. We've got 5 minutes to go until we start."

You sound like a robot! It is a good idea to start the webinar early because people might not be sure of the exact time or the exact time zone or they might just be joining to make sure they don't forget or that they're not late. What I like to do is show my screen of the webinar early and use a timer program such as Cool Timer to show a countdown clock right on the screen, so if people come half an hour or 10 minutes before, they can see how much time is left before we start and I don't sound like a robot.

Idea #7: Use proof. Whether your next webinar is a pitch webinar or a training webinar, why the heck should I listen to you if you don't know what you're talking about? That means if you're teaching me how to create a product, show me what some of your products are like or what some of your sale letters look like.

If you're explaining to me how would to find a niche or how to find a hook in that niche, go ahead and take the exact steps. Otherwise, it's not worth my time to attend your webinar.

Idea #6: Get a webinar partner to read and answer questions. I know that running webinar might be scary for you especially because there are so many controls to worry about and so many things that can go wrong. That's why it's a good idea to have a second person on the call with you to read the questions, to look at the question box and when it's an appropriate time, let you know what someone has typed for you to read and respond to.

There are also some questions people might type in the question box that are relevant just to them. For example, they might type in that they have just ordered but something has gone wrong with the order.

Instead of broadcasting your response by saying it loud, that webinar partner can privately type in a response just for that person while you train the entire group.

Idea #5: Have as much training as possible screenshoted out. Have you ever tried to demonstrate something, especially something technical or something on the internet to someone and it failed? We have all been there.

Murphy's Law tells us that if something can go wrong on your webinar, it probably will. That's why just as a back-up, it's a good idea to take screenshots of whatever you're going to show people and have it already placed in your Powerpoint presentation.

For example, if you are showing someone how to find a niche and how to write a report in that niche, do that before the webinar and take screenshots of you going to forums or thinking of an idea. That way, even if the forum you want to look at is not working, you can still flip through the Powerpoint presentation and you can make sure that the presentation does not go over time.

That leads me to...

Idea #4: Wrap it up and end with a bang. Movies and TV shows try to end in the most impactful way possible with something exciting, with a climax. Your webinars should be no different. It's a common problem to run a webinar for an hour only to see that it ends up running 3 hours or longer and it ends up losing the interest of many attendees.

I would rather you run a short 1-hour webinar that quickly delivers good value and has a solid pitch than one that has the same amount of content stretched out over 3 hours. You want to get in, make your point, and end with people learning something and ready to take some kind of action. End with a bang, not with a whimper.

Idea #3: Be honest. Running a webinar is a great way to personally connect with your subscribers because they can hear your voice, see your screen, and most importantly, you are live. But when you lie to them, it's counterproductive. That's why if you want to say how many people are on the call, either don't give an exact number or give the real number. If only 20 people are on your webinar, you can choose to just ignore that fact or say 20 people are on your webinar.

Don't lie and tell people that 100 or 300 people have attended when it's not true. Also, when you're taking questions, you don't have to think of your own questions or think of fake question-askers.

You don't have to say, “Joe from Mississippi asks, what's the fastest way to make a product?” Instead, anticipate questions. Tell people that the fastest way to make a product is in this fashion. Webinars are definitely not the place to fake it until you make it.

Idea #2: Blend content and pitch. The best sales letters in the world are the ones that educate while selling you at the same time. Your webinars should be no different. Give people on your webinar the first steps towards accomplishing some kind of tasks and lead them toward the ending, which is that your training is the best way to accomplish that. Make them aware of common problems or help them overcome common objections or give them some kind of process to get them started. That way, your pitch or your offer at the end is a logical next step after having taken your free training.

Idea #1: Give one single call-to-action at the end. At the end of every webinar, you should give people some direction as to what to do next. If you are running a webinar inside a paid training area, your call-to-action might be homework or a challenge.

People simply shouldn't be educated by you, you should tell them what to do now that they have this new information. If you're giving a free webinar, at the end you should tell people where to go to find out more about you or better yet buy from you. Don't give them 5 different URLs. Don't share with them your Twitter, your blog, and your LinkedIn profile.

Give them one single URL and repeat it a few times so that there is no confusion about where people are supposed to go next.

I hope that you picked one of those 11 easy-to-implement ideas and apply it on your next webinar. Which one was your favorite? Leave a comment below telling me right now.