Tips To Running Profitable & Successful Webinars

If you want to find out how you can host and run profitable and successful webinars, then you are in the right place. If you don’t know what webinars are, well, this is for you too. To kick things off and just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’m going to define what a webinar is.

Simply put, a webinar is a seminar which is hosted online. If you’ve hosted, or attempted to host a live seminar, you’ll realise that it’s not easy to fill up a seminar room with attendees. It takes meticulous planning and execution to get the crowd in the door.

The expense of hosting a seminar can be very high. There are venue costs and marketing costs which tend to eat up a great chunk of money. In light of all this, webinars present a very attractive alternative to the traditional approach.

let’s look at the tips to running profitable & successful webinars.

1. Know Your Niche

Just like in any business endeavor, it’s very important to know the specific people that you are targeting. This is know, in marketing, as an avatar. Simply put, you ask yourself the question, if my target market was a person, what would they look like.

This helps you structure the right message and language to get your audience to pay attention. Your approach for an audience consisting of mainly teens would be different for that for middle aged professional women, moms, business owners and so forth.

This is very important and should never be overlooked if you want to host a successful webinar.

2. Webinar Equipment

The equipment you choose to use will depend mainly on your objective and your audience. At the very minimum, you will need a decent laptop with a good camera. The camera is not always necessary as your webcast can simply be a screen cast where you share your computer screen.

If, on the other hand, you want to show your audience your face (this has been proven to significantly increase response rates to your offers), you will need a good camera on your laptop or connected to your laptop. You will also need good lighting and a good background or backdrop.

Another essential component is a very reliable, high speed internet connection. You don’t want your internet connectivity letting you down during a live webinar.

3.Presentation Planning

It’s very important to plan your presentation well ahead of time. Plan how long you want it to be, what message you want to put across, what you want to achieve and so on. You also need to plan the structure of the presentation.

Fortunately you can Google webinar presentation templates that you can customise accordingly. Once you’ve completed your presentation, go over it a number of times. This is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, you want to make sure that your presentation flows seamlessly and makes sense.

Secondly, you want to internalise the presentation so that you sound natural and flow easily through your presentation. You also need to make sure that you avoid putting a lot of text on one slide but rather have it on different slides so that your presentation keeps moving and is dynamic.

4. Promote Your Webinar

The next thing you need to do is market your webinar. If you already have a subscriber list, send out an email notifying them of the upcoming webinar and encourage them to register for it. If you choose a platform that supports that function, reminder emails will be sent out as the date and time of the webinar nears.

You can also use platforms like social media and PPC advertising to promote your webinar. This does not have to be limited to online platforms alone. You can also make use of flyers, post cards and networking events to reach out to your target market.

5. Monetizing your Webinar

In my early days of hosting seminars, I would give a powerful presentation which would move my audience but one big mistake I would make was that I would not offer them anything to buy. You need to be able to offer something to your audience after holding their attention for 30 minutes or more.

Attention is an important currency and the fact that they are still there after you have finished your presentation means that they are receiving value from you and the the best and only way really, to make money is by providing value.  In this moment, they are ready to pay for any additional value that you can offer them so you need to have an offer to put before them.

You can turn the recording of your webinar into an automated one which will keep delivering the same value and make you money again and again on autopilot for months and even years to come.

6. Conduct a Dress Rehearsal (and Promote Some More)

I mentioned in the tip about planning your presentation that it is important to have a natural flow. You should not sound mechanical or like are reading your slides word for word. That is why it’s important to do a dress rehersal of your webinar and have a trusted colleague or friend to attend and critique you.

This will also help you identify any technical issues that may arise before the main webinar and rectify them.  Just like you do a dress rehearsal for your main events in life, you also need to do at least one for your webinar.

As the date approaches, it’s very important to market your event again and again. You could never over market.

7. Host Your Webinar

Next step, host your webinar. You have done all the ground work and the day has finally arrived. Be natural and energetic. Your audience will relate to you better and take on your energy as well. Don’t be afraid to be spontaneous or to make mistakes. It’s all part of the process and you will get better at it as you host more webinars.

It’s always good to create a check list of all the essentials for your webinar and make sure everything you need is in place before you begin.

Types of Webinar Platforms

There are many types of webinar platforms out there and we are going to cover a few of them here.

When you run your webinar, you create an asset that is able to keep on making you passive income without the need for you to do any additional work. One of the best tools to use for this is Autowebinar X. It’s an amazing tool and I encourage you to click on this link and check it out.

You still need to do a great deal of marketing but you cut out costs like venue hire and but you still need to pay for the webinar platform you will use and…… to kick things off, let’s look at the different platforms available to you.

Auto Webinar X

Auto Webinar X is able to host live webinars but it was mainly designed around the idea of hosting automated webinars which can be served around the clock without you having to sit and host webinars each time. Its creators say that it is a way of turning you old YouTube videos which are gathering dust and turning them into money making machines.

It comes with a rich feature set to accomplish this which includes:

• Full Time Webinar Platform With Zero Recurring Fees
• Cloud Based Mobile Responsive
• Unlimited Attendees Free Live Streaming Videos
• Automated Evergreen Webinars
• Full Email Notification System
• For Email Marketers
• Live Built-in Chat System
• SEO Optimized
• Autoresponder Intergration
• In-webinar live stats
• Incredibly Newbie Friendly
• Live Built In Voting System
• Readymade Replay Pages

Go To Webinar
Go To Webinar is one of the very first webinar platforms to be created. It’s a platform that has somewhat maintained it’s feel from the early days of it’s creation and does not include a lot of bells and whistles as the other platforms we will talk about in this article.

It’s a very good platform if you want to host a live webinar and also want interaction with the viewers through a chat box function. You can schedule a webinar quite easily and are able to record sessions for playback later. It’s a really good platform with a good feature set which includes:

• Email Automation
• Custom Branding
• Practice Settings
• Audience Interaction
• Handouts Mobile Support
• Recording
• Lead Management
• Real Time Analytics
• HDFaces Video Conferencing
• Network Security
• Desktop/Application Sharing

Next up is:

Webinar Jam
Webinar Jam was built by Internet Marketers with fellow internet marketers in mind. If your goal is to market products or services online, then Webinar Jam is the right platform for you. One of the features that sets it apart from the crowd is the ability to have a co-presenter hosting at the same time.

Features of Webinar Jam include:

• Engage Everybody
• Go Solo Or  Invite Co-Presenters
• Attendee Spotlight
• Active Chat
• Highlight Messages, Comments, And Answers
• Moderate Webinars
• Stream Directly To Facebook Live And YouTube Live
• Easy And Fast Broadcasting
• Supports All Operating Systems Browsers, And Mobile Devices
• Video Engine
• Run Slick Slideshow Presentations
• Whiteboard Ideas
• Polls And Surveys
• Active Offers
• Urgency Display
• Limited Units Display
• Update Units Automatically Or Manually
• Buyer Alerts
• Feedback Flow
• Point And Click Registration Page Builder
• Remote Registration Embedding
• One-Click Registration
• Cross-Platform Tagging
• Automated Email And SMS
• Schedule Webinars
• Post Event Communication
• Multi-Language Capability
• Replica Replay
• Detailed Webinar Performance Analytics

Next up is:

Zoom
Zoom is a platform designed mainly for conference calls but also comes with a feature set that makes it ideal for webinars as well. In my opinion, it will soon take over from Skype as the go to web-conferencing platform out there.  It has a free plan which is ideal for most users and able to host about 100 participants at a time.

It also has different priced options for small to larger size organisations. The features include:

That’s it for this article and I hope it was beneficial to you. Please leave some comments below or any questions you might have.