See How Easily You Can Sell Products and Services With Webinars

August 21, 2014

Did you know you could sell products and services with webinars?

Are you curious if your business is the right fit to make money with webinars?

This week on the Social Media Social Hour Podcast I’m joined by Steven Essa, one of the world’s leading experts on Webinars. In this episode, Steven teaches us how you can sell products and services with webinars. Steven explains what a webinar is, how you monetize them, and best practices you should consider when creating webinars.

About the show:

SMSH_Podcast_Artwork_300The Social Media Social Hour is a podcast for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to get on the social media fast track. The podcast is an interview format, where each week I get up close and personal with top brands and influencers to talk social media, tech and online marketing. Each week I also share tools that I personally use to help me with social media management, sales, marketing, accounts management, and productivity. The Social Media Social Hour is presented by Scoreboard Social.

In this episode, here’s what you’ll discover:

About Steven Essa

  • Known internationally as the “Make Money with Webinars Expert.”
  • Trained thousands of people to leverage the power of “webinars.”
  • Became an authority on webinars by accident – Initially he wanted to be a public speaker and the advice he received was to start by doing webinars.
  • After he started hosting live webinars, he started to realize he could make money doing them.
  • Around 2011, Steven started to receive public speaking opportunities to teach people how to make money with webinars.

About Webinars

  • The word webinar is an acronym for web seminar – It’s a seminar that’s done online.
  • Webinars can be live or recorded and they can be automated.
  • Some webinars show people talking to the screen, others simply show a computer screen while someone speaks to the screen.
  • A topic is presented in a structured format that is anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes long where you can sell something at the end.
  • If you sell appliances or furnitures, webinars are most likely not for you.
    • Great categories for webinars: a product or service that deals with information or how to do a certain profession
  • Webinars do not have to be from “make money online” categories.
    • Steven has seen lawyers, fitness experts, real estate agents and more all utilize webinars.

Webinar Best Practices

  • If you’re selling anything less than $1,000, a 60 minute webinar should be long enough.
  • If you’re selling anything over $1,000, your webinar should be about 90 minutes.
  • In a 60 minute webinar, you should break it up with a 10 minute intro, 40 minutes of good content, and 10 minutes for closing.
  • In a 90 minute webinar, you should break it up with a 15 minute intro, 60 minutes of good content, and 15 minutes for closing.
  • The intro is not an intro about you, it’s building up a case on what will be learned from your webinar.
  • In your good content, you should have steps. Either three, five, or seven steps to achieve something. Give away valuable content.
  • In your closing, that is the time when you do your pitch and sell your product or service.
  • For the people who you don’t close on your webinars, you are still collecting emails of these attendees so you can market to them in the future.
  • After you record a webinar, use a reply system so in the future, new people can watch a webinar whenever they want.
  • While you can play webinars via replay, Steven finds that live webinars perform best.

Driving Traffic to Your Webinars

  • Start building a list. You need to capture names and emails everywhere you go.
  • Leverage other peoples lists by doing webinars, interviews, etc. on other people’s platforms. Then offer them a commission on any sales from the webinar.
  • Spend 15 minutes each day targeting people for 50/50 joint venture webinars.
  • Leverage social media and find where these people are.

Monetizing a Webinar

  • Steven says it all comes down to how many people are attending your webinars for monetizing them.
    • For example, if you can get 100 people to your webinars, you should be able to make at least $4,000 month if you’re selling your products/services for $300.
  • When you price your webinars, you want to have a price where you’re converting about 10% of your attendees. If you’re converting more than 10%, it’s time to raise the price of your product.
  • Steven suggests to start your courses at $297, figure out what people want, then add more value and increase your prices.
  • Steven says do not get discouraged if you don’t make a sale on a webinar. Steven has failed himself.

Webinar Tools

  1. GoToWebinar.com – Paid tool
  2. WebEx.com – Paid tool
  3. Google Hangouts – Free tool
  4. Webinator – Tool to have webinar replays
  5. Screenflow – a tool to create recorded webinars/presentations

Items/People Mentioned In The Show:

Steven’s Social Media Six Pack

  • Favorite city to visit in the United States? Boulder, Colorado
  • If you had to describe yourself as a flavor, what would it be? Orange
  • Last song or album you purchased? System of A Down – “Toxicity”
  • One trait you dislike about yourself?  I cannot say no 
  • Do you bite your nails? No
  • Have you ever eaten a whole bag of potato chips by yourself? Oh yeah!

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