Webinars are becoming an ever more popular means of reaching a target audience and I’m often asked what people can do to lift the webinar from a simple brand-building exercise to a real money-making event. In this article, you’ll learn 3 techniques that you can use to make money from webinars.
Before we get started, we need to ask ourselves a question: what is a webinar? Quite simply, a webinar is a web-based seminar where you deliver instructional material to people who want to learn more about a specific topic. The biggest difference with a webinar is that rather than you having to be somewhere in person, you simply deliver your content over the Internet using software such as GotoWebinar.
Consider the analogy of a webinar and a traditional seminar a little further. If you were to deliver a seminar, you’d expect to make money – otherwise you’re just teaching a class, and even then, you’d probably be paid a salary! With traditional seminars, people expect to either pay to attend or to attend for free but expect to listen to sales pitches. Also, there will often be products available to purchase at the back of the room. These are often also combined to generate multiple income streams for one event.
If we can do this with a traditional seminar, why not with webinars? Read on to see how these techniques apply online.
“Teach & Pitch”
People attend webinars to learn something. As long as you deliver something of value every time you offer a webinar, you’ll always have an audience who are willing to listen. By doing this, they grow to know, like and trust you – all of which are vital ingredients to making a sale.
I find that webinars tend to work best at around 1 hour in length. As you approach the hour, now’s the time to say something along the lines of “if you’ve learned something from this free webinar, imagine what you’d learn from my course, which for the next 60 minutes, you can get at a discount by visiting this link…”. The chances are very high that people will click through and at least check out your product.
Sell Affiliate Products
Along the same lines as the previous idea, if you’re talking about any specific product during your session for which you’re an affiliate, then setup a shortened URL (using something like TinyURL) so that people can buy the product that you mentioned through your link. This works particularly well if you can offer a special deal, which you’ll often find inside your affiliate areas.
One of the best ways to do this is to offer a free “resource guide” to all attendees. This adds even more value to your webinar whilst getting your affiliate links in front of targeted prospects!
Sell Tickets to Your Webinar
Premium webinars have a very high perceived value. If someone has to pay to join, they’re effectively handing you money to tell you that they are a qualified prospect for what you have to offer. Also, someone who’s willing to part with money to attend a 1 hour webinar is likely to also part with money to attend a full-blown training program that you might offer at a later date!
The trick to selling access to your webinar is to make sure that people who haven’t paid can’t get on too easily. If you’re using the recommended GotoWebinar software, this is easily achieved by setting an event password, which is automatically sent to attendees in their purchase confirmation.
So there you have it – 3 ways to make money with webinars! To be honest, there a whole bunch more so if this is of interest, please leave a comment and let me know and if you want more, I’ll write a follow up with 3 more ways to make money with webinars!
Happy New Year!
