Webinar Marketing Pro

How to Create Passive Income With On-Demand Webcasting

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Zimpfer) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:00:00 +0000

The question many people ask me is:

"How do I make money with Webinars and Webcasting?"

Like my uncle Leo used to say; "There's more than one way to skin a cat." How you actually "bring home the bacon" using Webinars depends on your business, prodcut, service and how you deliver them to your customers.

Many of my clients package up their content to be delivered 'on-demand' - creating modules of content to be spaced over time. This is known as an On-Demand Webcast vs. a live Webinar. You simply record modules and post them on your webiste, creating a library of content for your customers to...here it is... "pay for access" in an on-demand or self-directed format.

Your recorded sessions can include Power Point, video, testing, polling, reporting and analytics and more. It's a very popular method for delivering certification and continuing education credits, training, coaching and more.

Now you have a passive income stream that eliminates most of the manual labor and allows you to reach even an larger audience. You create it once and repurpose it through muliple mediums including on-deman Webcasts, off-line CDs and DVD's, home study courses etc.

On-Demand Webcasts are different that just recording your live Webinar and posting it up on your website, charging people money to watch it. These Webcasts are typically shorter in length, like and edited version of your Webinar - tightly focused on the content and desired outcome.

The key difference being - if you want to get paid to create content, you have to deliver the value and do it in a way that keeps people engaged and wanting more from you. There are several companies offering technology for you to create On-Demand Webcasts.

The two I'm most familiar with are:
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1) WebEx Presentation Studio
http://www.webex.com/enterprise/presentation-studio.html

2) Brainshark Presentations
http://www.brainshark.com

Good luck and let me know if you need any guidance.

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Zimpfer) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:27:00 +0000

7 Steps for Any Small Business to Make BIG Money Using Webinars… Without Spending a Fortune!

As a solopreneur or small business – if you want to grow your profits and expand your business; Webinars can become your most effective tool in today’s competitive environment. Caution! Webinars are like any other tool. When used improperly, they can cause harm and wreak havoc in your business. Used effectively – as you’ll soon discover – Webinars can transform your business and put you on the fast track to success.

Let’s take a look at how you can start using Webinars in your business and seven steps to help you avoid the usual pitfalls and risks when starting out with Webinars.

1. Clearly Define Your Goals

It sounds obvious, but you really need to think about the goal of your Webinar(s), so that you can measure your results.

What is your goal?

To acquire leads and bring in new sales?
To educate existing customers on a new product/service?
To obtain research or feedback on an existing offer?

If you are looking to acquire leads, there are lots of potential ways to grow your leads. If you’re reaching out beyond just your internal list, the name of the game is promotion. You can promote your Webinar using Press Releases, Banner Ads, Joint Ventures, eMail Marketing to rented lists, Article Submissions, eZine Advertising, Pay-per-Click and more.

If you are launching a new product or seeking feedback from your existing customers, then conducting an informational Webinar and Survey could be the an efficient method to fine tune your new project and get real-world feedback from those who matter most – your customers.

2. Choose Your Provider

Do a Google search on Webinars or Web Conferencing and you’ll get back around 1,600,000 websites returned. Truth is; there are literally hundreds of companies that offer some kind of product or service for hosting Webinars. Choosing the right vendor for your specific requirements is a critical part of your success. It can often mean the difference between a winning Webinar vs. a Webinar that burns your brand, your customers and a hole in your wallet.

For small businesses you want a vendor who has a solid track record who offers the following:

A) Reliability and Scalability – Ability to handle large groups
B) Ease of Use for you and your attendees – You don’t need to be a ‘techie’ to make it work
C) Affordability – Reasonable price for the services offered.

Do your research and select the vendor best suited for your specific needs.

What About Free?

Yes, there are some Webinar providers out there that are free and they may be quite appropriate for your smaller, more collaborative web meetings with an audience who already knows you quite well.

We’re talking Webinars here and that means reaching a larger audience, creating a professional image and delivering your message with minimal concerns regarding performance and reliability. Your Webinars are too critical to risk on a bare-bones service with little track record or limited history of results. Don’t step over dollars to pick up pennies.

3. Having a Compelling Title and Offer

To increase your response and maximize your attendance, you must have compelling, targeted, benefit driven topic that will capture the attention of your target audience. Find out any current hot-button issues in your industry and use those in your headline or content description.

What problem or issue does your product or services help your audience over come and how will attending your Webinar help them discover a solution to their problem?

Just like testing headlines when running ads, testing email subject lines is critical to gauging response for Webinars when using email marketing. If you have a known speaker or subject matter expert, whose name is recognized among your target audience, you MUST include their name in the subject line or you are missing out on leveraging their brand or celebrity power.

Test different copy and offers within your email invitation. When possible, personalize your email copy (Dear John) and write your copy as if you’re talking directly to that person one-on-one vs. a large group.

4. Make it Easy to Register

Your landing or registration page should require no more than one click to get to it. You don't want make your audience go from the e-mail to a landing page that describes the Webinar and then have to go to another page to get to the registration form. Even worse, putting your registration page on your home page and hoping they find your link to register.

5. Maximize Your AttendanceAverage

Attendance rates to registrations is about 40% to 60% for Webinars. Being planning your webinar about six weeks out to ensure you have enough time to build out your marketing funnel and process for inviting attendees. About two to three weeks prior to your Webinar, send out your invites.

One week prior, send a reminder and send out a final reminder the day before and possibly the day of if your event occurs later in the day. You may want to offer an incentive the first 50 with a free giveaway to accelerate the early sign-ups. After your Webinar, send out a thank you to those who attended with any pertinent information. For those who registered and didn’t attend, send a “sorry we missed you” email with links to the recording, and related offer.

6. WOW! Factor Presentations Too

Many starting out with Webinars repeat the same mistakes often made during in-person presentations; death by Power Point, boring presenter, little or no audience interaction and lack of compelling offer or call to action at the conclusion.

Webinars offer you the ability to integrate multiple forms of visual media beyond Power Point such as video, (when appropriate) polling, Q&A, instant feedback tools and more. You can share your desktop, take your audience by the hand and browse your website for live demos, case studies and more. Anyone can put up a slide deck and read bullet points. If that’s all you do, you’ll lose them in New York minute because they can read the bullet points themselves.

In a Webinar you have just two tools to keep your audiences attention.

Your voice and your presentation.

Don’t let them fall asleep! You keep your audience engaged by making your presentation relevant, interactive and lively.

7. Follow-Up, Follow-Up, Follow-Up

After your Webinar, your prospects are in the perfect frame of mind to learn more and be receptive to another offer from you. Be sure to add links to either the main offer or other related offers and up-sells in your e-mail. I've seen studies that show nearly 40 percent of thank-you recipients who visited a special post-Webinar thank-you page took advantage of another offer.

Here are some more follow-up tips:

Archive all your recorded Webinars and post them on your website.
Use a single URL that lists all your Webinars with a short summary of each.
To get repeat traffic, brand the page as an educational library, including your white papers, eNewsletter archives, and other content that is of interest to your target audience.
Submit your Webinar library URL to major search engines to boost your search engine rankings.

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Zimpfer) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:14:00 +0000

Webinar vs. Webcast - What's the Real Difference?

Here's the formal answer from Webopedia:

Webinar:

A Short for Web-based seminar, a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Web. A key feature of a Webinar is its interactive elements -- the ability to give, receive and discuss information. Contrast with Webcast, in which the data transmission is one way and does not allow interaction between the presenter and the audience.

Webcast:

v.) (1) To use the Internet to broadcast live or delayed audio and/or video transmissions, much like traditional television and radio broadcasts. For example, a university may offer on-line courses in which the instructor Webcasts a pre-recorded or live lecture, or an enterprise may Webcast a press conference in lieu of or in addition to a conference call. Users typically must have the appropriate multimedia application (computer) in order to view a Webcast.

(2) To use push technology, to send Web-based information to an Internet user.

There are some similarities but the real difference is that a Webinar is intended to solicit interaction from your audience. Often this is accomplished by using tools included with most solution providers such as Polling, Q&A, Surveys and other in-meeting tools you'll find inherent in some providers software.

On Demand Webcasting:

Let's not overlook "On-Demand" Webcasting which simply means taking a recorded web-seminar and making it available "on-demand," allowing users to view your presentation in a self-paced format, streamed over their computer.

Each has its proper place in your marketing funnel. Interaction with your audience is always encouraged for maximum impact during live events.

In my next post, we'll look at how to leverage Webcasts and "On-Demand" Webcasts.

3 Secrets of Winning Webinars

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Zimpfer) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:38:00 +0000

3 Secrets of Winning Webinars

1. Brainstorm Session: How Can You Leverage Online Events?
Imagine the creative new ways in which you could utilize online events, without incurring the costs and heavy-lifting of in-person events. Here’s some ideas for you to consider: Educating customers and investors, marketing to prospects, up-selling customers, updating employees and partners or working the press.

Take a look at your list of business goals and brainstorm how online events could help you achieve them. Want to strengthen relationships with customers or get prospects “talking up” your company? Host a half-hour webinar—for example, “10 Tips to Overcoming Procrastination”—to highlight your company’s expertise.

Power Tip: Begin planning your webinar six weeks in advance, and promote it two to four weeks out. Ask yourself: What specific goals do I want my event to achieve?

2. Schedule Event, Then Systematize Your Invitations for Maximum Show Rates
Setting up an online event should start with a date and then work backwards from there. Create compelling, targeted HTML invitations and text for those whose email accounts don’t accept HTML. Be sure to include a series of teasers, touch-points and reminders automated to be sent via an auto-responder so your reminders and confirmations go out without fail. Automated e-mail management makes registration and follow-up e-mails a snap.

Power Tip: Add questions to your enrollment form to gauge attendees’ interests and needs. Also, designate the destination page attendees will be sent following the event. Ask yourself: What will be my call to action? What specific benefits will participants gain from attending?

3. Capture Attention With Powerful Features
Lively conversation and quality content aren’t always enough to maintain your audience’s attention. Put on a good show for them with plenty of visual and auditory variety. Engage their eyes with PowerPoint presentations, animations and streaming video as you drive the discussion over your phone or microphone.

Let your guest speakers take center stage while you field questions from the audience, then launch a poll or to maintain the interaction. When it’s over, post the recorded event on your website for those who missed it.

Power Tip: Score your attendees (and no-shows) based on their event participation and enrollment responses, then import the data it into your CRM or follow-up system so you can quickly reach the most qualified leads. Strike while the iron is hot and recognize that hosting webinars that make you money is both a process and an event.

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Zimpfer) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:16:00 +0000

Seven Biggest Webinar Marketing Mistakes and How You Can Avoid Them

Mistake #1: SEX! Now that I have your attention...That was a dirty trick. Not to mention hokey. But since you're reading this, I guess that old chestnut still works.

Remember the old sales adage - A.I.D. A. - Attention - Interest - Decision - Action

On the web or in person, to reach your intended outcome, you must first capture your target audiences Attention. Ideally, you capture Attention because you have a compelling offer that appeals to your target audience, arousing enough Interest and allowing them to make a Decision to accept your offer which leads them to take Action and attend your webinar.

Today, because of information overload, most of us have what I call "short attention span theatre." We're scanning only for the information on our personal radar that were interested in and the rest gets filtered out. Even if yours is the most compelling offer ever given for your target audience, you have to be sure you capture your prospects' Attention, get them Interested enough make a Decision to sign up for your event, and take Action by actually following through and showing up.

Mistake #2: Not Using a Marketing Sequence to Build Your Attendance

Many people assume that just because they are putting on a webinar, and perhaps even offer it for free, that your target audience will drop everything their doing just to hear and see what you have to offer. You're too smart for that and you know people are very busy. Today, people need constant reminders, repeated exposure and you must provide valid reasons why they should continually subject themselves to ongoing communication from you.

A well designed marketing sequence builds momentum and critical mass along each step, creating greater interest and anticipation for those who have already registered and those who haven't yet but are likely too with enough emotional and logical triggers that resonate with them, where they are right now.

Mistake #3: Having Boring Presenters or Death By PowerPoint

In a virtual setting, having an engaging, energetic, well-spoken presenter is critical because your attendees can easily lose interest, get distracted or simply "click" a button and leave your session. In a live setting, that requires a few extra steps and is not quite as anonymous as in a webinar. Another good idea is to rehearse and review the content and do a few dry runs with someone to get your flow down and test out the mechanics of delivering a webinar -especially if you’re new to webinars.

Equally important is your presentation. Too many people use slides as a crutch, simply reading them verbatim on the screen, overloading people with data points, too much text and too many slides. Remember the KISS principle? Keep It Short and Sweet. You can liven up your presentations and keep attendees attention and interest at a high level by adding small doses of things like video, polling, guest speakers, Q&A and more when appropriate.

Mistake #4: Use the Wrong Provider for Your Webinar

Webinars, web conferencing, web collaboration and web meetings have been around for about ten years now. There are many providers all having some similarities and a few with some significant and important differences and features you should consider.

First of all, if all you're concerned with is price, you're approaching it backwards. Price is always a component of value but when you're talking about using webinars as a strategic tool to grow your revenues, expand markets and better serve your customers, the real question is what's it worth to you?

Meaning, if successful, how much would using webinars, web meetings etc. save and or make your company? How much would you save on travel? How many more sales or new clients could you get because your sales cycle is now shorter using webinars? How important is it to make a good first impression with your webinar? How important is support and reliability?

Are features like multi-point video, recording, application sharing, VoIP, integrated audio etc,. a must or are they just nice to have? How else do you plan on leveraging your webinar for future sales, marketing, PR, etc?

Seems like a lot but there are many ways to make money from webinars beyond the event itself. You can record events for future playback, create a passive eCommerce income stream, license your sessions, use as Press Releases, redistribute on CD to your lists, etc. Are you getting the picture that webinars can go way beyond simply desktop sharing and PowerPoint? Choosing the right provider can mean the difference between a smashing success or crash and burn failure. By using the appropriate tools for your goals, you can promote interaction, participation, and ultimately, gain more sales.

Mistake #5: Not Using Direct Response Marketing

Most attempts at building attendees for your webinar make all of the mistakes pointed out in #1 above. Using proven direct response methods includes having benefit driven headlines within emails, websites and other media. Well-written copy that speaks your audiences language, compelling offers and a clear call to action with incentives, multiple ways to register, testimonials etc.

Mistake #6: Not Using Off-line Media To Build Attendance

What? You mean use things like letters, postcards, "lumpy-mail," premiums, creative packaging, telephone, and the fax machine? Yup. Goes back to #1 and #2 above and for the plain fact that today, relying on email to successfully reach your audience is harder than ever. SPAM is pervasive, people mass delete in-boxes, junk folders steal correspondence even with your own customers…all the more reason to multiply your touch points for maximum exposure and boost your chances of scoring high on the A.I.D.A quotient.

Mistake #7: Failing to Design the Post-Webinar Marketing Plan

Too often people view a webinar as a one-time event. You'll see a lot of work and money wasted on what I call the "front-end" and little time planning for the "back-end" where you can leverage off your event for additional sales, up-sells and other income opportunities.

Make sure the follow-up plan gets as much attention as the webinar itself. Each step in the process should be well mapped out from salespeople’s roles to post-event websites, materials, touch campaigns and more. There is a short window of opportunity for you to take advantage of all your hard work . . . if you recognize and can avoid these costly errors and if you have a proven system to help you get the results you want.