12,500 reasons you should be using webinars

Once upon a time, I was just like the rest of the online marketers out there. Then I made some changes, and I guess you could say I saw the light. That’s the story I want to share with you….

In August of 2009, I was contacted by a friend on Twitter who wanted to organize a social media webinar. He had been hosting several webinars for business and thought it would be a good opportunity to get our names out there and provide some value.

Our initial ideas were simple. We would teach a lot of cool stuff we knew about Social Media and then offer my Twitter eBook for sale at the end of the webinar for those wanted to learn more. We decided to include my new friend, Lewis Howes, and all three of us were able to promote it using affiliate links and make some money.

Things were going as planned – we all had promoted the event and had 900 sign-ups.  The live webinar went great with more than 500 live attendees.  We gave out a ton of content and the audience gave glowing feedback. It was almost a complete success….

With 10 minutes to go, we were ready to wrap things up and offer the eBook for sale. I was ready to close when all of the sudden the host pulled the rug out from under me. Before I could get to the eBook he said, “We want to respect everyone’s time, so we’re gonna wrap it up – thanks for coming and have a good day.” I sat there wondering what the hell had just happened.

I assumed his office must have been on fire or something. I called him after to ask why he closed the webinar so abruptly. After some prying, he finally admitted that he was worried about losing credibility. He was scared to make the offer. In reality, we got them really excited, established our credibility and then left them to continue their learning… on their own.  We were rewarded with some thank you emails, but the major lesson learned is thank you emails don’t pay the bills.

It was a successful first webinar in the sense that we gave a lot of value, but at the same time we missed an opportunity to help people while growing our own business.

A couple weeks later I called Lewis, “Dude,  I think this could really work. Why don’t you and I promote this to our own network?  I really think we can help a lot of people and make probably $500-$1000 for the two hours of work of doing the webinar.” Lewis agreed and we set out to do just that.

One week later we began promoting our own webinar and had more than 1100 sign-ups within the first three days. The night before the webinar I called up my mentor and had a quick chat regarding the promotion.

Me: Hey, How are you? Got time to offer me some quick advice?

Mentor: Sure, whats up?

Me: Well, tomorrow we have a big webinar, and I’m not afraid of the audience or anything, but I was wondering if you had any advice to help me have better results.

Mentor: Great – first off how many people do you have signed up for it?

Me: Over 1100.

Mentor: Holy cow, are you serious… dude that is awesome. Not many marketers can do that – congrats on building a great list.

Me: Thanks, yeah, I was a little surprised by the numbers.

Mentor: What is the topic?

Me: Social Media Marketing

Mentor: What is your offer?

Me: We have combined our eBooks that normally retail for over $150 and will be selling it for $97

Mentor: You need a higher price offer.

Me: I do? Why?

Mentor: Because there will be a percentage of people who will want to pay you more than $97

Me: Ok, what should I offer?

Mentor: Well aren’t you offering “X” service to some people now?

Me: Yeah.

Mentor: Well offer that – but limit it to an amount you are sure you can service, that will help with scarcity as well.

Me: Ok,  I can do that. Thanks for the advice.

Mentor: When you craft that offer – make it irresistible.

Me: Ok. Good advice, thanks again.

Mentor: No worries, that’s what I am here for. Good luck.

So that’s exactly what we did.  I worked all night on the world’s worst-looking sales page and literally hit the save button as Lewis was delivering the webinar intro the following day. We went on to having around 500 people show up live and the webinar went great. We had a lot of fun and were able to teach a great deal in that hour. In our close we simply shared, “If you want to learn more, we’ve put together two packages, one for $97 which includes….and one for $497 which includes….”

We answered questions and then thanked everyone for coming and ended the webinar.

We then opened up the online order page and literally started screaming out of sheer excitement. In fact Lewis screamed so loud he woke my daughter who was napping. Normally my wife would have killed us, but she was so excited too. We had just brought home some serious dough.  I remember the three of us were hugging and dancing as we continued to check the online orders over and over again. We had done over 50 sales and there were 13 at the $497 price point (thank you, Mentor!). We couldn’t believe it. We literally had gone into the webinar hoping to make $500-$1000.

All in all it was one of the most exciting days in my marketing career. We did this webinar from my home office, so afterwards we were in my backyard jumping on the trampoline, still hooting and hollering. My neighbors must have thought we were crazy. To this day I still consider that moment to be one of the top three highlights of my career. To give you an idea of how much I value that day – it surpasses the high we got from doing a recent webinar promotion that netted somewhere around 90k in sales.

It’s so funny to look back now and think about how far I have come. On that first webinar we had a total of only four slides. (LOL! Yes, only four.) We used the web to show sites, which I won’t recommend doing now, but at the time it helped get us started.  Our presentation now has over 100 slides, and we rarely go to the web.

If you are interested in learning how you can leverage the power of marketing via a webinar – we are launching a new training this week. It’s called “Magnetic Webinars”, and to kick things off we are holding a webinar (of course) where we will reveal a ton of strategies to host successful webinars and make money. One of the things Lewis, Chris and I have done really well in getting such high attendance to our webinars is using social media. If you’re interested in learning some of our tactics then go now and grab your virtual seat.

Sign up for Thursdays (9/2/10) Webinar here https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/685997355

Go here for a free ebook on how to crush it using webinars – http://magneticwebinars.com/

Are you using webinars to market your product or service? If you aren’t… then why not?

Have you been on one of my webinars? Do you like the way we run them?

Looking forward to your comments!

Sean

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Image credit: Steve Garfield