Tim Thompson – 3 Easy steps to creating sales from online webinars

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Online Video, Product Creation, Webinars, by Tim Thompson, on 04.27.2011

Has your business considered using webinars or online seminars to attract, educate and sell products and services to your customers? If you have, that is great. But if you haven’t here are some easy steps you can take to start creating sales for your business or product via webinars.

A webinar is simply an online seminar. This means that you as a presenter can show a presentation to many 100s if not 1000’s of people over the internet, so that those that are invited to attend the online presentation can watch your presentation on their own computer screens anywhere in the world where they have an internet connection. Through this software, you can run a presentation, have other presenters connect and share their own presentation, demonstrate software or other components on your own desktop and even demonstrate via video camera.

This is all very powerful, but how do you create sales from webinars?

First things first. You will need to decide on a software system which will allow you to run your webinars. There are plenty to choose from ranging from some that are free up to those that are high end and cost many hundreds of dollars a month. Depending on your business size, the number of people you plan to have attending your webinars in one session and how regularly you plan to run webinars will determine the service provider you decide to go with. For me, the key criteria include the number of people I can have on any given webinar, the ability to record the web Some things that I would suggest are important to consider. Your business and your brand are important, so don’t give your customers the wrong impression by using a cheap “free” webinar software. Invest in quality software to host and manage your webinars. I would recommend something like GoToWebinar, but do your research.
Create a sales funnel for your event. What do I mean by this? Well, you will be investing time and money to setting up and marketing the webinar event in the same way you would market a seminar. The more people you have on the webinar, the more prospects you will have to create sales from. So, although the webinar software generally will provide you with a registration link to share with your prospects, I would recommend doing more than this. I would suggest creating a webpage which has an opt-in on it. I would encourage people to join your list to find out more about your “Free” webinar. This then gives you a list of potential prospects. So even if they register and then don’t make it to the event, you can still market to them via email after the event. Also, you can control the reminder emails that get sent to them before the event. The sales component of the sales funnel can also mean that after the webinar, you can send an email to those that attended and ask for their business if they did not convert after the webinar concludes.
Offer massive value and then make an offer and link this offer to a sales page online where the prospect can take immediate action to buy. By offering really good content to your prospects, they feel that the time taken was worth while to find out what you had to offer them. Remember, your prospects are always thinking “what is in it for me?”. Then after the content, allow about 15 minutes to do your sales close. To streamline the process and allow for an immediate action, explain that for webinar attendees only they will get a special offer or price. But they can only access this by going to a particular URL. This is where you can have a web page which summaries the offer and then encourages purchase right there and then. Limiting the offer to something like 24 hours will also help.

Hot tip: If you are smart, record your webinars. This allows you to create instant “information products” which you can do many different things with. Firstly, you can sell access to the webinar at a later date. You can use it as a video to share information with a prospect or use it as a giveaway for an opt-in to your list. Offer it as a bonus to a bigger product that you sell, which creates value.