This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Some mediums, some platforms, some strategies kind of stand the test of time. Like we often talk about new things that are coming out and new ways of people engaging, new ways to reach potential customers, clients, followers, readers, subscribers, listeners, whatever the case may be. Yesterday we talked a little bit about Pinterest and how this has been a long standing understudied network that some smart people are really benefiting from. Today we're gonna talk about a different platform, a different medium, but it's kind of similar in the sense that it's been around a long time and it still works, hasn't changed a whole lot actually. I'm talking about webinars.
So the question today is how do you create engaging and profitable webinars? It can indeed be a very effective way to reach people and in fact to close people on a sale. So you can actually teach through a webinar, you can prospect and without doing any kind of hard sell or anything that just doesn't feel that great, the conversion is really strong. So let's look at why this is the case and what you can do to take advantage of it. Today's question comes from Brandon in Houston.
He's gonna ask about webinars. I'm gonna do my best to answer it and give you a couple of specific tips that you can use right away. So if you're trying to figure out how to reach more people with your side hustle or your next business idea, hopefully this will help. It's all coming up in just 30 seconds. [Music]
Hello Chris, I'm Brandon from Houston.
I've been considering hosting webinars to engage my audience and generate some income. However, I'm not sure where to start. How do I create webinars that are both engaging and profitable? What platforms should I use and what are some tips for promoting my webinars effectively? Your podcast has always provided great advice and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Thanks. [Music]
Okay, as I said, tried and true. This is something people have been doing for years. I don't know, at least as long as I've been doing stuff online, 10 years, 15 years, this whole format of I'm gonna host half hour, hour long, sometimes two hours or longer, informative session where I'm gonna share a bunch of content, give tips, actually give a lot of valuable information away so it's not just a teaser. It usually works best when it's not just a promotion.
There's like 50 minutes of valuable info and then perhaps a 10 minute sale of like, hey, if you like this, well, guess what? Here's the whole product that I'm selling or here's the subscription that's going to change your life because it's gonna do all these things that I just talked about or it's going to help you do them more easily, more profitably, whatever the product is, like whatever it is that you're selling. So very effective platform. So how do you do it? What are some tips?
Let's talk about it. Planning your webinar. So first you wanna plan out the content. You think about the topics that your audience would find valuable. Give them some really helpful stuff right in the beginning.
Stay on topic, stay focused on solving problems. Definitely have a strong outline, practice, rehearse, do whatever you need to to make sure it is both informative and also a little interactive to keep people engaged. As for the right platform, there's a lot of ways to do that. You can do it right on Zoom now. GoToWebinar is a classic platform.
There's a bunch of new ones, I'm sure. There's one called Webinar Jam, another one called Demio, D-E-M-I-O. I don't have a lot of experience with those, but I think any of them tend to do kind of the same thing. So choose the one that suits your needs and budgets. And of course, most of them have free trials, so you can test them out before committing.
Next, you want to promote your webinar. So this is key, right? You wanna make sure you get the right people there and so you promote this webinar at least two weeks in advance. You want to get people signed up. You wanna get their email address.
You want to be sending them reminders. You want to do kind of a voter turnout campaign when it comes to showing up for the webinar. Like you wanna try to get as much engagement and interaction as possible so you want people to be there. And then after the webinar, you follow up. You send a thank you email.
You remind people about the offer. You make it a limited time offer so that it goes away within a couple of days, probably at the most or maybe a week. And if you set this up right, you can usually predict the conversion rate. Like once you've done it a couple of times, you can usually know, okay, if I get 100 people on this webinar, I'm gonna be able to convert X of them. So X might be three to 5%.
It could be up to 10% or more for a webinar. And so that enables you to plan and forecast and determine how can this be a viable business strategy for me on a regular basis. A lot of people are doing this in different ways. After many years, it still works. That's the general format.
So I hope it's helpful. Go get to work. Let me know how it goes. And listeners, if you have a question or a comment, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Much more is to come.
We are almost at episode 2800 and much more is still on the way. So thank you for being part of it. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
