By Ellen Finkelstein

What do most 6-, 7-, and 8-figure entrepreneurs have in common? They do webinars! Many of them do webinars every week to bring in income. And most of them are joint venture partnerships.

Why?

Because webinars are a powerful tool to grow your list, reach more people and make more profit.

What is a webinar?

I’m sure you know what a webinar is, because even if you haven’t done one, you’ve attended many. A webinar is just a way to speak online. Here are some important features of webinars:

• You can show slides
• You can usually show your face via your webcam
• You can interact with attendees via a chat box
• You can record the webinar to create a video

A powerful way to grow your list

The reason webinars are so powerful for growing your list is that everyone who registers gives you their name and email address, even if they don’t actually attend. (I like to put a statement in small print below the opt-in form that says something like, “You’ll also get a free subscription to the Change the World Marketing newsletter.”)

People like to attend webinars so just by offering one, you’ll grow your list. Yes, you have to promote it, but it isn’t hard.

In fact, for your first webinar, I recommend not selling anything – just offering free information – for the sole purpose of growing your list.

A tool to reach people all over the world

If you’ve heard about public speaking being a good way to get new clients or sell products, the same is true about webinars—but you can reach MANY more people.

I once did a webinar series that had over 3,000 people registered in 97 countries!

And because you can record the webinar, people on the other side of the world can still watch it – just later on.

A profit-generating engine

It takes time to perfect a webinar that sells, but once you have it, you can give it over and over, generating sales each time. You can even automate the process, so that you send people to the recording and let them buy on the same page.

A webinar is more powerful than a text sales page for selling. That’s because people respond better to seeing and hearing you than they do to reading text. They get to know, like and trust you.

A live webinar is especially powerful because people can interact with you, but the recording is powerful, too. In fact, a webinar recording is an easy way to create a video. (You don’t even need attendees to create a video in this way.)

Why people balk at doing webinars

But many people are afraid of webinars. Here are some of the objections I’ve heard:

The technology is scary: Only at first. Once you do 2-3 webinars, you’ll be fine.

I don’t have enough content: I heard this from people who had just written an e-book! You have enough content. You can blog posts and articles that you’ve written.

I’m afraid of speaking: Webinars are IDEAL for people who are afraid of speaking because you don’t see the attendees. And you don’t have to use the webcam if you don’t want people to see you.

I don’t have anything to sell: As I mentioned earlier, start off by just providing free information. Later, you can sell affiliate products or PLR (private label rights) content that you bought. You can sell something inexpensive at first, like a checklist or resource sheet. But know that you can sell expensive products with webinars—when you’re ready.

I don’t have a list: You can promote through social media, your friends, and partners. Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great places to post a link to your free webinar. There are also webinar directories, like tellonline.org where you can list your webinars. To find more, just search for “webinar directories.” Finally, you can use ads, such as Facebook ads.

Leave a comment if you have another objection and I’ll try to demolish it. Yup, I don’t think there’s a good reason for not doing webinars.

3 tips for profitable webinars

Here are 3 tips for profitable webinars:

• If you’ll make an offer, let people know at the beginning so it isn’t a surprise
• Use techniques to attract attention, maintain engagement, and incorporate emotion (because people need to feel that their decision is right). You do this with your content (your script), your slides, and your delivery.
• Practice in advance and watch the recording—you’ll discover a lot to improve!

The hardest part is the planning

Actually, the hardest part of doing a webinar is the planning. You need to think about your promotion in advance. If you’ll be selling something, you need a sales page. If you want to have affiliates promote for you, you need to contact them and provide email copy.

So I want to make that part easier for you. I’m offering a free document, the Ultimate Webinar Planning Worksheet.

This worksheet lays out all the steps you need to take, both before and after the webinar. You can use it over and over again. It lets you store all the details in one place – opt-in page, sales page, etc.

It will help make your webinars easier and more successful!

Here’s the link again. It will be available only through May 23, 2016.

Leave a comment with your thoughts and experiences on webinars. And please share this blog post because your friends and colleagues will get great value from it, too.