Webinars are an easy, affordable, and powerful way for the self-employed to grow their business
Like many others in business for themselves, I enjoy listening to and watching online webinars, and I have presented more than a few over the years. Indeed, I love webinars and find them to be an easy and powerful way to both learn something new, and better, get more business.
For the uninitiated, a webinar, or web-seminar, is a visual, interactive online speech. Some webinars use slides, others use a live video stream, while others have little in the way of an online component, and as such may be better described as a teleseminar. The typical webinar lasts about an hour; for instance, the ones I do generally consist of a 45-minute presentation and 15 minutes for Q and A.
Here at TheSelfEmployed, we will be launching a free webinar series soon.
Webinars work. Want more business? Present a webinar.
6 Reasons Why a Self-Employed Person Might Want to Host a Webinar
1. They are easy: Webinars are easy in two ways:
- Offering a webinar requires only that you have a great subject, a PowerPoint presentation, and a hosting service for the webinar. A simple Google search will yield a host of hosts who can help you put on and promote the event.
- From the speaker’s perspective, a webinar is fairly easy because there is no travel involved, and as you are speaking on a phone, you can have as many notes as you like in front of you.
2. They add value: Offering a webinar, either on your own site or someone else’s, creates value for the participant. I do webinars for many companies and they frequently offer the webinars free to their best small business customers. Here at TheSelfEmployed, we will be launching a free webinar series soon. Webinars are an affordable way to create goodwill and customer loyalty, add value, and to stay top-of-mind.
3. Webinars can be a dandy profit center: You can make money two ways with a webinar. First, you can charge people to attend. If your topic is compelling enough, that works. Second, because webinars can be recorded, by recording yours, you are creating content, and a product, that you can sell and sell again for a long time.
4. Webinars position you as the go-to expert: If you are the presenter, you must be the expert, right? Right.
For example, I have listened to many fantastic teleseminars at SpeakerNetNews – a great resource for speakers, consultants, authors, etc. They have a cadre of great speakers. Similarly, my pal Tara Reed brings in experts for her Teleseminar series, teaching artists how to make money with via licensing, branding, etc..
You could do the same in your industry.
More Great Reasons to Produce a Webinar for Your Business
5. They capture email: Creating your own e-mail list is important for marketing purposes. People who sign up for your webinar are opting in, giving you their e-mail address, and in the process, helping you grow your list.
6. They engage your audience: It is not enough these days to have a static website. People expect more. Webinars are a cool Web 2.0 tool that engages your audience and helps you forge a closer connection to your customers.
Webinar Success Secrets
So, if you think you want to put on a webinar, make sure to:
Promote the heck out of it. Many more people will sign up for the webinar than will actually attend it, so promoting it will ensure that you get enough people to check in on the day of the event. Plug the webinar on your site, tweet it, and use plenty of follow up e-mails.
Have a great subject: There is no shortage of competing ideas out there. So a great topic and name is a must.
Over-prepare. Know your subject cold. Practice the presentation, and then practice some more.
Have a great webinar you’d like to recommend and promote? Consider offering us a guest blog post on The Self-Employed Blog, today.
View Comments (2)
Steve, these are six really excellent points. I’d love to
share some experience from the front line of presenting webinars. In January of
this year I kicked of a six week series, the Bizfix Business Bootcamp. I’d
never run a webinar before, but I’m a seasoned presenter and thought “how hard
can it be.”
Writing the presentation was great. Each week we covered one
of six key aspects of business from finance to customers, sales to getting your
business found online. What I wasn’t prepared for was the phenomenal workload
this generated. On top of my normal day job of helping businesses find more
customers through strategic business advice, I was also blogging 5 times a week
and now writing and delivering a webinar once a week too. Here’s what I learned
from the experience:
1. Preparation of the technology is critical. I practiced a
couple of times before going live but it was nowhere near enough to be prepared
for being a little nervous and having to deal with so many things at once. Top
Tip: develop a checklist for what needs to be done (unmute the microphone,
start sharing the screen, start the presentation, press record) and in what
precise order.
2. Promote right up to the last possible minute, but leave
enough time for people to register and get online. Most of our registrations
came in the last few days and an email blast our to our blog subscribers,
current, and past clients and prospects really drew in the traffic, as did
Twitter and LinkedIn.
3. Recording is vital. We recorded each of the six webinars,
and have been able to use them again and again: they were a real investment and
now we are reaping the rewards. There were some technical issues with one of
the recordings and I lost days in trying to get that sorted. Test all these
things in advance would have saved a lot of anxious time in front of the
microphone.
I’m signed up to your RSS feed and look forward to your
coming webinar series.
Chris Markham @Bizfix.co.uk
Chris - Thanks for the great tips. We would love to have you write a guest blog for the site. Let us know if this would be of interest. Contact me at sstrauss@mrallbiz.com