“Wow, and we are live everyone!”
Nobody knew it, but I was as nervous as a sinner in church. Three years ago, I put on my very first live webinar, of which 30 people came to live. It turned out to be a great time (despite my nervousness), and I ended up closing ten sales of my new online course by the end of it.
Translation: I made $1,500 in one hour. I felt as if I found the fountain of youth or something. Ever since that initial webinar, I’ve made $170,000 selling that online course – and the secret to all of it is, you guessed it, my webinar.
There is no better way to sell online courses. Sales emails typically convert at one to two percent, while webinars typically convert at ten to 15 percent. That means if you have 100 people inside your live webinar room, you’ll probably convert ten to 15 of them on your offer. I’ve had some webinars convert at a 30 to 40 percent rate myself.
No matter what the experts might tell you about online courses being dead, just understand that their input is dead wrong. I’ve made more money than ever this year selling my own online course, and I expect e-learning to continue being a viable engine for solopreneurs to make money in 2021 and beyond.
Today, I want to walk you through the real magic, though: my webinar. I want to show you all the tools you need, the structure you should follow, and how to actually close sales by the end of your hour-long webinar.
Strap in, I’m going to reveal pretty much everything.
Why Webinars Actually Work
First, you need to understand why webinars actually work. Webinars are live shows online that people can sign up for and come to digitally. Typically, it consists of one presenter going through some sort of PowerPoint where they teach the viewers something.
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Most times there is in fact a sales pitch at the end for a course, a book, coaching, or something else. It’s not like a live call where you can speak with the presenter – you are simply watching from your screen and can comment in the chatbox.
Webinars are incredibly useful sales tools because your viewers can see and hear you. Would you feel closer to a pen pal or someone you do video calls with every week? We trust people we can see and hear – not necessarily a stranger on the internet.
Why not just use an email pitch? Well, a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? How about 30 frames per second for one hour on a webinar? Would a thousand-word email really be more convincing than getting to watch and listen to someone for an hour on a live call?
The fact that we trust people more when we can see and hear them makes webinars so lethal.
The Tools I Use for a Good Webinar
- WebinarJam ($499 per year) – WebinarJam is what I use to put on my webinars. If you need something more affordable, you can try WebinarNinja for $39 per month. With that, you’ll get up to 100 live attendees in the room.
- Teachable ($29 per month for the base plan) – Teachable is where your online school will actually be hosted. More importantly, though, it’s the place you can accept payments.
- Google Slides (free) – I use Google Slides to create my presentation. It’s free!
- Deadline Funnel ($49 per month) – This is my secret weapon. It provides urgency by putting a countdown timer at the bottom of your sales page. It’s easy to pair with Teachable’s Sales Pages.
Also, you’ll need a USB microphone and webcam so your audience can see and hear you during the presentation. Any will do. I’ve had a $20 USB microphone for the last three years – that will be fine.
How To Get People To Sign up for Your Webinar
A quick note here. This blog post is really all about the structure for a successful webinar. I’ve talked about how to get new subscribers and webinar sign-ups in a previous post. Go check that out if you want some education on that.
The most important part of a successful webinar is the presentation itself. I trust most readers can figure out how to set up a webinar on their own via Webinar Ninja or Webinar Jam – it’s not that difficult with some light googling. Let’s get into what a great presentation looks like that’ll help you potentially sell thousands of dollars worth of digital merchandise.
How To Make a Great Webinar Introduction
There are three parts to every webinar: the introduction, the main points, and the sales pitch. The introduction is typically the easiest part.
There are three things you need to do in every introduction.
- Introduce yourself as a credible authority figure
- Establish your method as a gold mine of opportunity that few have thought of before
- Reiterate that those watching can be successful (use case studies)
I’ll give you an example from my webinar of each.
My webinar, which is called “How To Make An Extra $1,000 Per Month On Medium,” is about how Medium can be a game-changer for writers online. To establish credibility, I talked about my own journey as a Medium writer, and how I have upwards of 48,000 followers on the platform.
For the second must-do from above, I need to present Medium as this wild new opportunity. The good thing is, it is. I talk about how traditional methods of building a blog on WordPress are difficult with the odds stacked against the writer, and how Medium is much easier to grow a following on since there are so many people reading there already.
This step is crucial. You need your audience to have this almost-drastic shift in thinking. The better you argue that you have this grand new opportunity for everyone, the easier it will be to sell later on.
The last step here is to show that anyone watching can find success. Typically, you’ll throw in a case study about how a student of yours or someone you know found success using your “new opportunity.” For me, I talk about how a student of mine made $400 on Medium after three short months of publishing his blog posts there.
Now, the audience respects you, is interested in this “new opportunity,” and is somewhat convinced they can do it, too. Typically, an introduction takes about ten minutes to get through. Mine has 28 slides.
Now is the time to get into your main points.
How To Deliver Your Main Points
“A webinar is not about teaching.” When I heard webinar expert Russell Brunson say that a few years ago, I thought it was some sick joke. Then what’s a webinar for? His answer was something that changed webinars for me forever.
“Webinars are about breaking down barriers to purchase.”
Then Russell went on to explain that every point of your “main presentation” should break down a barrier to purchase. My main presentation, which takes place right after my introduction, has three points and breaks down three barriers to purchase without the audience really knowing it.
For instance, the first point of my webinar is about why 99 percent of writers do not succeed. My answer? They aren’t successful because they don’t believe that writing is a skill that can be learned. Instead, they think it’s a talent that people are born with.
When I started thinking about why people might not buy my Medium Mastery course, I realized many just don’t believe they can be a good writer. Most wouldn’t even entertain my offer for a moment because they were so sure writing is a talent and not a skill.
If it’s a talent, then why do my journal entries from six years ago suck so bad?
I tell a story in my first point about how, after failing my freshman year English class for most of the semester, I aced my final paper with a lot of hard work and salvaged my grade.
I do the same thing with my other two points. I tell stories to break down barriers. My webinars are more inspirational than educational, and guess what? The audience always tells me afterwards about how much they learned and enjoyed it.
Write down the three biggest barriers you can think of for why someone might not purchase your course and design a presentation that breaks down each of them. Mine were:
- Writers are born, not made.
- Medium isn’t a good place to make money.
- I have no time to write every day.
Once you get your main presentation done, which should take about 15 to20 minutes, now we get to the sales portion. My main presentation has about 55 slides in it.
How To Close the Sale on a Webinar
Once you’re done with your three main points, it’s time to transition to selling. You first have to ask the audience a simple question:
“If you did all of what I showed you to do in this webinar today, would you be confident you could succeed as a ______?”
For me, I fill that blank with “Medium writer.” Maybe you’re teaching people how to become a real estate agent, for instance. Make sure you ask them that question.
Then you talk about how there’s a LOT more to it than that, and that you’ve created a product for those who want the entire process from start to finish.
Then you introduce your product!
The way that I sell my course at the end of my webinar is by using something called a Stack Slide. It was made famous by Russel Brunson, but the basic gist of it is you list off all the things your audience is going to get, one-by-one, in your sales pitch.
Here’s an example (above). I show people the entire value of what they’ll get in my online course one-by-one, meaning I don’t just show the above slide and talk about it for ten minutes. I slowly reveal each part of the deal. The audience gets to watch the value go up right in front of their eyes.
When I show them how valuable the course actually is, that’s when I slowly walk the price down to $199. I tell them they won’t have to pay $2,000 for all of this, not even $1,000 for it all, but only $199. I establish the value first, then I reveal the price.
I tell them they will only be able to get my course at the $199 price point for the next 20 minutes, and I share a link with them that immediately starts a countdown timer when they click on it.
If you want to see what that countdown timer looks like, take a look here.
I use Deadline Funnel to make that work on the backend. Once the 20 minutes are up, they get redirected automatically to my real sales page that lists the course for $399 and lose out on the coupon.
Here’s a post about how to integrate Deadline Funnel and Teachable. This post is more about the webinar presentation, so my apologies for not explaining the technical side of this in detail.
Also, Russell Brunson talks about the Slide Stack a lot in Expert Secrets.
I highly recommend you get that book because it’s a gold mine of great webinar secrets. That book is the reason my webinars convert at such a high rate today. It’s hard to find good advice about webinars on the internet, but I assure you all the advice you need to succeed (along with all the resources) are right here in this blog post and in that book.
