Webinars

Hi. So this is Paul. I want to talk to you about webinars. Webinars are such a great way for coaches, consultants, therapists, counselors. In fact, any kind of business. They're a great tool to allow you to get in front of your audience. A good webinar platform will record all the video for your webinars so that you've got content that can be repurposed.

You can cut it up, use it on your social media channels. Instagram, tik tok, that kind of thing. They're a great way to offer downloads. To get sign ups, you can sell on your webinar so you can give some free value content. Tell people what you're selling. Maybe it's a course. Maybe it's a product. And then at the end of the webinar, you can do a pitch to look that person into a great offer.

The better webinar platforms will allow you to record a series of webinars and bundle them together and sell them as a course. Also, depending which we have an OTT platform you use, they'll allow you to have your courses and webinars for free. Well, they could be tied into a payment gateway such as Stripe, so that you can actually charge for your webinars.

So one thing that you can do is bundle a series of webinars together to create a training course, for example. And then you can sell the collection of webinars or the group of webinars as the entire coaching package. Of course, a key part of your webinars is your slide deck. Don't make mistake. I did many years ago. I used to live in the corporate world ways to dress the suit and tie every day.

And we had these very neat corporate templates for our presentations, so they'd have the same footer, the same header. Now they've been very nice, but from side to side it was only the content that changed for certain audiences. Those worked very well. But in online marketing, if somebody is going to be watching your presentation, you've got to keep them engaged.

You've got to keep their interest. We all know that in the online world, people's attention span is very, very small. So if you show first people the same template every time, we've just the content has changed, they're going to gradually zone out. They're going to switch off. Now, in the world of psychology, there are things called passing trucks, and you need to put those to good use in your presentation.

And a passive interrupt is something like a different color, a different image. So every slide is buying something different, buying something different. So in that way, the user who's watching your webinar, they don't know what to expect next. With the old corporate template idea, if you've got the same background, the same fish with the same header, even if the content is really amazing, people are just going to zone out the kind of expect to see what's next and they're start to just lose the plot.

But if you've got like a bright orange slide and a bright red slide, a bright green slide or a bright yellow and different images, and you move the text around from place to place. Don't always put it in the same place. That's called a pattern interrupt. And every time you put a new sign in front of your audience, they have to reengage you, that they have to work out where everything is.

Now, that might sound very subtle, but it's a really important way to keep your audience engaged. But more importantly, you will make sure that your audience is absorbing and digesting the great content that you're giving to them. So make sure your size it colorful. They're engaging. Don't have too much. Don't have too much on each side. Break it down nicely so you can spread your webinar out.

Don't forget that if you want to at the end of the webinar, you can offer to give away your slide deck. The other thing that's really important in a webinar is the actual structure of the webinar not depends on the purpose. If you're offering a sales webinar, why we think it's polite at the beginning of the webinar to see signpost, to order to let them know in advance that you're going to be making them a great offer at the end.

Because I always feel it's a little bit sneaky if you watch a webinar, then right at the end of the webinar, there's a big sales pitch that you weren't really expecting. I think that can be a bit cheeky, but if you set the scene upfront, if you explain to your users junior introduction that you're going to be making it an offer to them at the end, a really good offer, then if they're kind of primed to know what to expect.

So when you do your pitch at the end of the webinar, they're not going to be surprised and not going to be so irritated, perhaps because they know what's coming. And if your values good throughout the webinar, then there's every reason for them to stay. Now, another thing that people often do in webinars is to keep the agent you want to keep your audience engaged, and you want to you want to make sure they stay to the end.

So here we look at content, but so that you can actually make the offer at the end of the webinar. A really great way to do that is during the introduction. The webinar is to tell people that you're going to offer a really amazing special free gift at the end of the webinar. So that entices people to stay.

That encourages them to stay for the full duration because they know at the end of the webinar they're going to get a free gift. Don't tell them what the free gift is because it might be something that doesn't interest them. So they might think, Oh, I don't want that free gift because I know what it is, so they won't stay.

But if you use curiosity to pick their interest, I'll just plant that seed of interest. Then people are more likely to stay to attend a webinar, and obviously you do want to give them something of value and you might be an e-book, it might be a template, it might be a free booking call for a consultation with you or something of that nature.

It might be a free empathy, maybe, you know, maybe you were doing meditation or something like that. So you can give a free MP3 download. Maybe you're an accounting service and you can give them like a free tax advice sheet, something like that. You know, there's lots of ideas that you can do, but the whole idea is at the beginning of the webinar, you make the promise that you're going to give a great gift that's going to be released to the audience at the end of the webinar.

And then, sure enough, at the end of the webinar, you put a download button on your screen that allows you to download it. So going back to the slide that there are various tools you can use, I think most of us have heard of Microsoft, PowerPoint, Google Slides. It is very good that you also know that you can use Canva Canvas, very good for creating slides.

Now the important thing is that inside PowerPoint you can do lots of really crazy things like animations. You can slide things on the screen, all kinds of whizzy stuff, which is great for interest. However, I would say that most webinar platform won't support that. Most webinar platforms allow you to present a PDF or PNG files which are just image files.

It's very easy to export those from your from your packet, from things like PowerPoint. You can you can export every side of the PNG file that upload it to your webinar platform. But if you use animations and all that kind of stuff, it probably isn't going to work. Although the webinar platform will allow you to do a screen share.

So you could actually arguably do your slides with all the snazzy animations. And I don't think you should really do that. Keep it simple. The simpler things are, the easy. They're going to be, and the more reliable they're going to run. Because on a webinar there's a lot of moving parts and the symphony can keep repeating the better it's going to work.

The other really important thing, of course, in a webinar is to talk about the hardware that you need. You need to have a quality microphone because the quality of your voice will help you to connect with your audience. If you've got a tiny microphone, it doesn't sound that good. You'll lose that human connection, which is so important to talk to your audience and help them for engaged get into trust.

You get into like because they can hear the quality of your voice. So I'd recommend investing in a good microphone, something like a blue yeti, and there's plenty of other ones out there. But do spend some money because invariably the microphone is built into your PC or your webcam. Although it's fine for phone calls and video calls and that kind of thing, it's probably not quite good enough to do a webinar.

The next thing you need is to have a good webcam. Now, although the cameras inside computers such as Windows Boxes and Apple Macs, that kind of thing, are pretty good. But obviously they're restricted in terms of position. I'm actually using a Logitech Brio at the moment, which is a four HD camera. It's really, really good. You can vary the the scene size, the width of the actual visual window that you're using is very well recognizes.

The ultimate goal they make is an HD 920 that's the this that's the that's the model I was using previously works very, very well but again, you know, you want to be able to film yourself in high resolution so your audience gets the best experience. Another thing that's really important I strongly recommend is that you use an Ethernet cable to plug your computer into your router.

Now wi fi is getting better and better and better, but wi fi is very subject to interference, all of that kind of thing. And video streaming is very, very bandwidth intensive. If you use a hard wired Ethernet cable, you get over all the limitations. When you're running a webinar you want to give you or your audience the best possible experience.

So I thoroughly recommend you get yourself a cheap you're only about $10 something of that nature, a good quality Ethernet cable to plug your computer directly into your router. I can almost guarantee also, if you run a speed test over Wi-Fi and then run the same speed test with the Ethernet cable connected, I would expect you would see a very, very high improvement in the bandwidth.

So to give you a webinar is the best possible chance of running smoothly. You use an Ethernet cable because that's a really worthwhile investment. It won't cost you very much money whatsoever. Of course, the key thing you need is the actual webinar platform people use Zoom. Great Zoom is great because in some respects it's good that you can see your audience.

But the thing with Zoom is it's missing a lot of key webinar facilities. For example, if you want to do an automated replay, if you want to do On-Demand webinars, a follow up sequence and evaluation form, reminder emails, all of those different things. And as I was saying earlier, if you want to group your webinars together into a into a course that you could twice take it on, then Zoom is not gonna let you do that.

I personally recognize so I personally recommend Webinar Geek is a great platform. The technical support excellent is very intuitive. It's very, very well thought out. I've been using it quite some time. I've actually delivered probably well over 100 webinars using Webinar eight now and I obviously love it. And they're improving all the time, new features and improving the quality bugfixes where you could know that I've never found many bugs, to be honest with you.

But Webinar Geek, I've looked at all the different platforms. This webinar gem, easy webinar, go to webinar, bluejeans demo is a very long list of quality products out there, but I've looked at all of them and it terms of pricing and what you get for your money and the quality. For me, Webinar Key is the best platform out there to use.

I would highly recommend it. You can sign up for free subscription. I think you get 14 days for free. You test out the features, you could even run some like webinars. So I'd recommend if you're looking at a webinar platform, look at webinar key and I'm pretty sure you'll find it's really, really good. Okay, so you've got your hardware, you've got your software, you've got your slides, you're going to do your first webinar.

Now, I would strongly recommend you put yourself together a checklist because there's a lot of moving parts to webinar and it's quite overwhelming at first. So you want a checklist that runs something like test your microphone, test your video, have a glass of water ready. I know. Take a bathroom visit before we start the webinar because you don't want to get caught out halfway through.

Do a quick check in the mirror, make sure you've got nothing on your face that shouldn't be there. Do a voice warm up. It's very important when you're talking to people that your voice is in good order, that your lips are working properly. You know, if we go to the gym, we do a warm up and there are there are some voice exercises you can do.

You can do a bit of Googling, but you can find there are some good voice warm ups that you can do so that you're speaking at your best in front of your audience. So that's also worthwhile to do. Every time you run your webinar, you'll probably find a little mistake that you made or something you could've done better.

Go to checklist, put it on there next time you're on the webinar. I would say start the webinar well, actually get your checklist out about an hour before the webinar when you're new to it, run through the checklist, make sure everything's running smoothly. The old saying is that it's better to be an hour early to 5 minutes late.

And in terms of time, what I always recommend we do is to actually open the door, see a webinar, so to speak, open doors 10 minutes early. So you not actually start your presentation, but you're opening the webinar so that people can come in, they can see you on the screen, you can have a bit of a chat with them, introduce yourself if you want to, but start the actual presentation paying on time.

And in terms of time, what I always recommend we do is to actually open the door, see a webinar, so to speak, open doors 10 minutes early. So you not actually start your presentation, but you're opening the webinar so that people can come in, they can see you on the screen, you can have a bit of a chat with them, introduce yourself if you want to, but start the actual presentation paying on time.

The presenter is there. Why should we be held up by late comers? That's, you know, we all have problems in life. I respect that. People get stuck in traffic. Things can happen and they want to come to the webinar. But it's not fair on those that have turned up on time. They don't forget you people give you their time.

Time is precious. You don't get an infinite amount of analogs. If you're going to say 10:00, start at 10:00. Don't keep don't hang around for late comers. If they turn up late, it's not your problem. They'll catch up. They can host you can send them a replay later on and they can catch up on the five or 10 minutes that they missed in the beginning.

I'm sure they won't mind. So pressure to start on time is what I would strongly recommend. I always think at the beginning of the webinar it's a good idea to signpost. So you can do like a little agenda to say maybe a list of bullet points of the things you're going to discuss, including the offer that I was talking about earlier on.

And of course, you should perhaps keep webinars about 45 minutes to an hour. If it's the first time people engage with you, you don't want to overrun your time. Obviously, there can be questions and answers. I it's kind of if you have someone else who can host the webinar with you, they could be possibly answering or or fielding the questions in the background.

Again, it depends on the webinar software that you have, but with webinar geek, which is the platform we use, any questions can be answered either in real time on the spot, or they could be emailed so that you can deal with with an email after the event. It's obviously very important you try and answer your audiences questions, but make sure you've got a facility to do that that we're curious if you're finding that same questions come up time and again, then you might find that you want to revisit your slides and address those questions, preempt them, so to speak.

So the next time you do the webinar, you kind of address those questions that frequently come up. So that's pretty much it. I think I've probably shared everything I know about webinars now in about So what is it about ten or 15 minutes or so, first time you run one can be very nerve wracking. It's be like driving the car.

Is it you going to put your foot the clutch, lift the handbrake off, put the indicators on change gear, turn this through. There's a lot to think about. But when you start the second time and the third time and the fourth time, you start to become very familiar with all those different things that you have to do when you get to your fifth or fifth or sixth webinar, I'd suggest that they'll run very smoothly, you'll feel very relaxed.

You can start to really enjoy doing them. But the thing is practice as well. The first time that you're going to do a webinar, I would suggest you do a dry run with nobody watching. Well, maybe get a friend or relative to watch with you and then they can give you some feedback. They can give you some advice on how your delivery of speech went, how your articulation went, how your appearance went, how the subject went, but always do a dry run first, even if you don't have a camera stand in front of the mirror.

I find a lot of people are quite comfortable doing that. They seem to be afraid of their own voice. And that's no surprise because it's not something we do every day. If it was very alien to us to stand in a room and speak on our own, but you get used to it. It's like everything in life. Familiarity breeds comfort.

You'll get very comfortable with it, and practice makes perfect it again and again and again. And you'll become very polished and you start to have fun with it. Once you overcome the first technical hurdles and the anxiousness, the anxiety and all the things that go on there, you'll start to really have fun with it. Few things I've learned which are quite interesting now.

I'm sure that we've all heard our voice on a recording and we realize that our voice sounds complete different, and we kind of, oh, we call us squirm, as you may realize. The reason for that is that when we hear our own voice, we're hearing it through the vibrations in our jaw. We're not really hearing it through the airwaves into our ear.

We do have some of that as well. But we're also hearing it through the vibrations in our head. But obviously our friends and relatives and our audience, they only they only ever hear through the airwaves and they're familiar with that voice. But when you hear yourself the first time, your voice sounds very different. So that's the first thing.

The second thing that is really interesting, and I only learned this a while ago, when you see yourself in the mirror every day, you become your brain. Your mind becomes very familiar with the image in front of you. You've probably spent a life, you know, looking at mirror, brushing your teeth or having a shave or fetching something out of your eye.

So throughout your life, you spent many, many, many times looking in the mirror. So your entire mind is very familiar with the image of you. Where do you see yourself on video for the first time? Maybe a recording, or you're standing in front of the live camera depending on the software. If you're watching a recording, the image is going to be the other way around.

You'll see yourself as everybody has always seen you. But for you, is this quite a different experience? Your brain hasn't seen that very often, and the way that the brain communicates is something wrong is by the feelings of anxiousness and discomfort, because although logically you can see the video and you know, you know it surely well that it's you, but your face is the other way around.

And our faces, they're not symmetric. They're not exactly the same. When you flip them round. So our mind is having some real problems with this because it sees it sees the person on the on the screen, but it's something wrong because it's the other way around. So your like your psyche is kind of giving you that kind of little nudge of discomfort, say, hey, is there something wrong here?

There's something wrong. Obviously, there's nothing wrong, but it's just an image of yourself that you're not familiar with. Now, in a lot of software and things like Logitech and webinars and many other platforms, they'll have an option so that you can actually view yourself reversed. So what you see is when you are on the video, you see the mirror image of yourself, which is what you're very familiar with.

The software vendors have actually latched onto the fact that, you know, if you see yourself the right way around, it's actually quite disconcerting because when you turn your head that way, the image on the screen goes the other way. And that's quite unnerving. If you're trying to do a video and your head's moving the opposite way around, you can.

Your mind is not used to seeing that you're used to seeing the mirror image where you turn your head that way. The reflection follows. It doesn't go the other way. So they give the option software to leave it reverse because it's much more comfortable to do the video anyway. That's just another little thing that's interesting because your brain's just not used to seeing you the other way around.

But believe me, when you've done video recording for quite a few times and we've lost quite a few times that part of your subconscious, which is giving you those little niggly warning signs that something's quite right, eventually it gives other things. Okay, that is you. I realize it's fine, but it's just one of those things, you know, with comfort, with familiarity, with practice, you get more comfortable doing them.

So that's pretty much what I've got to say about webinars now. I really want to encourage you to get out there, start doing them. You can you can look me up if you want to find out any details, ask me any questions. I've got my contact details here below the video. So please do get in touch and I'll be delighted to help you.

Webinars that can be very lucrative, very successful. Once you've got your webinar running really smoothly, you know, getting conversions at the end of it, you can automate them and then you've got an automated away runs. You run your ads, you run your traffic to your web or not booking page, your webinars run automatically. You don't have to be there.

You can scale up. And that's that's where you can be really successful at making money depending on the nature of your business. Anyway, thanks again. That's Paul. See you again soon.