4 Ways to Use Online Webinars to Boost Your Blogging Income
I want to share with you a new medium that I have been using with some success. Online Webinars have been around for some time now, but I have been surprised at how well they have worked on different blogs of mine with different audiences.
It is amazingly simple to host a webinar these days. All you need to do is sign up for a free trial with a site like GoToWebinar.com and you are in business to try out unlimited webinars for 30 days. You can have as many as 100 people in your webinar at one time. Webinars allow you to put a human touch to your blog and your message. I believe that this can help you in a big way obtain clients, sell more products, and just win over more followers. While there certainly are more than 3 ways to boost your blogging income with webinars, here are three that I have recently used with great success.
1. Put Together a Comprehensive Webinar Series
This is actually something that Bob and I did right at the beginning of our blogging adventure together here at Blogging Your Passion. We hosted a 5 part Webinar Series in which we dispensed in great detail just about everything that we knew about blogging. We charged $247 for access to the 5 week event and honestly we launched this series without a ton of traffic. In fact, we were not sure how it was going to turn out. We ended up having 30+ people signed up. We were pleased with the result.
2. Hold an Affordable One Time Webinar
The following income idea is something that I have been experimenting with on my Career Coach site. I decided to host a low-cost webinar that is packed with content on a hot topic. I charged just $7.00 for a 90 minute webinar. Think about the math for a moment. If you were able to get just 20 Attendees x $7.00 = $140. While that may not seem like a lot, is there anything else you can make $140 for 90 minutes of your time? On top of that, you get to share and talk about something you love and are passionate about. Also, what if you advertised for 2-3 weeks and filled up all 100 spots? Now, you are looking at $700 for 90 minutes of your time.
By the way, A great way to promote webinars is to use an online ticketing system called EventBrite. I love their promotional materials and widgets that they have available. They even have a really cool “countdown clock” widget that you can easily paste into the sidebar of your blog that will promote your webinar for you. You can sign up for a free account at EventBrite.com.
Just to stretch you a little bit further, you could also offer a bigger ticketed item while you have a captive audience. For example, one of my webinars was about how to show up at the top of the search results for Linkedin and Google with your resume. After I explained in detail how to do the work in a 90 minute webinar, I offered a $297 product to work closely with me on getting the process completed. I was able to pick up more sales from my “captive audience.” Suddenly a $140 in profit can turn into $437 by just selling one $297 upgrade. Just food for thought…
3. Hold Free Q&A Webinars to Boost Your Credibility
Holding Free Q&A Webinars is something that Bob and I have done with the audience here on Blogging Your Passion. In fact, it is something we more than likely will do again very soon. Just by opening up the lines for questions, we were able to quickly identify what our audience was interested in and it really helped us to get a better “pulse” in general. I can almost guarantee that if you promote a free webinar for a week or two even if you have minimal traffic, you will gather an audience. You then have the opportunity to connect with them in a very personal way. As they listen to you teach and answer questions, you can begin to build credibility with them. People like to do business with people they genuinely trust and like. Free webinars give you that ability.
4. Turn Your Recorded Webinars into Products
Lastly, despite the method above that you use, record all of your webinars. You can then choose to sell any of these webinars however you would like. We have sold a good number of the Blogging Your Passion Webinar Series recordings long after we recorded these live sessions. That is now passive income for us. We already put in the hard work, but the content is there to make money for you. In fact, a few days after a I recorded the $7 webinar, I was still getting emails asking if they could purchase the recording.
What I just outlined is something that any of you can do. Just think about the “hot topics” that surround your passion and go for hosting a webinar using one of the methods above. One great thing about most of the Webinar software packages out there is that they allow you to hide the attendee count. The very first webinar series I ever did (over a year ago), I only had 4 people sign up. I did charge $47 so it was worth it to me. However, I did the live webinar as if I was speaking to 100 people. I gave them the same amount of energy, quality content, and effort that I would if it was sold out. They knew no different, and I gained from the experience. Get out of your comfort zone and try something new!
