2 Reasons You Should Consider Having a Webinar to Attract New Prospects

How would you like to conduct a speaking event from the comfort of your home or office? As business owner, you can attract new prospects to fill your pipeline by using your computer with internet access. Imagine attracting new prospects and getting more clients from everywhere online.

You teach others about who you are, how you can help them, and let them know what you do, right from your computer by hosting a webinar. There are 2 good reasons to host a webinar.

Reason #1 Convenience of Hosting a Webinar

Imagine not having to travel to a venue to conduct a speaking event. You can have your speaking event right from the comfort of your home or office. You also don’t need any expensive equipment. Most likely you already have a desk top computer or laptop. So, the only investment you need is a microphone, headset and a webcam (if yours in not built-in to your computer).

You can also use the earbuds that came with your iPad or iPhone, plug it into your Apple computer and use it for your webinar. However, I do recommend using a professional headset which sounds clearer and you can buy a good brand for under $100.

Reason #2: Low-Cost Marketing to Host a Webinar

Sure, you’ll need to find a platform to conduct your webinars, one of the popular ones is Zoom. It’s one of the easiest to learn and I’ve helped many business owners with their webinars using Zoom. There is a difference with a Zoom Meeting vs. Zoom Webinar. Majority of my clients found Zoom Webinar to be intuitive and not much of a learning curve.

I recommend clients Zoom Webinar, LogMeIn’s GoToWebinar, Webinar Jam, for small to medium-sized business owners. First choice is Zoom and the second choice is GoToWebinar it’s affordable and the learning curve is not too bad.

In order to have a webinar using Zoom’s platform you’ll need to have a paid account. They have a free Zoom Meeting account, but you’ll need to pay extra to have webinar features. You have the option as an add-in feature, pay monthly or buy their annual plan. (Check with Zoom on the payment plan and how long you can use the webinar features). You may be able to provide unlimited webinars for a whole year which can be cost-effective. You can create different webinar topics to broadcast every 2-3 months.

How to Start: Your Webinar Prep

Select a topic for your webinar

Perhaps you have a specialty as business owner or help a specific target audience. If you specialize wellness, you can talk about how to have a sense of peace, healthy diets, coaching plans. Depending on your topic, it can also be an evergreen topic.

Evergreen topics means you’re talking about a topic that can last for a few years and you can have your webinar running over and over again after you record it. You can add this recording to your website or as a lead magnet to have new prospects opt-in through your website.

The only thing you would have to be aware of having an evergreen webinar is if something changes in your industry since it runs for a long time (forever). Then you’ll need to either create a new webinar or edit and update a portion of it.

Decide on a date to have your webinar

You want to broadcast your webinar typically during a weekday. Consider your targeted audience’s time. Do they work during the day and can only attend in the evenings?

Also decide if you want them to register anyways so if they cannot attend the live webinar the time you selected, they can still get a recording of the webinar. This is an option you can add in.

In addition, to send your announcement to your email list, you should market your webinar event to your social media profiles often. Or you can lead them to your sales landing page for the webinar event and add the registration link and include permission to add them to your email list.

You’ll also want to consider ample time for the launch of the webinar. Plan on announcing your webinar about 4-6 weeks in advance of the actual broadcast event. This will allow time for people to register, get email reminders to attend.

Create Your Webinar Slides

You’ll most likely need to use Keynote or PowerPoint and create your slides. Create some slides, that have easy to read content maybe 2-5 bullet points and please do not read your bulleted points word for word. People can read it themselves. You should be doing the speaking and going into details about each of those points.

Create Your Event in Zoom

In the Zoom Webinar platform, you create the title of your event, select the date, the time, whether there’s a password to enter the webinar or not. Once you finish creating your event, copy the registration information which includes the link. Add this link in your email blasts. If you have a landing page, add the link here too.

How Long Should your Webinar be?

A best practice is to have it no longer than 45-minutes which also should include time for Q&A. The maximum time is one hour. If it goes over because people have questions, it’s up to you but let them know how many minutes they have left before you end the webinar. Let them know if you cannot address their questions during the live webinar, how you will be in touch with them. Also, include in your last slide your contact info, your website address and anything else you want to share such as your social media profiles.

Here are some questions to ask if before you hire a VA for Webinar Tech Support

What platform do they use? If they say Zoom, ask them what’s the difference between a Zoom Meeting and a Zoom Webinar?
What would you do if my internet goes down while we are having a live event?
How do you prepare for the webinar?
What are housekeeping rules?
Who will moderate it?

Remember, a webinar is a virtual event that’s conducted online. It can be live or pre-recorded. It has a host, presenter and attendees (if live) that can listen and attend from anywhere in the world from their computers with internet access.

In conclusion, here are the steps you need to create a webinar: