Last week’s episode was SO popular — it was all about how to hold a 5 day challenge. In that same vein, I get a lot of questions about how to hold a webinar. So I thought, let’s keep going with these mini-trainings and give you the rundown on what you need to set up a webinar and make it successful!
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Transcript
Hello health coaches! You know ? Last week’s episode was so popular, it was all about how to hold a five day challenge. I don’t know if you were able to catch that one. If you haven’t, go back to episode number 80 and definitely get the scoop on five day challenges, but in that same vein, I get a lot of questions about how to hold a webinar. Oh yeah. It is a big topic and it’s confusing and I know you want to hear more about it, so I thought, let’s keep going. Doing these sort of mini trainings so I can give you the rundown on what you need to set up a webinar and make it successful.
But first, before we get into it today, I need to say hello to one of our listeners, Ashley Lauren RD, who left this five star review on iTunes. She said, “Keep on being you, Michelle. I cannot thank you enough for your helpful content, caring heart and incredible energy. I found your Facebook page before your podcast. Your Facebook group is so great that I felt comfortable enough to ask a question and then without hesitation, you jumped in and turned my question into a podcast episode. Wow. Michelle, you go above and beyond for your community and I cannot say enough good things. All of your podcasts are full of useful content. It’s obvious that you want all of us to win and my favorite part is your energy. I can hear you smiling through my headphones. You bring so much positive energy that it makes me want to learn more from you and that skill alone sets you apart. Thank you for being you.”
Ashley. Girl. That really touched my heart. Thank you. Sometimes I think we all doubt a little bit what we’re doing like, geez, am I really helping anybody? And reading your review just gave me such a smile and yes, I do truly want you to succeed. I can only reach so many people on my own. I can only help so many clients. So many of my clients achieve better health, but together we are changing the world and that’s super, super exciting for me. God knows the world needs it. Right? So thank you Ashley. Please send us your mailing address. Just email it to support@healthcoachpower.com and reference episode number 81 so we can send a little thank you gift your way.
All right, so let’s dive in and start talking about webinars. If you’re here with me live and I know some of you are, the chat is open and ready for your questions. I’m here to help you. That’s why I do this live. So don’t be shy, jump in, ask anything as we go along that I either, maybe I’m not being clear about or you just have a question related to what we’re talking about.
Let me know. Okay. I want you guys to start when it comes to holding a webinar, I want to start by knowing the answer to this question. Ah, this is going to be a toughie. Ready? What is the goal of your webinar? Ah, what is the goal? In other words, what’s going to make this webinar a success for you? You know, you and I may have very different goals when we hold a webinar. There’s no right or wrong answer to this. Your goal may just be like, Michelle, I just want to stand in front of my little laptop camera and not pee my pants. That’s it. You know? That could be the goal and if that’s the goal, great, you will be able to know whether or not you succeeded at the end of that webinar based on how wet your pants are. Okay, so that could be your goal.
Your goal can be that you’re intending to grow your mailing list. Okay? If that’s the case, you’re going to need to plan to promote this webinar far and wide across all channels, not just to your current audience, but maybe your goal is going to be less about list growth and it’s going to be more about wanting to sell your services to your correct list, your current audience. Now, in that case, you would promote heavily to your list, to your warm audience, and you would come up with a great offer for them. In any case, depending on what your goal is, you want to know what you’re trying to achieve so that you can measure your success. In the end, and I just think it’s so important because if you don’t know what your goal is, then you’re never going to feel good about what you’ve achieved.
If you go into it and you’re like, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know how I measured success. You can make several sales and then you’re just going to beat yourself up and say, well, why didn’t I make more sales? But if your goal was to make like five sales and you made five sales, you would think, Hey, I’m awesome. So set your own expectations about what you’re trying to achieve and then you can make the proper decisions along the way to get you there. No, I bet. When I first said the first thing you need to do for a webinar, you weren’t thinking, Oh, I need to decide what the goal of the webinar is because that just seems way too basic. I bet you were thinking, well, what’s my webinar are going to be about? That’s a great question. What is your webinar going to be about?
Does anybody right now thinking about holding a webinar? Just tell me in the chat if you have some ideas about what you might like to hold a webinar about. When you think about this, I want you to frame your thinking in terms of what does my ideal client want more than anything. And if you can answer that question, if you know they’re big problem and you know what their desired outcome is, then the answer to that question can basically become the title of your webinar. And I’m going to give you an example. I want to just step outside of the health and wellness space for a second because sometimes we’re like all drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit too much and that’s helpful to just look at other industries and what other industries are doing cause good marketing. Often you know it’s going to be pretty similar whether you’re selling a detox or weight loss or you’re, you’re selling in this case, this webinar I came across last week was selling a positive parenting course.
Okay, so I can’t remember exactly what the webinar was called, but it was something like this. And let me tell you, I signed up in a heartbeat. It was called something like no more yelling positive parenting solutions that will have your child listening tonight. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I saw that and I was like, good God, I need that right now. I think I just came across it after a particularly difficult morning with my five and eight year old and to see that, Oh, have your child listening by tonight. No more yelling like I am their target market and that is exactly what I want. So it didn’t have to be like a catchy tricky, funny headline or anything like that. It was just exactly what this mom wants and needs, which is no more yelling. Got it. So they had me hook, line and sinker.
I signed up for that immediately and listened to it right away. In fact, I bought what they were selling at the end. So how’s that for marketing? Well done. So you want to come up with a title or topic that is just a straightforward and promising your ideal client. Exactly what he or she wants right now. Don’t get too clever. Don’t get too tricky with your words or coming up with this like alliteration or some kind of like fancy copywriting. Just tell them that you’re going to give them what they want. Okay. That’s what’s going to get people to sign up. Now let’s talk a little bit about the logistics. Actually holding a webinar. It’s kind of funny because technically right now at this very moment, I am hosting a webinar. It’s not the kind of webinar that you’re usually thinking of when you’re thinking of a webinar, but I am in fact using my webinar tool.
I am broadcasting through my webinar tool and a, yeah, I mean a webinar is really just a video audio platform that allows you to broadcast over the old interwebs and reach people who can either join you inside of the webinar platform or what I do for these Q and A’s is I live stream into our Facebook group that’s kind of advanced. We’re not going to talk about that too much today, but what is the tool that I’m using? I use Zoom and Zoom is an incredibly powerful tool. I use it for all kinds of stuff. You can use it to meet with your clients, especially clients who live overseas and you’re not going to be talking over the phone this way you can see them in video if you want some very, very stable platform. I find it to be more reliable than using Skype.
I use Zoom to record podcast episodes like this. I use them to record podcasts when I have a guest, you know from a maybe another part of the country and we’re going to come together on Zoom and record that way. And then of course they use it for true webinars where usually selling something to my audience. So, you need some kind of weapon webinars or online meeting tool like Zoom or another broadcasting tool like Go To Webinar, which I actually have never used myself but I have been a participant on many Go To Webinars and it seems to work really well. I find that Zoom has everything that I need for very, very affordable price. Yes, there is a free Zoom package which you can sign up for right away. Just you can get comfortable on the platform and that is very, very useful. You can just practice with your friend or your mom or something.
Just learning how to push all the buttons and make the thing work. However, there are limitations to the free package. If you upgrade, it’s like $15 a month, so my goodness, if you want to hold a webinar, go ahead and upgrade. You don’t even have to continue paying for it. You can always just downgrade again after you hold the webinar, but give yourself all the features that you need. Have a true Zoom meeting. That should be enough to get started at $15 a month. I don’t get any kickback for this, by the way. I just love this tool. I personally have a Zoom video webinar package, which has some extra features, so I think I pay about $60 a month and that is still a very, very good deal considering how often I use this tool. So basically, what you do is you go into Zoom, you say, I want to create a new meeting, or I want to create a new webinar, which basically is the exact same thing, very minor differences.
You fill in the date, you fill in the title, all that information, and then it’s going to give you a link. And that is the link that you’re going to share with all of your participants. You know they’re going to click that link and that’s how they join you during the live of that. They can do it from their computer, they can do it from a mobile device. It’s really easy, and in my experience, most people are able to figure it out flawlessly, even if they’re, you know, a little bit older, not quite as tech savvy, and you don’t have to be like a 25 year old to be able to figure out how to use Zoom. So I think that’s really good. And Zoom also will give an alternate phone number for anybody that wants to call in instead. Sometimes people have a hard time getting their audio to work, so they’ll end up just calling in on the phone, no sweat.
So, you have your Zoom set up, you have the actual webinar ready to go next. You’re going to need a way for people to sign up for the thing, right? I mean that’s the whole point. We want people to sign up for our webinar because we want to collect their email addresses either because they’re going to be added to our mailing list and we’re growing our mailing list or because we’re going to continue to market to these people and sell them something that we are introducing on the webinar. So you’re going to need their email address in order to do so. So your opt in page, it usually looks like this, a very simple webpage with the headline and a very description of what’s going to be covered, the date and the time and a button to sign up. That’s really all you need. I’ve tested lots of different kinds of opt in pages.
Sometimes they will be longer where you go into more depth about what’s going to be covered. Maybe there’s like testimonials, you know, you see all sorts of stuff on a page like this. In my experience, the more simple the pages, the better, the better it converts. And by converts I mean the number of people who land on that page divided by how many people actually sign up for the webinar. Like that percentage, you want that percentage, like a high percentage means it’s a high converting page, right? So you’re going to have this pretty simple page. You want it to look professional, you want that one really stunning headline that like talks to your target market and promises them what they need. Your participants are going to give you their name, give you their email address, and when they sign up they should get an automatic confirmation email that has details about the event, including that event link.
How do you set this up? What tools are you guys using for opt-in pages? Ah, I know there’s so many ways to do it and it can be really daunting in the beginning. If you’ve never done it before, it’s really just a webpage. Don’t freak out. It has nothing to do with your website, although it could be on your website, but mine never are. It is a standalone opt in page that can be done through MailChimp for free. Right? If you have MailChimp, then you can certainly set up an opt in page through them. If you’re using convert kit for your email service, you can definitely set up landing pages through convert kit, so depending on your email service, they may offer this and you’re already paying for it or you’re already eligible for it for free. So look into that first. I usually make my, no, I should say I always make my opt in pages using a tool called Leadpages.
Leadpages is a pretty robust tool. I use it for opt in pages, thank you pages, webinar, replay pages, sales pages, all kinds of stuff. There is a yearly fee involved, but I think it’s worth its weight in gold. If you want to check out Leadpages, you can go to healthcoachpower.com/Leadpages. Great, great tool. But in any case, the most important thing is that your page is simple with a killer headline, speaking to what your audience wants, because nobody, let’s just face it, nobody really wants to sign up for a webinar. No one’s like, Oh God, I got nothing to do tonight. I hope there’s a webinar I can sign up for. Like, no, everybody’s busy. They don’t want that. But using the example from earlier, a parent like myself really wants a night with no yelling where the kids just listen and we want that bad.
So if you appeal to what your target market really wants, they will sign up for your webinar. Now, the big, big thing, and I do see questions coming in and comments. I’m going to get to those in just a second. The big, big thing that everybody misses. Can you guess, can you guess the part that every health coach falls down on? I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to really want to figure this out first because your whole, your whole thing is going to bomb if you don’t figure this out from the get go where and how are you going to promote your webinar? Where and how, like listen, it is not a list builder. If you are not getting this webinar in front of new eyes, people you haven’t met before and that’s hard to do, right? It really can be tricky because who do you have access to?
You’ll have access to your list, your Facebook audience or Instagram audience, you know, whatever. Like whoever people you already have contact with, how are you supposed to expand beyond that? Right? So I want to just hang on this point for a little bit cause my goodness, how many times did I see a health coach just pour, pour their heart into creating a webinar, creating that opt-in page, writing up their presentation, pitching their services and it’s like crickets, crickets because only 11 people signed up for the webinar and statistically speaking, only about three of them are going to show up live. And ah, it is so frustrating, right? Have you been there? But I don’t want you to worry. There are ways to make it happen. I actually have a checklist to help you out with this part. It is my zero cost promotion tactics download, meaning ways that you can promote your webinar or promote whatever you’re doing.
In your business for free, which means you don’t have to spend money on Facebook ads. If you work your way through this checklist, you’re going to increase your reach, you’re going to increase your webinar signups like crazy. So please do not do the work of creating a webinar without downloading this checklist of smart promotion ideas at healthcoachpower.com/promos it’s really like a numbers game. If you offer your webinar to 100 people and 50 of them sign up, first of all, that would be amazing. That would be a really great converting webinar. If you offer it to a hundred people and only eight people sign up, well you’ve got to have to kind of rethink the webinar topic or rethink who you’re promoting it to. So always looking at numbers in marketing. How many people went to the page to sign up? How many actually signed up of those folks, how many attended the live event, and at each point along the way, you can assess what’s working, what’s not, what can be optimized. But if you don’t promote the webinar properly in the first place, your numbers are just going to be too low overall. So again, be sure to grab that checklist. You can use it to promote webinar, any freebie, any free event that you might be doing for your business at healthcoachpower.com/promos okay, so let’s do some questions real quick and then we’re going to jump into talking about the, the webinar itself. Um, let’s see here.
Christina said yes, give them what they need and positive parenting solutions is awesome by the way. Oh good. You guys have heard about this before. I’m sure you have. I’m sure we’re all kind of in the same parenting circles if we’re into health and wellness. Right. I’m very excited about it. Thank you Christina. And Christina says she might upgrade her Zoom account. Yes. Upgrade it to what you need when you need it and then downgrade it again. So like when I have a big webinar and I’m going to exceed the limit to my webinar room, which I think it comes with like 100 seats. Sometimes I have a webinar that has like 400 people enrolled. I will upgrade my package, have that webinar and then just downgrade it again. So you’re only paying for one month at the higher rate. You don’t have to be always paying it if you’re not using it.
Pam says Zoom is great. She used the free version for a while and then she upgraded when she needed more features. That is perfect. Michelle says she’s been using Zoom for meetings and to create videos but hasn’t used it for webinars yet. Got to try Michelle. This is like this is the next frontier of business, right? Webinars can be a game changer in terms of making more offers to more people or easily, well, more easily once you get the hang of it anyway.
Any other questions here? I’m having a hard time scrolling back through my comments right now. So those are the only ones that I’m seeing right now. I’m sorry if I miss something. I’ll keep a closer eye on it. Moving forward. Let’s move on though before we run out of time and talk about the actual webinar itself. So before the webinar, like the day before, you want to send a couple of reminder emails to all of your registrants and don’t make them boring because if people are bored before the webinar even begins, they’re definitely not going to show up. So you want to like remind them, but also tease them about the content they’re going to be getting and the value that they’re going to be getting. And then remind them again and then remind them again. Because if you just send one reminder, chances are people are going to miss it.
So I usually send a 24 hour reminder, one hour reminder and a 15 minute reminder. And they all have, here’s the link, here’s the link, here’s the link. So nobody at the last minute is going, Oh my God, I don’t have the link. Someone will still say that. It’s pretty amazing. But you do your best to make sure everybody gets the link ahead of time. Okay. Now, let’s say you got them there. Again, your show up rate could be between 10% like to 30%. 30% i s amazing. So if you had 30% of your registrants actually show up for the live, you can just Pat yourself right on the back. That’s an amazing job. I don’t think I ever see 30% it can be really hard and you have to pick a time of day that works for you obviously. But you also want to try to pick a time of day and day of the week that works for your audience.
So let’s say you are targeting parents who are tired of yelling at their kids. Well you probably wouldn’t want to hold your webinar at like eight o’clock on a Wednesday cause what are all those parents doing at eight o’clock on a Wednesday? They’re putting their kids to bed, right? So you’re going to want to pick a time slot that works, that works better for your group. So would either be later in the evening or maybe it would be in the middle of the day or on a weekend or something like that. So just keep that in mind and see if you can get your show up rate to be at least 10% for the live event itself. Okay, here we are. It’s the day of you getting a little bit sweaty. You’re feeling nervous, you’re normal. You want to make sure you’re in a quiet space, duh, right? Quiet space with a decent looking background.
It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but you certainly don’t want like an unmade bed with a pile of the laundry behind you. Okay? So try to pick a nice space in your house. Um, and I would say quiet is more important than beautiful, but if it can be both quiet and look professional, all the better. Hopefully you have some kind of decent lighting. It doesn’t have to be some fancy equipment like I got going on down here in my studio. It could just be a lamp. I’ve seen people just have a normal table lamp. Put it right behind your, your camera so it’s in front of you. And the light is shining softly on your face. If it’s too harsh, hang like a towel or something. So the light is not quite as hard. It’s a little bit of softer glow on your face and that’s going to make you look like you’re glowing and happy and it will definitely, definitely give off a better impression than if you’re like half in the dark with like shadows and bags under your eyes.
Lighting can be really, really helpful. So hopefully you have some decent lighting and then you want to use whatever kind of earbuds, microphone, whatever it is so that your audio can come across as clear and crisp as possible. It does not need to be anything fancy. You really could just use your, the same earbuds that you use for your phone. Um, you can see like I have a headset here that works pretty well. So whatever it is, just make sure that if you are using a microphone, like a true microphone, like I have this audio technical microphone that I use when I’m recording my other podcast. The problem with a microphone like this is that you can’t move around. Your voice gets lost. You really have to keep your mouth right in front of the microphone. And I hate that for webinars because as you could probably tell, if you’re watching me, I move when I talk and you want it to be natural.
And so I need a microphone that moves with me and I find that that helps me really be myself and, and speak the way that I would speak in, you know, in, in person. Like if I met you in real life. So, um, I always recommend some sort of headset. Now your presentation itself. Okay. Does anybody worry about the presentation itself?
Christine is asking, what do you think about screen sharing and talking, but not being on camera? Yeah, let’s talk about that. Um, you can do a slide show, right? Your webinar can just be a slide show where you’re talking and they hear your voice, but they never see you. But I do encourage you to be on camera at least a couple of times throughout your event because slide shows can be so boring, right? They’re just not that engaging. And we are like hard wired to want to see somebody’s face, right?
Like a baby sees a face and they smile. You know, like we’re just hardwired for that. You want to see somebody’s eyeballs, nose and mouth. It helps so much with the connection that you’re trying to build with your audience. So usually if I have a slide show, I will either keep my video on the whole time so my face is in the corner and the slideshow is going on next to it. Or I will come on the screen in the beginning to welcome everybody and then go to my slideshow and then I’ll come back to the screen. I’m like later, maybe during the Q & A portion so that I am getting a chance to sort of show my face and being a real person. You know with this online marketing stuff, it’s so easy to appear fake and salesy and like somebody that you can’t really trust because you don’t really know them.
So I really want to encourage you to get your face on camera, even if it’s just for a couple of seconds in the beginning. Okay. No. There’s some other ways that you can bring some life into your webinars and we do, we want to like breathe some life into our events because if they’re boring people who are going to check out if it seems like it’s routine, you know like you’re just reading a script and there’s no life to it. Again, people are just going to check out. Please engage with your audience. You want to have a chat box open, you want to ask questions and encourage people to use the chat box. You want to be monitoring it in real time and responding to people. So I’ll always ask a question at the beginning of my webinars, something like, um, well I try to make it relevant to the topic of the webinar.
Like let’s say that right now I was doing a webinar about how to hold a webinar. I would probably say like, Hey, tell me in the chat area, how many webinars have you ever held or tell me in the chat area if you’ve a held lots of webinars, be held one webinar. See, never held a webinar before in your life, right? Like give everybody a very simple question to answer just to get them used to using that chat feature because that’s going to come in really handy, especially if you’re selling something at the end. You want people to feel comfortable typing in that chat box and knowing that you’re going to respond so that they will ask questions if they’re interested in buying from you and anyway, even if you’re not selling something, it will start feeling more like a real conversation. Now here’s something that you might get nervous about.
I mean, I’d love to know what you guys are nervous about. I’m just guessing and based on my own experience what if nobody shows up? Ah, what if only two people show up? I know, I know. There’s two ways to kind of mitigate this. First there is no harm, no shame in asking friends and family members to show up for you just to fill the room a little bit, just to give you some extra faces in the crowd, have them throw some comments in the chat box and that’s going to help live and things up and just really help everybody else get comfortable too. So just a little insider tip because I think a lot of online marketers do this when they’re first starting out. I know I did. You just want to ask your sister, ask your best friend to login and join the event.
It’s kind of like, do you ever go to like a bar mitzvah or something and they have party dancers? That’s what it is. You need some party dancers. They’re going to help keep the energy up for you and for your more shy participants. The other thing that you can do, and for this you would need to upgrade to the Zoom wet webinar package is you can hide the number of participants so they don’t see a count. Because let’s admit, like if you, you know, show up for something, just admit it, you’re going to look and you’re going to say, oh my God, there’s only two people here for this, this quote unquote big webinar that I signed up for. And that can make a person feel like, Oh, maybe this isn’t such a good thing for me to attend or maybe nobody else is here, so why should I be here?
So with a webinar package, you can hide the count number. You’re still going to get a sense of how many people are there based on the comments. But that can help some of us, you know, I remember when I first got that feature, I was like, Oh now I never have to worry how many people actually show up. It’s not going to be publicly displayed. So you can do that and you can also have questions in the can. So if you’re going to have a Q and a period and you’re worried that your audience is going to be a little bit on the quiet side, you can have some canned questions ready to go. And you can just say like, okay, here’s a question from so-and-so and it’s a question that you wrote, but it’s a question that you know people probably have. And so you’re just helping to move the conversation along by having those pre-written and that also can take a lot of the pressure off when you’re like, so are there any questions?
Awkward? No. Uh, so just have having a few pre-prepared for yourself. Okay, post-webinar, the most important thing that you can do is follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. If you are at selling anything, then your follow-up is going to look like regular, consistent emails to your list, right? They joined your list when they registered for this event and now you get to nurture that relationship by continuing to bring them relevant content. And this is where it is really, really important that you know who you’re serving and what big problem you’re helping them solve. Because if somebody joins your list via your webinar about fat loss and then a week later they get an email from you and it’s like all about energy healing from trauma, you’re going to lose them. It’s like, Oh wait, I thought we were talking about this.
No. Now we’re talking about this other thing and sometimes we do this as health coaches because we’re interested in lots of different aspects of health and wellness, but you really want to maintain a common thread throughout all of your marketing should be part of your marketing plan or your business plan that you work with one type of person to solve one specific problem so your people will see what you’re doing, they will stick with you and you will build trust with them over time. You don’t want to like all of a sudden start talking about healthy snacks for the kids. If you’re not marketing yourself as like a health coach that helps moms feed their kids, right? You want to like keep everything on the same track so your message is consistent. No. If you are selling something during your webinar, you definitely want a complete set of follow-up emails specific to your webinar participants.
Now inside my program, Healthy Profit University, it’s my course for health coaches actually give everybody a set of templates for these post-webinar emails, but the idea is that some sales will be made during your webinar, some but most sales happen over the course of the next week or so. So you’re going to want to send out the webinar replay link for anyone that missed the live event and then reiterate your offer again and again and again. Lots of different ways leading up to the deadline. Okay? I know there’s so much you guys, webinars is like Oh, whole skill, it’s a whole bag of worms, I know it, but the single most important thing you can do, it’s planned this webinar, whatever you have in your mind right now, pick a date and start promoting the darn thing. And remember I have that free checklist for you at health coach, power.com/promos the reason is because once you start getting signups, the rest is going to fall into place.
Like trial by fire, right? As soon as I have somebody signed up for something, it’s like, Oh boy, well I guess I better do that. I guess I’m on the hook now and then you have to and that is the best way to move forward. We all get nervous before these kinds of things. I still get nervous before a big webinar and they promise you there will always be a technology hiccup. Okay, so like let’s just plan for that to happen. You want to surround with support, you want to breathe, you want to give yourself lots of time and grace as you figure out the whole process. But it can be a game changer for your online business. Takes time, takes repetition, but you learn this new skill and I always appreciate you guys cause someone I know after this episode is going to come back and say, “Michelle because of you. I planned and I held my first webinar and here’s how it went.”
You guys are always willing to take action and learn new things and that is a growth mindset. That’s the difference between coaches who succeed and coaches who don’t. So I love being here for you guys. I love teaching you everything that I know, and I will be back next week answering more of your questions, so please keep on asking them and I’ll see you then. Take care.