214 – Webinars are a powerful selling tool: Tom talks Selling on Webinars

Episode 214 – Selling On Webinars
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 214 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about selling on webinars, and I got to tell you, a long time ago, one of my students, Daniel Hall, dragged me, kicking and screaming into the webinar arena. I'll tell you what, because at the time it was people had to download and install stuff to watch your webinar. And it was a hassle and a lot of hassle to create them. And there was no replay services. So anyway, he dragged me kicking and screaming. And now I'm a webinar, you know, monster. So. So it's definitely worth. It's been very lucrative. And I thank him for pushing me into it. I hope you didn't miss Episode 213. Ed Primeau, he's a friend of mine for many years and he is a forensic audio expert. He had stuff to do with the JFK assassination research stuff, the disappearing Malaysia Airlines case, George Zimmerman, Laquan McDonald, all of these things had audio aspects that he was working on. So a very interesting episode 213. All right. Make sure you grab a copy of our podcast app in the app store. You can go to screwthecommute.com/app and we got complete instructions on how you download and use it with screen capture shots so you can see exactly how to use all the fancy functions. And make sure you grab a copy of our freebie how to Automate Your Business. Just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. So we sell this for twenty seven bucks, but it's yours free for listening to the podcast and you can find that it screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And there's another special little gift on the download page for you that's very valuable. In fact, some people charge four or five six thousand dollars for the information in it. So make sure you grab both of those downloads. Our sponsor's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia Tech Distance Learning School, which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business or both. So you can check that out at IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed and dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. We have scholarships available for military spouses, all military, law enforcement, first responders and their families. So we're really pro military and pro law enforcement and first responders. So but the whoever gets in the school is going to have a portable career. They can work at Starbucks, they can work anywhere they want by using this knowledge in it's an in-demand skill that you can get within six months or so.

[00:03:36] Let's get on to the main event. Webinars are a powerful way to sell. And I've made a lot of money not only with the live webinars, but the most money comes in from webinar replays. Now I'll get to that little bit later. the replays won't do you much good though, if the live webinar was no good. So. So let's get that taken care of first. We're going to stipulate here that you have a topic that someone wants to hear. And you have something to sell related to that topic. I mean, it is possible to sell an unrelated product just from doing a great webinar that proves your expertise. But it's much harder and you probably won't sell as many as you would if the product was related to the webinar.

[00:04:26] Now, you also have to get as many people as you can to actually show up for your webinar. It's relatively easy to get someone to register, but people that actually show up are generally more gung ho about the topic and generally more qualified buyers. And next Monday in episode 217, I'm going to cover getting a high percentage of registrants to actually show up. So it will be like a two part series on webinars here.

[00:04:55] OK. Let's get going on. Doing a great job selling on your webinar. The first concept is that you don't wait until the end of your webinar to sell. Yeah. You may introduce the deal at that time, but with my method you are selling all along the way even before the webinar begins. So that's I'm going to start right there. Here's something that I do very frequently and it always makes money. You should always have a confirmation page when someone signs up for something, including webinars or anything on your website. I mean, it applies to everything you do online. So I tried this years ago and have been doing it ever since. When they register for a webinar, I frequently just dump them on a sales page for something. Though it's usually at least loosely related to my target audience and and not necessarily related to the topic of the webinar, for instance, I have lots of professional and aspiring professional speakers on my list after someone registers for my webinar. The confirmation page might be my sales page for my e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Professional Speaking. Then if they choose that I use an upsell technique and upsells are covered in episode 22 of Screw the Commute. Any time you want to go to a specific episode, it's screwthecommute.com and then slash the number like slash 22.

[00:06:28] So they decide to buy the ultimate guide to professional speaking e-book. And I offer them maybe a transcript on how to sell your knowledge in 19 different ways. I've made as much as a thousand bucks before the webinar even started using this method and it wasn't even the main product I was selling. So put that into play as soon as you can.

[00:06:52] Then I usually get on the live webinar about 10 minutes before the scheduled start time. I start engaging with early birds and get them comfortable with putting in comments and questions and making sure they know how to do it on whatever system I'm using. Comments that I read out loud are an important part of the sales process, as you'll see later, this banter in the 10 minutes before I go live is not usually recorded while I'm talking about it. Please remember to record and know how to do it. You don't want to forget this and not have a replay available.

[00:07:35] All right, once you go live and start recording, I want you to be careful what you say. See, we are planning to have a great and powerful replay that has the feel of being live. Certain things you say, especially in the beginning of your webinar, can hurt that live feeling on the replays. The reason I say live feeling is because I never lie and pretend a replay is live. It's just part of my DNA to be reputable, credible and trustworthy. Pretending to be live when it isn't is opposite of that. Most of the replay services actually allow you to put lots of fake things in to pretend the replay's live when it's not. Now, see, I have no problem in people getting caught up in the moment while enjoying the webinar and feeling that it's live. But I won't promoted as such or lie about it.

[00:08:36] Now, when I promote the webinar replay in e-mail and social media, I. I say something like webinar encore and I'll be there answering questions live. And this answering questions live is is a hybrid webinar, which I'm certain I invented, and I'll tell you about that later. At any rate, I did not say it was a live webinar when I promoted the replay.

[00:09:04] All right, back to some of the things you should be careful about saying, which ruins the live feeling and just sounds weird. And I mess this up quite a bit when I was first starting, I'd say something like, I'm here tonight to tell you about copyrighting or something like that. Well, what if they're listening to the replay at 10:30 in the morning? It would sound weird. So me saying tonight when it's actually the morning. What if I said, hey, everybody, Christmas is all almost here? And it was the middle of August when they were watching. Again, it would sound weird. I also avoid current events because some of my webinars have been playing and making money for seven or eight years. If I would mention Prince William and Kate Middleton getting married. Yes. It would put me in the moment. On the original recording. But hey, that happened in 2011 and it would make the webinar that I'm on seem really dated. Another thing I would do would mention two ways people could interact with the webinar. The live recording had live chat, but the replay doesn't. They in that case, they e-mail me to ask questions. So in the live webinar, I say depending on what system you're using. You may have a chat window or if you're watching through our other system. And that's really the replay system that's going to happen later. You will e-mail me your questions, so keep your e-mail open to get my answers.

[00:10:42] Whatever you say will depend on what system you are using to do your webinar and your replies. But you just have to be thinking forward to make sure that what you say still makes sense when someone is watching a replay rather than the live event. The other thing I do, and now that I wish that done a long time ago was leave off the year of the copyright. And I'm not talking about copywriting like advertising, I'm talking about the protection of your intellectual property. The copyright. Yeah, I have some webinars that are great, but the copyright year makes them look old. So now I just write out the word copyright and I put the copyright symbol and I leave off the year. I'm not really sure if it would hold up in court or not, but in my not so humble opinion, having an old looking webinar is worse than the slim chance someone is going to steal mine.

[00:11:44] I know, let me get back to that hybrid webinar thing. I'm sure I coined this term because no one was talking about it on online until I started to and I bought the domain name at the time. The term hybrid webinars came to me when I saw a lot of lazy marketers creating webinar. They put him on replay services and cross their fingers, they would make some money and some did. I agree, but some didn't. But to me, they were leaving enormous amounts of money on the table because of laziness. Yeah, I want to replay the heck out of my good webinars, but the replay alone did not give the attendees any real engagement. As is most any really good marketer will tell you, engagement will increase sales. So I thought to myself, self, I love to do that. What if I let people watch the replay, but I made myself available to answer questions live while the replay was playing? This is how hybrid webinars was born. They're part recorded in part live hybrid. Now. This went great. I get lots of sales because of the engagement, but not nearly as much work because I don't have the hassle and stress of the live webinar. See, I only did the live webinar once and I replayed the recording sometimes hundreds of times. And when I say I make myself available to answer questions they're emailed to me so I could be anywhere and answer them. Me one time I was literally sitting on the ground leaning up against the tree deer hunting and I was answering questions coming in from my webinar replays. And there's no no doubt the deer were walking by saying to each other, like, look at that, dumb arse. He could. He could have been eating us tonight if he didn't have his nose stuck in that cell phone. All right, so. So don't be lazy and you'll sell way more than you would have just by throwing up your recording on a replay service. If you're there to answer questions.

[00:14:07] All right, now let's talk about angles. For me, there are two major angles I take when doing a webinar and I'm going to use my copywriting 9O1 webinar as an example. That's advertising copywriting. There are around 31 major elements I teach in my copywriting course. One angle I could take on a webinar is to tell a little tiny bit about all 31 elements and then offer my course. It goes deep on all those elements and that could work. I chose another angle. I chose five really critical elements out of those thirty one, and I went deep into them with lots of theory and examples of how they work psychologically to get people to buy. I then mentioned the other 26 elements that they also needed to know. I chose this angle for two reasons. One, I thought it would get a little monotonous to go over thirty one elements a little bit each and two. I always want the reputation that whether you buy or not for me, that you get value from Tom Antion. This creates referrals and a long term great reputation. So I either go deep in part of what I teach or light in all of the things I teach. But most of the time for me, I go deep, deep for the reputation and referral aspect of my career. So those are angles.

[00:15:47] Now I'm going to break the overall webinar structure into three simple parts, beginning, middle and end. And I'll tell you what I do in each part. In the beginning, I do a written intro, but don't do that unless you can read it. And it doesn't sound like reading in it. I get in some credibility points. Yeah, you see, you never know beyond these webinars. Many will know you, but many won't. And by the way, what I'm talking about here is a webinar where you host it and it's all you talking. If someone else is hosting a webinar to their crowd, they will introduce you and get in some of your credibility points so you don't have to. I usually make the points that support what the webinar is about. For instance, if it's about professional speaking, I use my professional speaking credentials. If it's about Internet marketing, I use those credentials. Of course, there's gonna be some overlap, but you get the the idea customized to what you are talking about. Now, during the beginning, some people use their web cam and let people see them a little bit before they go to full PowerPoint type slides. I mean, that's your preference. I haven't seen it make much difference in sales either way. And also, I forgot to mention you can see lots of my replays at TomAntionwebinars.com. If you're listening to this, as soon as it comes out, we're revamping the whole page and upgrading the replay system. So if you have any trouble, just let us know. But that's TomAntionWebinars.com.

[00:17:34] All right, so we're back at the beginning, part of the beginning is stalling. So I make some announcements, I remind people to subscribe to my podcast and stuff like that. You're stalling because inevitably there will be late comers and you want them to hear the main points you're making. Also, very near the beginning, I make a deal with people. One of my overriding principles of business is fairness for both the attendee and for me. And fairness. This is a quote I came up with is not a one sided concept. People, for the most part believe in fairness. So near the beginning we're going to use a concept of sales called reciprocity. We're giving something of great value to the people attending the webinar, so it's totally fair to ask for something in return. And you're also being very transparent, which people also appreciate. So near the beginning we have a sponsor. The sponsor is the name of the product or service we're going to offer later in the webinar. It say something like this or I would sponsor for this event is the wake him up video professional speaking system. It's the number one best selling pro speaking course ever online. And of course, you substitute whatever you have to offer as the sponsor. Then I would say, hey, I'm gonna make a deal with you. I promised in the promotion of this event to give you five critical copywriting techniques that can change the course of your business overnight. And I'm gonna give them to you. But you can be darn sure I'm going to offer you something for sale later. But I'm only going to make that offer after I absolutely delivered on my promise. And if I fulfill my promise, you agree. You at least listen to my offer. Is that fair? So that's what I said, and then and then I'd start getting engagement and buy in from attendees. I'd tell them, put that in your chat box if you think that's fair. A good deal or fair deal. And now I'm ramping up both engagement and social proof. I would read out loud and to get it on the recording. Joe says that's fair. Sally says, Tom, you're always fair. Jill says, absolutely fair. Jim says, Tom, you've got a deal here. And on and on and on. And I'd excitedly read off a whole bunch of them. And there's too many, I'd say. Everybody says, that's fair. I can't get all of them. Let's get going here. Something like that. So that's excitement, social proof, engagement, and it's setting people up for what happens later.

[00:20:23] So what just happened? Everybody's hearing how everyone else said it's a fair deal. So they are somewhat obligated to stay on and listen to my offer. Now, is there a real obligation? No. Do fair minded people feel there is because they agree to the deal and gave their word? Yes, they do. Next, in the beginning section, I put in a section. Why should you listen to me? This is where I go deeper into my accomplishments that pertain to the topic. Now, I try not to go on forever, but do take the opportunity to build some more credibility. Now, just before I get into the meat of the topic, which is the middle part, I usually take a poll and this is a strategic part of my sales process. I want to establish in the beginning for the world to see that most everyone on the line does not know what I'm claiming. I'm going to teach him. And then later, I take another poll that proves that they now know what I promised to teach him. And it proves that I kept my promise. And remember that deal I made with him just a minute ago? See, the the second part of the poll, which I'm going to go into later, is I kept my part of the bargain. So they should keep theirs, which is to listen to my offer. So I'm taking a poll. So here's how it goes. Here's how I might word it. And remember, I want a word, the poll question so that virtually everyone taking the poll says no. And then I also add a little humor during the poll. So here's here's a sample beginning poll question. Do you know the intricate details of five critical copywriting techniques? That's the question. Now I give him three potential answers. Yes, no. And then I put some humor in. Maybe if the copywriting fairy helped me out. So everybody laughs, I laugh and then I add up all the nos and the maybes from the funny part. And I usually get ninety eight or ninety nine percent. And I announced these results. I show them on the screen and then I address the one or two percent that said that they did know. It says I might say something like it sounds like we got a couple accomplished copywriters here. I promise there's gonna be something for you to add in. Heck, I'm still studying copywriting after 43 years, so there'll be something here for you to. So all that is in the beginning of the webinar and designed to make the end of the webinar very profitable.

[00:23:16] All right, now we're into the middle of the webinar. This is where you deliver your content. You can invite questions or not if you do take questions, read them out loud for the recording and get the answer on the recording. Read selected comments out loud, give shout outs to people you recognize this is a form of engagement that makes people want to stay on and makes them like you more and more likely to buy your stuff. Let me take a sidebar here. All this engagement is meant to get it on the recording, so people watching the replay hear it. Of course, it's good for the live. Absolutely. But we're shooting for the long run with the recording. That's why I all I almost always first do one live and then I mean, I could simply record the material and put it on a replay service, but then I wouldn't get all those great comments and social proof on the recording. And all of these lead to bigger sales.

[00:24:19] All right, after you give some good content, it's OK to start adding more social proof in the form of testimonials and case studies. I like case studies better, but I also use testimonials. I put the person's picture, the name and what they said and I read it out loud for the recording. The reason I I like case studies better is that the people are learning and I'm getting my bragging points in for helping the subject of the case study in a more subtle fashion. See, the more subtle you can be, the less sales resistance you have to overcome later.

[00:24:58] Ok, I get through what I promised, and at the end of the middle section, I do this second part of the poll. Here's what I say. Now, do you know the intricate details of five critical copywriting techniques and the answers are yes, no. And then a goofy one like, hey, the copywriting fairy gave me a hernia carrying all this stuff. So then I show the results on the screen and I add the yeses and the funny one together. And I usually get ninety nine or 100 percent. Yes. Then I say, look at that. That proves I did my duty and I kept my promise. And if you believe I did, keep my promise. Put it in your chat box there. And then, of course, I start read them out loud. Pete says you did your duty, Tom. Harry says a promise is a promise. Sally said, Tom, you always do your duty and so forth. You know, just keep going on and on. Then I say, well, that looks like pretty good proof I did what I promised. Then you all agreed. If I did what I promised, you would listen to my offer. All right. So there we go.

[00:26:11] So before I get into telling you about the ending part, you know, I'm down on my hands and knees to kill you to watch a webinar. Since we're talking about webinars, I did create a webinar that I wrote. It's funny because it's totally opposite of what I just told you about engagement. It is one of my I think it might be my only just pre-recorded webinar that was not live and doesn't have engagement technique, but it had to be that way because there was nobody to get on a live webinar for this topic. But anyway, the topic is higher education. And if you're considering getting retrained because you hate what you're doing or you you want a better life for yourself or your family or maybe your kids or nephews, nieces or even neighbors are wondering if they should burn up hundreds of thousands of dollars and end up broke with mountains of debt, no marketable skills. Well, you just got to watch this webinar. I mean, you've got nothing to lose. Take 90 minutes. Hey, you can even download the MP 3 file just to listen to it, but you won't see all the good graphics. But these colleges and universities are really screwing over a lot of young people and families. I mean, some people are mortgaging their homes to send kids to college. And listen to this. A massive study showed that the kids are going to class and preparing for class. A total of eight hours a week, eight hours a week. The rest of the time is partying, eating and shopping. I don't know if I'd want to mortgage my house for that. And also, they're inflating grade point averages to make it look like they're doing a better job of teaching. When the testing shows that kids are dumber, you know, so this really is going to make you mad. But it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you decide you want to take an interest or your kids would want to take an interest in an online business. My school is perfect for that. They could have a career in in-demand career in six months or less. And we've got people that are making money, but a couple months into the classes before they even graduate. So check out the webinar and then if you're so interested, then give me a call and I'll talk about the future of you or your your friends online.

[00:28:39] All right. Now let's get to the ending part of the webinar. We're into the offer phase. And this is where you bring your product out and start showing the viewer the benefits of having it. Hopefully it will solve some of the problems brought up in the webinar. Now, even though in my case, I fulfilled my promise of giving them deep details on five elements of the sales letter. They were still left with the problem of what to do about the other 26 elements that I told them they need to know about. While the logical thing is to get my offer, they already know like and trust me from what I already taught them. And if they can afford it, why should they go anywhere else? And when I say when they could afford it, always make if you really want to sell more. Always make a finance option. I've got that in a is one of my advanced selling things in a previous episode. I'm not sure what number right now, but. Offering finance option like we did this WordPress course, ninety seven bucks if you pay it all at once. And we saw it, I think seven hundred of them, but one hundred and eighty of them took the finance deal, three payments of thirty nine bucks. They couldn't even put the whole ninety seven on their credit card. All right. Let's say maybe some of them just didn't know me enough to trust me with the whole ninety seven. I don't know. But that was one hundred and eighty sales or eighteen thousand dollars that I may not have gotten had I not given a finance option. Say so. Always give a finance option if you want to sell more. OK. So after you've explained the product or service, you can throw in bonuses. They should be somewhat related. But if you don't have things exactly related. As long as it's something in the ballpark that adds value to the deal, you'll be fine. Bonus must be something good enough to sell on its own or it has sold on its own. Your free email magazine is not a bonus. Anybody can have that for free without buying anything in a way that's getting too much in the copywriting which I covered in episode 13. By the way, so you could go to screwthecommute.com/13 if you want to go deeper into copywriting. And you could put a guarantee on there, and I'm not going to go in the guarantees. They're pretty basic. But what I will tell you is that engagement and social proof in this critical offer phase of your three phases here is important. So here's what I do. You may not be able to do this right away if you're new. But I ask people to put in the chat box how long they've been doing business with me. Some of them, 28 years. A load of them are 10 years plus and tons are three to five years. This provides enormous social proof that I'm not going to disappear with their money if they buy. And it sends the message that all these people wouldn't still be dealing with this guy if he was a rip off.

[00:31:48] All right. So here's some more things you can do during this period. This ending offer period. You can give him a call to action. In fact, you must give him a call to action. Here's one with me. Very simple. It doesn't have to be, you know, crazy. I mean, it says those of you ready to rock and roll with this. Go ahead. Now to the link displayed on the screen. And and you can put it in the chat area. And I'll put it in the chat area for you. That's a call to action. Go do it. Go buy this thing now. But keep talking. You can give him a webinar only price. You can add another bonus. Then give him another call to action. Then remind him of risk reversal, which means that there is a guarantee and you're reputable they can buy it. And if they if it's not for them, they can get a refund. But thing is, when things are good, nobody gets refunds. There are hardly any. And I hardly remember how to do refunds now. But if you're a crappy product, yeah, you're gonna get refunds but don't have crappy products. How about that. Give them another call to action. Tell them what they're losing from not having your stuff. Give them another call for action. Show them what happens when they go to the link. So I might put screen captures of you click the link. Here's the shopping cart. Here's where you put your your credit card in or paypal. And oh, another really thing if you want to sell a lot is remind people of paypal credit. A lot of them almost automatically for everybody. They can get a thousand dollars credit and no interest, no payments for six months. That's a massively powerful thing to throw in with your offers.

[00:33:41] Give them another call to action. Show them why they should do it now. Give them another call to action. And so forth. You stay on until they quit buying. You should be able to monitor the sales on another monitor or on your cell phone or something to see how many people are coming in when it's possible. I have my kaching noise going off when a sale comes in. Sometimes I can't do all in the same computer. And then another thing you can do is have while you're in this ending phase, if you are getting a lot of sales, tell people, hey, come back on and put it in the chat box of what this is going to mean to you and your business. And. And so I get people coming on saying, oh, gee, you know, this is going to open up my sales. This is going to mean a lot more money for me to get a new car, to buy a new computer. I mean, just they tell you all kinds of stuff and they tell you how they're their products now gonna help more people do. A lot of nice stuff comes in on that. But it's more social proof and more in the face of the people that are still on the fence of man, those people are doing that. I should I should do that. Yeah, that's what you want them thinking. So the more engagement with the buyers you can get, the better and you just keep going on until they quit buying. All right.

[00:35:07] I actually suggest you get a book on closing techniques and also get my copywriting course because it is just massively comprehensive. It's copywriting901.com. We've got a finance option there. No, no kidding. But it's it's the number one skill in my entire business career. I have I have said that thousands of times over the years. So so I want you to get that skill, too. And it's mine is the most cost effective best one ever. And that's not hype. I've been I've taken courses. Forty five hundred dollars just on a course to write a headline. There's only one of the thirty one elements. Cost me forty five hundred bucks. You know, so. So definitely check that out. Copywriting901.com.

[00:35:54] So that's how you sell on webinars. At least that's the way I do it. And it's worked out pretty well. Now, the replay service I use, I'll put it in the show notes cause it's gonna be an affiliate link. And if it's not there when you hear this, check back in a day or two and we'll have it on. So go out there and sell on those webinars, folks. We'll get you on the next episode. See ya later.

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