217 – You can’t sell ’em if they don’t show up: Tom talks Getting People to Show Up for Webinars Part 1

Episode 217 – Show Up Webinar Part 1
[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 217 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is the first part of a two part series on getting people to show up. For your webinars, next Monday will be episode 220 and that will be part two. So don't miss that one. And I hope you didn't miss Episode 216, Elena Evangelo. Oh, she's been on the cover of Time magazine and she is a lot of fun. She's an actress that's been in all kinds of stuff, from CSI to the Motley Crue movie, hundreds of commercials and print campaigns, lots and lots of fun. So that was Episode 216. And remember to grab a copy of our automation e-book. It saved me just one tip. Folks, one tip saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. All right. You're crazy if you don't grab a copy of this book. You can grab it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. I mean, just like I said, one tip saved me a fortune in time and effort. And there's 40, 50 tips in there. So get a copy of the book. All right. Also, hey, also get a copy of our podcast app. It's in the Apple store. You can do all kinds of cool things on your cell phone and tablet. We've got complete instructions on how to use all the fancy features. And so check that out at screwthecommute.com/app and you can learn how to do that and take us with you on the road. Our sponsor's the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's a 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. You can check that out at IMTCVA.org. Everything we talk about will be in the show notes. And this is episode 217. So to find the show notes, you go to screwthecommute.com/217 and you can find all the stuff that all you have to do is click on it. You don't have to remember all this stuff. If you happen to be military first responder or law enforcement, we've got great scholarships for you at the school. Can give you a second incomes, kids, your family role in a safe environment where nobody's going to hit you on the head with a beer bottle or shoot at you.

[00:03:06] Let's get to the main event. Let's talk about how to get more people to show up for your webinars. Now, here's the deal. Even though we are definitely going to set you up to make more money on your webinar as I cover it in episode 214 last Monday. That's with replays. The more people that show up for your live webinar, the more money you will make the fastest. These people are the most gung ho. So in this episode 217 and then next episode is 220 next Monday, I'm going to show you a bunch of ways to get as many people as you can to show up for the first webinar.

[00:03:52] And remember from last episode. One of the reasons and this was back last Monday was episode 214, one of the reasons we want to do the first webinar live and have a bunch of people on it is so that you can get the live reactions and comments on the recording, which can then sell for you for years. All right. That's what we're talking about. Let's get started with topics and titles. And as I've taught for, I don't know, a million years, if you have a topic that nobody but your mother and dog wants to hear about, no amount of training is going to get people to even register, let alone show up for your webinar. But having a fantastic topic coupled with a great title can increase desire so much people will be showing up early to make sure they can get on your webinar. Now, I suggest you start with a topic that you have proof. People want to hear about. I mean, is it a topic you regularly sell in other formats like books and recordings? I mean, that's a good place to start. You can experiment with other topics later after you get some good cash flow coming in from webinars and replays that are sure to sell. Now how two topics tend to sell very well. I haven't really counted them all up, but I'm pretty sure well over 50 percent of my topics are how to do something topics and the actual phrase how to is either in the main title or the subtitle. So here's some examples how to make a fortune speaking at fundraisers, how to maximize the value of any speaking engagement, how to make Web sites the search engines love for 20 bucks or less.

[00:05:54] Now, here's a little different format. I'm going to tell you about the title is Hybrid Webinars and the subtitle is How to Make a Fortune with webinar replays, as we're talking about today. Next one crowd-funding and then subtitle How to get the money you want and never have to pay it back. See those last two titles have a main title. One was hybrid webinars and the other one was crowd-funding. And they both have how to subtitles. Now, all of these complementary webinars and many more can be found at TomAntionwebinars.com. So please, like the page at the top. If you go over there and leave a comment at the bottom and I'll respond to you personally. TomAntionwebinars.com and of course, that will be in the show notes.

[00:06:44] All right, a little bit more about titles. I read somewhere that the bulk of New York Times best sellers. These are books had a main title comprised of three words or less and then a more descriptive subtitle and I went and checked it. And you can just go and look at any New York Times best sellers list and you'll see a lot of what I'm talking about. The main title is three words or less and then a descriptive subtitle. I'm not sure that The New York Times will ever have a bestsellers list for webinars, but I'm pretty darn sure titles are critical to grab people's attention and increased desire for the knowledge you plan on conveying in your webinar.

[00:07:32] All right. Now let's talk about time of day now. In this case, I'm talking about for entrepreneurial webinars. I'll get the corporate stuff later. So entrepreneurial nighttime webinars. Now, I'm partial to evening webinars since many of my clients work during the day and are pursuing their business in the evenings and weekends. Now, this doesn't mean I don't do daytime webinars and it doesn't mean any of this applies to you. You have to experiment and keep track of what works best for your offerings and your target market. Now, here's some things to keep in mind in the summer or I mean, actually immediately after Daylight Savings Time. This is in the United States takes effect. I do my evening webinars at around 9 p.m. I do this because it's dark in my time zone and getting dark in the central time zone. I don't want to try to compete with summertime outdoor activities. Also, I can usually get finished on or about 11:00 p.m., which most people can handle before they totally crash mentally and physically and want to go to bed. Now, in the winter or as soon as we go back to Standard Time, I switch to 8 p.m. Eastern. People are inside and it's dark outside, so I don't have to compete with outdoor stuff. And if I run a longer webinar, I can still get finished before it gets too late. Now evening webinars at either 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Still work well for West Coast people who would be happy to sit out rush hour watching my webinar at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Now, the drawback with nighttime webinars is that it cuts out live participation from people in the UK and all over Europe because it's just too late for them to start a webinar watching a webinar at like 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning.

[00:09:37] All right, now let's look at entrepreneurial webinars. In the daytime, 1 or 2 p.m. Eastern seems to work well for me for several reasons. 1, The West Coast people are up and about and 2, the Midwest people can participate at lunchtime and 3 the East Coast people can finish the webinar before the end of the workday, which keeps their evenings open. Now, what if you have a corporate webinar and what time of day? Well, all of the above applies to entrepreneurial crowds but see corporate webinars, which can be very, very lucrative are a different story. They must be done during the workday. Most of these webinars are going to be paid, so you'll have contact with the person booking you to do the webinars. You can get input from them on when they can get the most employees to show up. You'll most likely be required to provide them with a replay. For those that couldn't attend anyway. All right, so that's corporate, it's pretty simple.

[00:10:47] Now. Odd times. Now, one trick to solidify the time in the mind of attendees is to have start times that aren't exactly on the hour or half hour. An example from what I just did was 9:05 Eastern Time. For some reason, the 9:05 is more memorable than 9 p.m. Eastern. You can do times like eight thirty five or eight fifty five. The bottom line is that you must experiment with your market to see what works best for them. Yes, I'm in favor of structuring your business to suit you. Obviously I talk about lifestyle business all the time, but if you don't have webinars when people can be available, you won't get people to show up and you'll make way less money.

[00:11:34] Now let's switch to another topic. Days of the week you will find that certain days of the week work best for your webinars. But don't get locked in so tightly to certain days that you ignore other days. I even accidentally scheduled a telecast on Thanksgiving one time, and I had 60 people sign up for it and I made thirty eight hundred dollars that night. I guess 60 people didn't want to listen to their relatives, tell stories and get drunk watching football. Now, during the week, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays seemed to work out best. Mondays are mostly a frantic start to the new week and clearing out all the spam from the weekend. And Fridays aren't usually as good because people are focused on what they're going to be doing on a weekend. But I will say, though, that once in a while I'll throw a Friday night webinar and I have pretty good attendance. You just never know until you try. And you must also keep in mind that the days when you get the most attendance may be the days when other people can't attend. You'll pick up lots of new people by occasionally having webinars at odd times. Now, with an entrepreneurial audience, you can do weekends. I do lots of business on Sunday nights. I've also had some good luck on Saturday afternoons. Again, it doesn't mean you should do Saturday afternoons and Sunday nights. It means you'll probably want to try them after you try Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays. Now, if I can revisit the topic idea for just a moment, you should evaluate if your topic has any bearing on the day of the week that's best for you. Maybe you have a sports betting webinar and Saturdays work best for you because most of the games are on Sunday. Maybe you have a gardening topic where Saturday mornings work best because people can get excited about what you teach, then run right out and try it in their gardens. Think about if your topic dictates a day of the week. Maybe it's a seasonal topic that you do only for six months out of the year, then shelve it for the rest of the year and talk about something else. I just want to make sure you're making good decisions that maximize your show up rate each time you do a webinar. And you know what? I have a whole book on this. It's an e-book very inexpensive that can go into the details of everything. I'm going to talk about this week and next week. You can check that out at screwthecommute.com/showup.

[00:14:22] All right, let's talk about incentives to show up. Now, as you saw in the introduction, you make more money when people actually show up. It's a good idea to give special attention to these people. They are the most gung ho about your topic and they should be rewarded for taking the time out of their day to attend. These people are also the most likely to take advantage of your offer. That is if you're selling something during the webinar. Now, if it's a corporate event that's mandatory for the people to either attend live or listen to the replay. Giving incentives is not that critical. However, it can create some goodwill and excitement if you choose a bonus that really resonates with the attendees. It will also most likely increase your evaluations, which could lead to more work when the brass sees how well the webinar was received. And you can also brag about your evaluations when trying to get work from other companies. And this can be very lucrative in the corporate market. I've heard of people getting $25000 to develop a custom webinar and deliver it for a corporation. So this you know, it's not my market, but this is a very lucrative market if you have a corporate topics.

[00:15:55] All right, so let's talk about some bonuses for live attendees. This is not opposed to dead attendees. Bonuses can be in several forms, so you can have a bonus for showing up five minutes before start time. You can have a bonus or a discount only for live attendees, which is edited out of the replays, and you'd want to say that on the live when to let people know they miss something. So next time they'll want to show up live. To save yourself expense, make your bonuses downloadable or deliverable online. They could be PDF files, MP3 audios or private videos or something like that. Make sure you make a big deal of these bonuses for live attendees in your promotion of the event. I suppose giving an unannounced bonus to people that show up is a good idea, and I'm not against you doing that. But the entire purpose is to get more people to actually show up. So it makes more sense for me to promote the bonuses heavily. When you announce the webinar.

[00:17:09] All right. Let's talk about discounts. The other thing you can do is give a cheaper price to those on the live event and then edit out the cheaper price for the replays. You can be sure the next time you do a webinar, people will remember that you only gave the discounted price to the people actually on the webinar. All right. This will give them more incentive to clear their schedule and be on the call.

[00:17:38] All right, now, before we get in to when to promote these webinars, I want to tell you about my twenty four week intensive pro speaking mentor program where I take you from where you are to a much higher level pro speaker. Now, if you're just a beginner. Hey, that's a great clean up the messes you made. There's several different levels, including a level that teaches my famous back of the room selling technique where I've made millions of dollars and without being obnoxious like many sale speakers are. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/prospeaking. And of course that'll be in the show notes for episode 217. And to tell me you heard it on screw the commute, use coupon code SPEAK10 and you'll get 10 percent off whichever package you choose. And that can be a lot of money. I mean, let me help you turn you into a great and busy pro speaker.

[00:18:42] All right, so the last section we're talking about today. And remember, we're going to continue this next week is I promote the same day for evening webinars. Now, you would think promoting way in advance would increase show ups. And yeah, I mean, I'll admit sometimes that can work, but I have found that I only have to send one e-mail instead of several emails and I can still get a high percentage of show ups. You really need to explore this. See, the more emails you have to send to get a certain number of registrations, the worse it is for you. The reason is that every time you do a broadcast, you will lose subscribers. My philosophy is that if I can do one broadcast and get 200 registrations, that's far better than doing two broadcasts and getting two hundred and twenty five sign ups. What? I thought you wanted more people on your webinars, Tom. Well, yes, that's correct. But with my list size of about one hundred thousand people, every time I broadcast, I lose a certain number of subscribers. And it might not be because they don't like me. Of course it might be. But but it may be just. They were on email overload and they just couldn't take it anymore. So I want to minimize the number of broadcasts I use to get signups. Now that's not the only way to get people to sign up. You got social media and other stuff, but from the email perspective, I do them the same day if it's an evening webinar, so if I can get away with just one broadcast to populate my webinar, that's what I'm going to do. So this preserves many broadcasts over the course of a year that can be held back. So I don't overload people or they can be used to promote something else. Now, the reason I think this works better in getting more show ups is that when people sign up for things too far in advance, they forget about the webinar when the time rolls around to attend. And even if you remind the heck out of them, which we're going to cover next week. When I promote in the morning for an evening webinar, I get a really high show up rate. I mean, people typically know what they're doing on a particular day, but they don't know several days in advance. So usually a much smaller percentage of people run into conflicts they forgot about when they register the same day. And again, I only had to send out one email blast telling them about the webinar. You have to experiment with this to see what works best for you.

[00:21:37] All right. In part two of this series, I'm going to go in the e-mails. You can send landing pages, confirmation pages, registration videos, all kinds of reminders and a bunch of other cool ways you can get those darn people to show up. OK. Make sure you check out my pro speaking mentor course. Twenty four week intensive at screwthecommute.com/prospeaking. And if you're interested in my internet school for you or a loved one. Check that out at IMTCVA.org and feel free to call me or email me with questions about that. All right. I'll catch you up on the next episode. See you later.

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