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How To Transform A Webinar Into Business Revenue Here are 4 ways that you can turn your webinars into income-generating machines.

By Adam Deutsch

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Webinars are more than just a proven way to promote your goods and services, they are an extremely powerful modality for educating, training, entertaining, and converting consumers into loyal customers.

A main reason for their effectiveness is the meteoric rise of video content in the digital world. The other half of the puzzle can be attributed to the fact that the vast majority of webinars are free events.

This does not mean that all webinars are free or that paid versions are somehow inferior. This is a very versatile modality; that's one of the reasons it works so well.

Webinar provider ClickMeeting recently articulated this with a free eBook about how to make money using webinars, which illustrates a variety of money-making tactics fueled by technology.

Webinars can be used at nearly all stages of the buyer's journey without losing effectiveness or potency. Instead of just being a supplemental tool, webinars can become a source of revenue in their own right; you just have to know how to structure and leverage your broadcasts accordingly.

If you are looking for ways to generate a meaningful income through webinar technology, you've come to the right place.

Here are 4 ways that you can turn your webinars into income-generating machines.

1. Create a Webinar Series

If you haven't considered making a webinar for the actual thing you are selling, try this on for size:

A great example of a brand selling a webinar series comes from Social Media Examiner. Each year, the company holds its annual summit that they creatively (and cost effectively) turned into a series of webinar presentations from renowned marketing experts like Joel Comm and Ian Cleary.

The series is organised so that each presenter is allotted one session to discuss their particular topic of expertise. All of the presentations are available to watch live or, for those who can't make the live broadcast, are accessible as a recording. In either format, there is a fee for access.

In addition to the actual presentations, Social Media Examiner supplies attendees with audio files and transcripts to provide added value to the experience.

This is a unique way to leverage your brand as an industry thought leader too. By consolidating other experts in your field, you can make legitimate impacts and revenues by hosting a webinar series event.

2. Sell an Online Course

The previously mentioned eBook points out that while sharing knowledge is inherently a good thing, one shouldn't do it to their own detriment:

"If you share your knowledge on how to excel in a specific area or how to improve a skill, don't give away your expertise for free, with exposure as the only compensation. Instead, consider sharing it in a webinar with paid access. Educate, teach, guide, and share knowledge – and get paid."

The tactic of selling an online course via webinars is extremely fruitful and has made many people legitimately wealthy. This is exactly how Lewis Howes went from sleeping on his sister's couch to being a millionaire 2 years later.

Selling an online course can be fairly simple work. Tools like Kajabi have made this accessible to even the technically illiterate. From building a website to selling and marketing your content – online course builders like Kajabi supply the entire back end needed.

The main thing you need is enough knowledge to fill roughly five videos worth of material that you can promote through your video series.

It doesn't matter if you are training people to achieve higher employee engagement rates, teaching them to be better chefs, or helping them learn to meditate; people are searching for everything online. Don't be timid with your knowledge.

Online courses differ from a webinar series in that courses provide a step-by-step program with clearly defined goals. Additionally, courses typically integrate supplemental materials like worksheets, checklists, and similar content that are worked on or referenced inside and outside of the course.

3. Promote Your Product

Pitching a product during a free webinar is certainly the most common way to generate revenue through this medium, but that's because it's extremely effective.

This one is fairly easy to model and replicate using the following steps:

  • Promote a free event with content and email marketing, supplemented by PPC advertising
  • Spend the first 30 minutes of the webinar providing your audience with valuable advice that they can use to improve their life or career.
  • Pitch viewers your product or service by tying it back to the original pain point that got them to sign up in the first place.

The best part about this model is that everybody wins. The attendees gain actionable wisdom and expertise. You widen your audience, collect a bunch of email addresses, and likely gain a few customers too. If you integrate a proposal software in conjunction, you've got an insanely streamlined acquisition and onboarding process.

4. Use a Webinar as a Sales Tool

This is one of the easiest tactics to implement as it requires almost no extra effort.

You can add value to a subscription, membership, course, product, or service that you are offering by adding in webinar recordings as a bonus; this is a fantastic way of driving additional sales.

Another way to approach this simplistic sales scheme is to create a sense of urgency around purchasing something by offering your webinar(s) as a "limited time" extra; something that consumers would normally have to pay for.

For any potential customers that find themselves riding the fence on whether to make the purchase or not, this is often the extra push that they needed to click that "Buy Now" CTA.

These are just a few of the ways to earn money using webinars; ClickMeeting's eBook dives into scads more details. Many entrepreneurs have made webinars the platform on which they built their fortune; do not underestimate their power. This broadcasting tool is the real deal, and you should be in on the action too.

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