The Complete Guide to Webinars: Lessons We've Learned from Hosting 50+ Webinars
Hosting webinars is a super fun way to engage with your audience, pitch your product or service and add amazing value. But there’s also a lot to think about!
It can be both crazy-exciting and super duper scary to host a live webinar. There are probably tons of thoughts and what-ifs floating around in your cute little brain.
“What if I forget what I want to say?”
“What if no one thinks what I’m talking about is interesting?”
“What if…?”
These are totally normal fears to have, especially if you’re someone who was scared to ever even show your face in a video, let alone host a live webinar for a group of people. This is a big step to take in your business, and we applaud you for coming this far.
We’ve hosted countless webinars (literally.. we lost track somewhere around 50), so we’ve picked up a few tips along the way that we’d love to share with you. Stick around for the end because we have a treat that will help you knock your first webinar out of the park!
What Even is a Webinar?
You could call it a webinar, workshop, or masterclass. We’ve used these terms interchangeably, like for our Day Job to Dream Job webinar and our workshop, Your Biz Horoscope. They can either be live or pre-recorded, but that’s usually only after you’ve hosted a live one and still give access to the recording. Launching a fully pre-recorded webinar takes away the ability to talk to and connect with your audience live. (Unless you plan on being there via chat box, but that isn’t nearly as much fun or effective.)
WHY ARE WEBINARS A GOOD IDEA?
They’re a way for you to communicate with your audience live and as close to in-the-flesh as you can get online and provide them value. People love putting a face, voice, and mannerisms to a name– anything that will make you seem more like a person than just a brand. Your audience will feel way more connected to you, which will lead to building better trust. Not to mention the new relationships you’ll form with the ones who are coming to check you out for the first time.
All of the above will waterfall into increased brand awareness. If you fall in love with your first (or second) webinar, you’ll start to notice that the more you host, the more attendees you’ll have. That’s because you’ve built those connections, more and more people are starting to trust your words, and you’re becoming even more of an expert and authority figure in your field.
Remember that if you’re hosting a webinar just for the sales, you shouldn’t be hosting one at all. Your webinar should focus around teaching something and actually giving value versus just showing up and spitting out a few bullet points from a presentation just to coerce your audience into buying something.
You Need a Topic, Of Course!
You might already have a topic in mind or at least an idea of what you want to talk about. If not, that’s totally okay, too. Just take a moment to think about what you’re good at. If you were telling a friend about one of your passions, what would it be? What topic could you easily talk about all day long and even teach to someone?
Don’t think that your topic is too common or well-known. There will always be someone who knows less about something than you do and is wanting to learn more about it. Yes, that means even if there are a hundred webinars out there about the same thing. What sets you apart from others is that no one can tell it like you can, and we’d bet you even have your own experience as well.
If you’re planning on introducing a paid offer at the end, be sure that your topic will flow naturally into it. For example, if you’re selling a course on how to use Pinterest for business, your topic could be about three steps someone shouldn’t miss when creating their business’ Pinterest account.
NOW FOR THE TITLE
This is the part that can be all too easy to get hung up on, but you don’t have to spend three days overthinking it and trying to come with a super sexy title. Heck, ours is just “Day Job to Dream Job” because that’s what we teach– how to go from working at your day job to your dream job. The topic should be clear right away from reading the title, but it can be written in tons of ways, like a question, challenging statement, or focusing on the benefits of what your audience will learn. Maybe your topic is on helping people create better graphics for marketing purposes. A few examples of titles you might use are:
Tired of Spending Hours Creating Subpar Graphics? – Asks a clear question with an obvious answer (Yes!)
Your Social Media Marketing Sucks and Here’s Why – Challenging statement
3 Ways to Create Marketing Graphics That Will Boost Your Conversion Rate – Both clear and focuses on the benefits
Set Your Goals
Let’s say you just launched an awesome new online course. The incentive of hosting a workshop may be to:
1. Get people on your email list by signing up for the workshop
2. Grow your audience/connect more with the ones who’ve been following you for a while, and 3. Drive traffic to your sales page.
All of these goals will ultimately lead back to one thing, right? Sales. You can nurture those on your list and lead them to buying, you’d grow a larger following that you could then also nurture, and driving more traffic to your sales page will lead to, well, more sales. Now, it’s just your job to figure out what numbers will make your webinar “successful” in your eyes. Keep it realistic so you won’t be discouraged if you don’t hit, say, $10k in sales after your very first one.
Plan Out Your Content
This will also sit hand-in-hand with how long you want your webinar to be. Most are about 45 minutes to an hour, but if this is your first one, it’s all up to you and what you feel comfortable with. The maximum length you’d want it to be is 1.5 hours so that you can be inclusive to those who may have crazy schedules and aren’t able to attend for any longer than an hour, and oftentimes people can start getting a little antsy if it’s any longer than that. A rough outline that can you can follow is:
Just a few minutes to welcome people in. Give them that award-winning smile and warm greetings!
About 5 minutes introducing yourself and your business.
10-15 minutes explaining what your webinar is about, what they’ll learn, what benefits and action steps they’ll walk away with, etc.
25-30 minutes actually diving into the good stuff. This is where you’ll teach and give all the value you can. They should leave with action steps they can immediately start on.
Now, we’re already around the 45-minute mark. Take about 10-15 minutes to introduce your offer and what amazing things it can do for them!
Finally, the fun part– Q&A! This is your chance to really interact with your audience.
Figure Out the Logistics
What day and time will your webinar be? What platform are you using to host it? What equipment do you need? Get all of the technical stuff straight.
We have to recommend WebinarJam as our all-time favorite platform. With the Basic plan, you can have up to 500 attendees, a 2 hour duration, and an unlimited amount of webinars. You’ll be able to live chat with your audience and even choose someone to “bring onstage” with you for a virtual face-to-face conversation. (Um, hello, super-fun Q&A!) You also get automatic recordings of your webinar, and those can then either be on-demand for whoever wants to register and watch it right now, scheduled for a later date, or made as a recurring series. WebinarJam even lets you share files with your audience during the webinar like a PDF workbook. There are tons more features that you can read about here.
As far as equipment goes, you don’t have to get too fancy as long as you have a quality webcam, microphone, and great lighting. Usually, Mac laptops have great cameras and microphones, and if you’re sitting in front of a window, Mother Nature will give you selfie-worthy lighting herself.
The best day and time for your webinar depends on who your ideal client or customer is. If you’re targeting an audience who works a 9-5 job, then a Monday at 2 pm might not make sense. Think about what their current situation is, or you can always just ask! Post a poll on your Facebook page or Instagram stories and let your audience vote what time they’d prefer it to be.
Get Your Slides Ready
You don’t have to have a presentation per se, but it helps to keep your audience engaged and paying attention if they can have a visual to follow along with. Plus, they’re just pretty! The general order we follow for our slides is:
Title page
Table of contents
About us
The “meat” of the webinar (all of the good stuff)
Presenting the offer
Q&A
The actual amount of slides you use can vary. With the table of contents, it can be more than just telling them how the webinar will go, but also presenting what exactly they’re going to learn, why they need that information, and how it’s going to benefit them afterward. When you’re presenting your offer, you may also include testimonials, results, payment options if applicable, bonuses that may be included, FAQs, etc.
A DONE-FOR-YOU PRESENTATION
Because we know how important your first webinar is to you, we’ve just released Presentation templates in our Creative Template Shop. You’ll have a snazzy, dazzling deck of slides to present during your webinar that are professionally designed by our own in-house designer.
Above is the template in our soft collection, but it also comes in a neutral and bright color palette, but the colors and fonts can be edited to match your own branding should you choose. It comes with 17 pages that include:
Title page
Table of contents
Title
Table of contents
Quote
Biography
Testimonials
Selling page
Call-to-action
FAQs
9 general layouts for multi-purpose use
You’ll never have to stress about having a beautiful presentation to back up your webinar ever again. Once you decide you love it, consider joining our membership so you can download this template and every other item in The Shop as many times as you desire!
Set Up Your Pages
Now comes the fun part: setting up your registration page and thank you page! The registration page is exactly that– it’s the page people will land on to sign-up for your webinar. It will give more details about what they’ll learn, why they should register, some information about yourself, and more compelling copy that will make them want to click the magic button to sign up. The thank you page is then what they’ll be taken to upon completing registration. Here, you can urge them to take another step, which could just be sharing your webinar with friends.
Both of these can be easily created on a platform like Leadpages. We even have a sales page template for Leadpages in The Shop that you could easily tweak to work for your webinar.
COLLECT THOSE EMAILS
We could assume that you already have an email marketing platform, but you’ll need somewhere to collect their emails as well as send their confirmation email with the webinar link. If this is your first webinar and you have a smaller audience, there are platforms like MailChimp, Mailerlite, and Convertkit that have free plans which are perfect for those just starting their list with less that 1,000-2,000 subscribers.
Promote the Heck Out of It
Anywhere that you can be found online should have something promoting your webinar. You can easily put together some cute Canva graphics to use for your social media channels. Create a cover graphic about it for your Facebook profile. If appropriate, promote it in Facebook groups. Post on your Instagram feed and stories everyday. Try going live on Facebook and Instagram to talk even more about it. Send announcements and reminders to your email list. The world needs to know about this webinar! There should be some form of communication going out almost everyday up until the day of, no matter if it’s a quick P.S. at the bottom of an email or even just a quick mention of it in an Instagram caption.
Finally, Just Do It!
We were totally nervous before hosting our first webinars, but once you get through the first one, we guarantee you’ll think to yourself, “Wow, this wasn’t so bad after all. What was I so afraid of?” Just practice, practice, and practice some more until your jaw hurts. Try sitting in front of your camera and pretending your webinar is live. We promise you’ll only look a little crazy. If you haven’t yet, now is a good time to go live on Facebook or Instagram. Having a live audience watching will feel just like a webinar. You could view them as essentially the same thing, just one doesn’t have a pretty presentation to go with it.
DON’T FORGET THE FOLLOW-UP
Now that you have all of these amazing new emails on your list, be sure to follow up with them. You could send a heart-felt thank you with a replay link and reminder to check out your offer (if you presented it during the webinar). Whatever it is, you should send some sort of follow-up email to those who attended the webinar. It’s super simple to set up a tagging system in your ConvertKit account which will allow you to then send an email to only those people who registered.
And you’re finished! Now, you can sit back and relax because you just hosted your first freaking webinar! Whatever you do, please don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t perform how you were hoping. Think of your first webinar as a practice run and really buckle down to kill the next. Just continue to show up, provide value, and connect with your audience, and you’ll be amazed at how those great relationships pay off.
