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!

We’ve launched The Creative Template Shop-- us cool kids just call it The Shop-- and it’s FILLED with templates for your business, ranging from social media to client experience to even web design and opt-ins. These already-made templates are the silver lining for any biz owner who struggles trying to put together beautiful graphics for their business.

You’re working your tail off in your creative service-based business.

Your life is all about clients: finding them (where ARE they??), landing them (and competing on price makes your feel like you’re charging so much less than you need to if you want this biz to be sustainable), making the ones you DO find happy (so much so that you find yourself delivering WAY more than you originally agreed to)...

And maybe you’ve convinced yourself that this is just how life has to be if you’re going to do what you love for a living.

Do you ever find yourself on the word vomit train when attempting to sell anything? You know the one that makes zero stops and is stationed in Awkward Townsville? The one where you’re chatting with a potential client and you find yourself having the out of body experience where you hear yourself doing things like…

It feels like you’re still playing “pretend business” and you’re wondering if you’re even smart enough to figure this all out like it seems like everyone else has.

This convinces you that the only way to get clients is to do what works for everyone else - posting 3x a day on Instagram, blogging “value add” content, showing up in Facebook groups where you *think* your client might be and so on…

You’re listening to countless other business owners tell you that doing all that ^ is what’s going to work for you...so why isn’t it?

Here’s the truth: it’s not you. It is the strategies you’re using. They aren’t right for YOUR business.

Sounds pretty dreamy right? Someone finds you online. They are interested in what you have to offer and learn to more about you. They like what you do, say, and sell and eventually buy. Well folks, to make this happen you really have to focus on a couple of key things.

As a small business owner, Facebook is definitely not the hot place to be. With less than 5.5% referring traffic for our own site, Facebook was never the platform that made sense for us to invest our time on. Until they changed the live streaming landscape in August 2015.

Now, it wasn’t until February of 2016 that all accounts were able to use the streaming capabilities on their own pages. From August to February the only type of accounts able to use live streaming were celebrities and journalists. But it’s interesting to note that these two (very different types of people) were using Facebook Live in the exact ways that would be helpful for small business owners (see, our obsession with Amy Schumer was for research!).

We have been around the block once or twice online and have tried our hand in many platforms, hosting services, and domain providers, but when it came time to rebrand we were stuck. We pondered for months over who or what we should choose, but once we finally made the decision we never looked back! Squarespace is by far the easiest platform to use, with the cleanest interface. Choosing them is hands down the best decision we’ve made for our business and blog.