41 Ways to Build Your List, Bond with Your Readers and Make More Money Using Webinars

Webinars are hot stuff these days. Everywhere you turn, you’re probably seeing invitations for free webinars, Google Hangouts, and live online summits.

But you’re having trouble picturing how webinars could actually help your business.

If you’re a coach, consultant, author, therapist, blogger, or other small business owner, you need practical, real ways to use webinars to:

• Grow your list
• Get your message out to the world
• Increase your authority in your niche
• Connect with your audience members
• Drive traffic to your website
• Sell products and services

If you’re getting stuck when you sit down to brainstorm ways to use webinars, today’s post is going to be a HUGE kick-start for you.

So, without further ado, here’s the definitive list of 41 specific and practical ways you can use webinars to grow your list, connect with your audience, and make money:

How to Webinars to Market Your Business and Grow Your Email List

1. Make your webinar slides into visual badges for Pinterest and Facebook. Visual marketing is HUGE right now, so if you’ve got great slides, make them into cool, shareable graphics you can use on social media.

2. Pull quotes from you and your webinar co-presenters and make them into attractive quote badges. People LOVE quotes, so make sure you take inspiring and interesting quotes from your webinars and make them into promotional materials for social media.

3. Offer free, open, pitch-free Q&A sessions as a promotional tool for your business. Once a month, hold an open Q&A webinar where you just show up and answer as many questions as you can in an hour. People need to sign up (via email) to get the webinar login details, so this is a great list-building strategy.

4. Use webinars (either live or automated) as a way to entice people to sign up when you’re running Facebook or other online advertisements. Studies have shown that Facebook Ads will be considerably more effective if you drive your advertising traffic toward a free incentive (like a free report or webinar).

5. Create online summits or virtual conferences using webinars. You can attract tons of subscribers by hosting an online summit (which is really just an extended webinar where you invite special guests to come in and speak to your audience). Your special guests will often help you promote the event, so you can potentially reach thousands of additional potential subscribers.

6. Turn webinar presentations into slide decks to publish on SlideShare. SlideShare is one of the world’s most underutilized sources of traffic. You can easily turn your webinar slides into slide decks to share on SlideShare.

7. Approach experts in your niche (or other influencers with similar communities to yours) to do webinars for their audiences. You’ll get in front of their audiences when they send out promotional emails for the webinars. Depending on the arrangement you have with your co-presenter, you can often add the your webinar participants to your email list. Make sure you’re clear on the arrangement with your co-presenter before you do your webinar.

8. Ask another expert to do a live webinar for YOUR audience. Having new and interesting guests on your webinars will often draw significantly more webinar participants.

9. Upload some of your webinars to YouTube and include links back to your site and your email opt-in page. You can give away some of your content on YouTube or Vimeo – just make sure you always include strong calls to action, to prompt people to sign up for your list.

10. Create a pinboard on Pinterest that features all of your recorded webinars (or invitations to join your live ones). Video content is allowed on Pinterest boards, but hardly anyone uses it – so be one of the unique pinners who includes video, and pin the webinars you upload to YouTube on your Pinterest boards.

11. Turn your webinar content into free videos to give away during launches. You can record any webinar, no matter what platform you’re using, and use it as a free giveaway next time you run a launch.

How to Use Webinars to Connect with Your Readers, Prospects and Customers

12. Build authority by doing regular webinars (either promotional or pitch-free). The more high-quality content you give away, the more authority and respect you’ll build.

13. Listen to your participants’ feedback and questions during your webinars – the feedback you get will probably be more candid and honest than what you could gather during a formal survey of your audience.

14. Get ideas for new blog posts, podcast episodes, products and services. Take your audience questions and feedback and turn them into ideas for new content for your business. If you see particular questions come up over and over again, you might consider creating a special product or service to address that need.

15. See who your true fans are. I have two people who show up for every single webinar I host. If they’re not on a webinar, it probably means they are bleeding from the head. These people also happen to be two of my very best clients. If people shows up for your live training webinars over and over again, that means they are VERY warm leads for you, and it’s probably a good idea to touch base with them to find out how you can help them.

16. Ask questions during webinar sign-up. You can often customize the sign-up forms for your webinars, so you can ask specific questions in those fields. Is there something about your audience you really want to know? Create a question on your sign-up form and ask them. One tried-and-true question that works in all situations is, “What is your biggest problem with [YOUR TOPIC]?”

17. Create unstoppable sales copy by discovering your potential customer’s objections. When you’re selling products, one of your main jobs is to get people over the objections that come up for them during your sales process. You’re probably going to see certain objections or issues coming up over and over again during your webinars, and you can use those exact phrases to create powerfully compelling, persuasive sales copy.

18. Utilize the “Meet and Greet”. Before the webinar officially starts, you can chat with your audience, ask them questions, and warm them up a bit before you start your presentation. I like to ask people where they’re calling from, and what they’re looking to learn on the webinar. It’s also a great way to show people how use the chat or question box on your webinar software.

19. Create a bond by telling stories. Webinars are an intimate form of communication, whether you’re using them as a promotional tool or to deliver paid content. You can intensify that bond (and keep people engaged) by telling stories on your webinars. At the beginning of promotional webinars, it’s always a good idea to tell people a little bit about who you are and what your story is, to help them understand you and trust you. You can also use case studies, testimonials or example stories during your regular presentation to keep people interested and engaged.

20. Host customer-only webinars to provide new information about current products, or give special sneak peeks of upcoming additions to your product line. Offering special programs like this builds customer confidence and helps your clients learn to use your products better, which increases their chances of becoming repeat customers (or staying with your continuity or membership program).

21. Pull back the curtain and offer your webinar participants a glimpse at what happens behind-the-scenes in your business or industry. Giving people a look at what goes on behind closed doors lets people know your story and makes them feel like they’re part of a special, insider community.

22. Offer the content from your webinars as a regular audio or video podcast. Podcasts are hot right now, and they can be fantastic marketing tools. You can take your webinar content and offer it as a regular podcast.

23. Use webinars during your onboarding process. You can host a live monthly webinar for new clients, where you can tell people what they can expect from working with you and let them ask questions.

24. Offer webinars as content upgrades. Need free giveaways and incentives for your website? Live and recorded webinars make great free “bribes” on your blog. At the end of a blog post, you can include a button your readers can click to sign up for a targeted webinar that is relevant to the content they just finished reading.

How to Use Webinars to Make Money in Your Business

25. Host free promotional webinars that include a pitch for your product or service. We talked about this in yesterday’s post, Why Webinars Might Be the Best Thing You’ll Ever Do For Your Business. Promotional webinars are a phenomenally effective marketing tool, when used correctly. Just make sure not to make the entire webinar a giant sales pitch – respect your audience, and give away top-quality content, then offer a relevant and targeted sales pitch at the end.

26. Include webinar Q&A sessions or other discussions as part of a membership site. If you’ve got a continuity program or ongoing membership site, you can include live weekly or monthly Q&A webinars with you or other experts as part of the paid program. Copyblogger Media’s Authority membership program features weekly Q&A sessions with a rotating cast of influential experts, and it’s a huge selling point for this (paid) online community.

27. Use a webinar to create digital products to sell (like ebooks, recorded workshops, and video series). Package up a webinar (or series of webinars) as a product. If you’re not sure how to create a product for your business, this is a quick and easy way to get started.

28. Run a short or long-term mastermind or coaching group from a webinar platform. You can gather your mastermind together in a regular webinar discussion group. Two of my business coaches, Pam Slim and Tommi Wolfe, both use GotoWebinar to gather their mastermind members together in one virtual place, even when those members are scattered all over the world!

29. Get sponsors for your regular webinars, especially when you start attracting large audiences. Once you reach a certain attendance level, you can actively recruit sponsors for your webinar and make money directly from sponsored ads or announcements during your event.

30. Market affiliate products on your webinars. I recently attended a outstanding webinar, hosted by Anne Samoilov, where she invited an expert from LeadPages to talk about optimizing your website for maximum subscriber sign-ups. During the webinar, the presenter gave tons of ideas for turning your visitors into subscribers (with LeadPages or without) and at the end of the webinar there was a sales pitch for LeadPages. Anne received an affiliate commission for all the sales they made during the webinar.

31. Need bonuses for your online products? You’ve seen all those online programs that have a big list of “bonus” content you can get for buying the product. You can easily use recorded or live webinars as those bonuses when you’re launching your paid products or programs. Bonus note – you can use some webinars as bonuses for multiple products, as long as they are a good fit for that content!

32. Use an automated webinar service (like Stealth Seminars and Evergreen Business Systems) to sell products during automated webinars. Amy Porterfield and Michael Hyatt both run very high quality  automated, pre-recorded webinars that feature great content and include a pitch at the end. Automated webinars can turn into a source of ongoing, passive income if they’re done well and you promote them regularly. You simply record your webinar once, upload it, and make sales on an ongoing basis.

33. Become a webinar moderator or manager. If you love running webinars, help other people do it! Hire yourself out as a regular webinar community manager or moderator.

34. Host a live webinar during a product launch, offering some sort of special deal on your product or program. When you’re doing a product launch, you need to do everything you can to draw attention to your launch. Launch-week webinars can be a great way to give people an introduction to your teaching style, give them free content, and sell products or programs.

35. Remember those online summits we mentioned during #3, above? You can give away your seminar content for free if people attend live, and also offer them a package of all the recordings of the presentations for a reasonable fre. Photographer Catherine Just ran a popular summit for several years called The SoulFull Summit, and sold recordings using this model.

36. Use your webcam to teach a paid class in which you need to demonstrate something live – like cooking, flower arrangement, bike repair or archery. You can keep the camera on you during the webinar, and teach anything you want!

37. Use webinars to conduct live makeovers or critiques of things like wardrobes (if you’re a personal stylist), websites (if you’re a designer) or rooms in houses (if you’re a professional organizer).

38. Use webinars to help you promote your live events and conferences. If you’ve got an in-person event or conference coming up, you can host webinars with your conference speakers to increase buzz and make more ticket sales.

39. Make money with your co-presented webinars. Remember those joint ventures we mentioned in #7 and #8, above? You can also sell products on those webinars, and split the profits with your co-presenter.

40. Launch your book with a webinar. Offer a special webinar during your book launch week, and do a virtual reading. Offer giveaways and prizes to build buzz and encourage people to attend and invite their friends.

41. Offer a weekly webinar to sell membership or continuity programs. Podcasting expert John Lee Dumas offers a free webinar-based workshop every week for anyone interested in started a podcast, and makes sales of his Podcaster’s Paradise program every time he does it.

Webinars are a highly effective (and fun!) content marketing tool

Businesses in all kinds of industries and niches (including B2B and B2C businesses) are discovering that webinars are an effective way to build relationships with their prospects and market their products and services.

I’ve just showed you over 40 creative and fun ideas to integrate webinars into your business model.

Want to know what to do now? Block out 30 minutes, set a timer, and sit down with a blank sheet of paper. Then make a list of all the ways you can use webinars to build your list and make YOUR business more profitable in 2015. If you get stuck, return to this post and look for more inspiration.

Once you’ve got a list of webinar ideas for your business, pick one. Choose an idea that you’re excited about. You don’t have to start at the top, with the most ambitious webinar idea on the list, either. Start simple.

After you’ve chosen an idea, run with it. Get it scheduled some time in the next two weeks. Set a date and start promoting your new webinar. You can use tools like GotoWebinar or Google Hangouts to run your first webinar event.

And above all – have fun with it! Webinars are a great way to talk with your audience, so enjoy your first event, even if you only get one participant.

I started with one attendee at my first webinar, and now I regularly get over 400 participants every time I do a webinar event.

Your job with webinars is to start small, and grow!

Your readers, clients and customers will thank you for it – and so will your bottom line.