7 Tips for Selling Via Teleseminars or Webinars

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the positive messages about the recent earthquake, I appreciate your support, it has been a difficult time here but at least my family, my staff and their families are safe.

One of my companies offices is complete 'toast' the other ones are not too bad and we should be back in them in the coming weeks. In the meantime my staff are working from home and some are working from my house.

If you want to read my story of the earthquake, go here.

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So, today I wanted to give you some tips for those of you who are interested in running your own teleseminars and webinars.

For the rest of this article I'll refer to them as webinars, but they could just as well be teleseminars as the tips work for both.

Note: These tips work for running webinars in just about any niche (ie not just the 'make money online' niche). I've run webinars in the dating niche, personal development and other niches with great success. Others have done so in Forex, weight loss, dog training and all sorts of niches. The fact is, getting a bunch of people together and delivering them free live training that is great value, and leaves them wanting more information from you, leads to great sales in any niche.

Here are 7 tips for selling via live teleseminars or webinars:

1. Make sure that the content delivered on the webinar is worth the attendee's time, whether or not they buy the product that you offer at the end of the webinar. If you fail in this, then they'll never want to come back to be on another webinar. If you succeed, they'll not only come back, but they'll forgive the occassional lower quality webinar and keep coming back. They'll also be more likely to buy from you and recommend you to others in the future.

Also, by being on a webinar with you, your open rates and conversion rates from your emails that go out to them in the future go up. This is because they feel like they know you better, they know your voice now (and your face if you put it on the start of your webinar) and they 'hear' your voice when they read your emails. 

While webinars that do nothing but pitch and sell a product DO convert to sales and DO work, they are not a good long term strategy if you want your attendees to keep coming back. Also, you can run these kinds of webinars, so long as you tell your audience before they come (e.g. if you tell them that the webinar is going to be a live demonstration of a paid software product. If they know what they're in for, then that's ok).

When you deliver good content, try not to cram too much into a short time-frame. I've been guilty of this in the past, and not only does it lead to less sales at the end of the webinar, it leads to people taking away less value from the webinar than if you'd just covered a few great ideas really well. Usually 2 or 3 big ideas are enough for a great webinar, and within each idea there may be 3 to 10 'sub ideas' that reinforce that main idea. If you have too many big ideas in your webinar, people will suffer from information overload as it's too much to get them to remember and take away to implement later for such a short space of time.

They'll also leave earlier as it'll be too much for many of them to take in and leaves less time for them to get their questions properly answered (assuming you take time for live questions later in the webinar).

2. Don't cut the close too short. Make sure that you appropriate at least 5 minutes to deliver your close so that you can punch out all the benefits of the product, and also make sure that you put a further 10 minutes aside for live questions about the product.

I almost doubled my webinar conversion rates when I added extra time into them for the close so that people could ask questions about the product. Sometimes people are very close to buying but NEED that urgent question answered first.

3. Have scarcity, either have limited numbers of bonuses OR have time based scarcity. I usually like to have time-based scarcity because I don't usually like to limit the number of sales that I can make. When you tell people that they have 15 minutes to join a product to gain the bonuses from your live webinar, and that if they join within 48 hours, they'll gain 'most' of the bonuses from your live webinar, but if they join after that, they miss out on the bonuses... that scarcity works really well and it also rewards those who took the time to be there on the live webinar.

4. Make exciting bonuses. If you can't make them, get some from the product owner, often they'll have other products of their own that they can offer to you to use as bonuses. If you can't find those, then you can buy private label rights to a product that you can use as a bonus. Just be careful with private label rights products as some are very low quality and others are pretty good. If it's not something you think is good value, then refund it and buy another PLR product to use as your bonus. Sometimes you can use price scarcity as a bonus if the person you are interviewing on your webinar (assuming it's their product) is willing to allow you to sell their product at a discount for their launch.

5. Make the webinar fun, if you are making good money from your webinars, then why not give away some prizes? Mp3 players, ipads, Nintendo Wiis, whatever you think might get people excited about staying all the way to the end of the webinar, and also to give them extra incentive to buy the product in the hope of winning one of your awesome prizes.

I don't do this on every webinar, but when I offer prizes it has helped get more attendees to stick around to the end of the webinar, and also it has helped conversion rates during the 'close' when people know that not only are they buying a fantastic product with great bonuses, but they also have a chance of winning another really cool prize.

6. If you have a guest on your webinar, or if you are the guest on a webinar, don't be afraid to ask/answer the difficult questions that the audience might throw at you. Usually the 'curly' questions are the ones that everyone in the audience are thinking, so they need a good answer to those kinds of questions in order to overcome any objections they may have and if they are answered well, conversion rates on the product you are promoting will skyrocket. Answered poorly will backfire of course, but I hope you are promoting products that are great value that stand up to scrutiny from your audience.

7. Most people are pretty nervous for the first 3 or 4 webinars that they run. This is normal, just think of it as training. Don't worry if you make any sales or not, this is time for you to learn your craft. Just do it. It's like driving a car, you won't learn by reading books, you have to get in the car and start driving several times before you become a good driver. Have fun with it and go well!

I hope that you enjoyed this blog post and that it sparks some interest in you running your own webinars or teleseminars someday.

Please post your comments about this blog post below.

If I get enough comments and interest from you from this particular blog post then I'll book some time in my schedule to run a live webinar teaching you in detail how to make money from running your own webinars and how to get people on them and so forth.

I'll even get one of my friends on it who is a genius at hosting and monetizing webinars, but I only want to do this if there is enough interest as I realize while webinars are very lucrative they aren't for everyone.

All the best!

Mark Ling