Webinars are among the more compelling lead magnet creation formats you can use.
Some marketers are hesitant to use webinars for delivering content because they think it might be too technical. Others suffer from “stage fright” related to presenting material to an audience.
While both of these issues are real concerns that must be addressed, webinars are far too popular for us to abandon the idea out of hand.
Overcoming Objections
As for the matter of webinars requiring too much technical expertise, let’s outline the skillset you should come to the table with.
Webinar Services
To deliver a webinar, you’ll need to have some video conferencing service. The most widely used one is “Go To Webinar”. But it’s not the only one.
There are several excellent webinar systems you can use. In a future post I intend to review various options for webinar systems. Whichever one you use, you’ll obviously need to learn how to use it and how to record it.
Learning to use your webinar service will require time and effort. It will also require that you conduct many real-time “dry runs” before you go live. It’s good to do these trials, or dry-runs with a friend who is in close physical proximity to you. They might be in the next room, for instance.
This is helpful because you can’t always get immediate feedback from your “audience” in any other way. It allows your friend to come into your room and let you know you’re camera is not set up right, or you’re screen capture is not clear, or whatever technicalities you’ll want to know in real time.
Once you’ve done this a few times, you might be surprised to see that it’s a lot easier than you thought it would be.
Powerpoint Presentations
You can present your webinar using the teleconferencing platform by displaying whiteboards, browsing the internet, opening a mindmap or anything else.
One of the more popular methods is to use a Powerpoint (on PC) or Keynote (on Mac) presentation as your screen share.
What’s nice about this is that your slides are created in advance and you simply have to follow them for your presentation. Many people find this easier than browsing the internet and chatting off the top of their head.
Regarding the matter of technical skills, learning to use either Powerpoint or Keynote is fairly simple. You should be able to master it rather quickly.
Screen Capture Video
You won’t necessarily need to learn to use screen capture videos. You can simply record your webinar from your webinar service.
If you simply want to record a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation with no audience present at all, you can capture the “event” with screen capture software like Camtasia or Screencast (for PC), or Screenflow (for Mac). Then upload the video to YouTube and share the link as your lead magnet “webinar”.
Stage Fright
As for stage fright, the best thing I can suggest is to do as many dry runs as you need to start feeling comfortable. Then, when you’re ready, do your first live one and let your audience know… this is my first shot, so please bear with me if things are not perfectly coordinated.
This will help you lower the bar of expectation and will actually get your audience to root for you if you run into difficultly, rather than judge your “performance” too harshly.
Live Webinars
Live webinars are the cadillac of webinar presentations.
If you can offer people a solution to their problem, and promise to go over this solution in some detail on a live event, you should have little trouble getting people to subscribe to your list in order to register.
Deliver the webinar, give some Q&A, and people will be excited to follow you. This is a real relationship builder. Personal branding doesn’t get much better.
Not only will you get subscribers to your list, you’ll immediately earn their respect and trust.
This will breathe instant life into your email list.
Evergreen Webinars
Probably the next best thing to live webinars, are “evergreen” webinars. These are the recorded events that appear to be live.
There are some really great softwares and services that help you pretty easily record a live webinar, or even record a webinar with little or no audience, and deliver it to your subscribers in a way that they appear to be live.
These are very effective because even if people realize that they’re not really live, they’ll still get the feel of being at a live event. As for Q&A, you simply ask people to email you their questions and let them know you’ll respond to them as soon as possible after the event is over.
One of the keys to using evergreen webinars effectively is to never promote them as live events. They are not. So don’t say they are because some portion of your audience is sure to know the difference. Simply promote them as “webinars” and don’t qualify them as either live or recorded. Let each audience member decide for himself if it is actually live or not. The majority of them won’t even question it.
Recorded Webinars
It’s not a bad idea to simply offer a recorded webinar as your lead magnet, either.
Simply tell folks they’ll get your secret sauce in a recording of a webinar you recently recorded and let it go at that. When they join your list, give them the link to a webinar you recorded as a simple screen capture, and your lead magnet creation is done.
Please share this article on your social sites. Also, let me know in the comments section below, what you think of adding webinars to your lead magnet creation arsenal.