In the most recent post in this series, Can an Author Increase Their Impact with a Certification Program? I Did!, I talked about some of the reasons a certification program can help writers increase their impact, influence, and income. This week, I’d love to show you some steps that can help you figure out how to create a paid webinar you can earn more income from as an author.
You can run FREE webinars through Go To Webinar or many other platforms. These webinars can be live or recorded. We run several FREE ones, like How to Become Unhackable. However, you can charge a fee for these webinars too. It’s a great way to bring in some extra income and extend your reach. However, you can still earn income through a free webinar, just like I’ve done with all the webinars I’ve hosted in the past.
Step 1: What are your goals for your webinar?
You can ask yourself a series of questions to explore what goals you might have for running a paid (or free) webinar:
- Do you want to earn income directly from your webinar?
- Do you want to use your webinar as a magnet for a higher price point offer?
- What skills do you feel confident you can help your readers with?
- What type of engagement are you looking for?
- What do you want your attendees to get out of your webinar?
Once you’ve isolated what your goal—or your why—is, you can use that goal as your launching point for building your content.
Step 2: Who is your target audience?
This is one of the most important steps in marketing and creating content, and it is no different for creating a successful webinar. Here are some guidelines for identifying your target audience:
- Define who could benefit the most from your webinar. Though it may be true that everyone could benefit from attending your webinar, you won’t be able to reach anyone if you don’t focus on a specific group of people.
- Look to your readers for ideas on who might be most interested in attending your webinar. When you do some deep digging into who is engaging the most with your book, there should be some common ground among those readers.
- Make a list of where those readers are most likely to gather online. This will help you when you start to promote your webinar later.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to help everyone with your webinar, but when you try to let everyone know about your upcoming webinar, you may not be able to reach anyone at all. This is why defining a specific group of people as your ideal attendees is so critical for your success.
Step 3: What is the theme for your webinar?
If you’ve already published your book, this part of the webinar planning process will be simple for you. Focus your efforts here on the content your book focuses on. For now, you only need to define the general area your webinar will focus on. For instance, if you wrote a self-help book about addiction or alcohol abuse, you could host a free or low-cost webinar on the principles and resources that kept you in sobriety. Ask yourself some questions to guide yourself to the right topic:
- What are the biggest problems my ideal reader might face?
- What topics did I cover in my book that I can dive deeper into?
- What is the most popular question readers and/or interviewers ask me about my topic?
- If it’s been some time since I published my book, how can I refresh or update my topic with new information?
And keep asking yourself questions until you stumble upon an answer with a lot of potential that excites you. If you’re passionate about the information you want to relay to your readers, that will make for a more successful webinar.
Step 4: What call-to-action (CTA) will you feature at the end of your webinar?
This step takes step number one—your goals for your webinar—a bit further. Once you have your goals defined, return back to your work in that step to brainstorm some possible CTAs that will complement the theme of your webinar you worked on in step number three. It should be a natural “next best step” plan of action for your attendees so it doesn’t feel like a sudden shift to a problem they might have no interest in. Think about how you could adjust the following products and/or services to fit your specific message or vision:
- A low-cost ebook or digital workbook
- An hour of coaching services
- A signed copy of your book
- A speaking appearance on your topic
- Services directly related to the topic of your webinar
- A physical product you’re promoting on your website
Once you have clarity on your goals and your topic, start writing down as many ideas as you can think of for possible CTAs. When you’re done with your list, focus on the most relevant product and design your talking points to lead up to that. Don’t worry if you have too many listed—you can always use these to spark a later webinar or online course!
Step 5: What will you speak about during your webinar?
Using your theme and your CTA you developed in the previous two steps, the next step is to develop your talking points for your future webinar. If you start with your theme—your launching point for your webinar—and set your end point as your CTA—the final destination—design the logical pathway that takes you from your introduction all the way to your conclusion. Each talking point should directly relate back to your theme, but it should also push you further toward the end goal—your CTA offer at the end of your presentation. Once you have your basic talking points decided, I highly recommend practicing them in the mirror and on a recorded video before you go live with your webinar. Ask a few friends to watch your test video and give you feedback on how you can improve.
Step 6: How will you deliver your webinar?
I already listed one possible platform at the beginning of this blog, but there are plenty of other platforms that can host your future webinar. If you plan to deliver it as live video content, you might consider either going live on Facebook or YouTube if you already have an audience built on either of those platforms. Then, once you’ve finished the live video, you can offer it online on other social media platforms and your website.
Hosting live and recorded webinars are only a fraction of the action plan I created when I set out to become a more successful author. To this day, I still host regular webinars, and I attribute a fair portion of my success to them. I’ve proven they can work to increase impact, influence, and income, and I believe you have it in you to achieve the same level of success I have!
In the next installment, I’ll share yet another path to more success as an author—paid conference calls. This is another tool I’ve used that helped me gain more impact, influence, and income as an author, and I’d love to help you use them to your advantage as well.
If you’ve attended one of my webinars in the past, what did you learn that you can use to enjoy more success in your future webinars?
Kary Oberbrunner, CEO of Igniting Souls, is an author, coach, and speaker who helps individuals and organizations clarify who they are, why they’re here, and where they’re going so they can become souls on fire, experience unhackability, and share their message with the world. Connect at KaryOberbrunner.com.