George Kao says free webinars are usually just sales pitches in disguise. Charge $10 to $50 instead: you'll get serious attendees, spend only 5-10% on selling instead of 25-33%, and actually teach something real.
George Kao.
April 2, 2018.
About $10 (low end) to $50 (high end).
About 5–10% of the webinar time.
Typically about 25–33% of a 60-minute webinar (i.e., ~15–30 minutes).
A common marketing method is doing free webinars. And you may have experienced this as a consumer when you've seen the announcements about free trainings and you show up to that free training on a webinar and it turns out to be, you know, a third of it is a, is a sales pitch for their service or their program. So as an attendee of such free webinars, you know that it's not the most pleasant experience because it's a bit of a bait and switch. Okay, they told you it's a free training, but they didn't tell you how much of it was going to be selling something more for the business owner, actually the person doing it. I don't think it's the smartest business strategy anyway. Let me give you an alternative method. So instead of a free webinar, do a paid webinar, a low price paid webinar. Something between, let's say $10 at the low end to $50 on the high end. A paid webinar on a topic that you really believe in, that you really believe is going to be benef for your audience and that they are buying it because they believe it's beneficial for them. Now, how do you know? Now, the difference between a paid webinar and a free webinar is that a paid webinar is where you're really delivering value rather than trying to sell them on working with you. Now, even in a paid webinar, you can spend maybe 5 to 10% of that webinar time talking about your service to say, hey, if you thanks for joining this webinar, I hope you benefit from it. And if you want to go deeper on this topic, you can work with me one to one, or you can join my coaching program or you can buy this additional webinar to learn more. And because they've already paid for it, they've already qualified themselves. The people who show up are of course more qualified and likely to say yes to paying more for additional services or additional training, you see. So the expectation is going to be more aligned between them and you. So there's less, there's no feeling of bait and switch, you know, so that's, that's why it's so much more helpful. But one of the key ideas here to make this work is to know what topic to do a paid webinar on. And this is where doing additional free content on a consistent basis is so helpful. This is why I talk about the importance of free content. Doing that all the time. And my dog just was running around here. I'll show you him later if you can get into the view. So the paid webinar comes out of your free content that you do on a consistent basis. Because in your free content you get to test what topics your audience find most interesting. You get to see what they like the most, what they comment on the most, what they tend to share. And then based on what they're interested in, you can then create a paid, a low cost paid webinar on that. Okay. And like I said, during the paid webinar you can spend maybe 5 to 10% of the time. So let's say it was a one hour paid webinar. It's totally fine to spend about 5 to 10 minutes saying hey, if you want to go deeper, here are my services or here are my products or programs or additional trainings versus Typically what people do on a free webinar is they spend 25 to 33% on a 60 minute webinar. They'll spend something like 20 to 30 minutes or 15 to 30 minutes selling you on their thing. Right. Which is unpleasant for both the seller because they know it's bait and switch and for the attendee because that was not expected. So anyway, long story short, I'll have more notes, more thoughts in the notes of the video, but let's stop doing free webinars and instead switch to consistent free content to test what topics people like and then the topics they like the most. Let's do a low cost paid webinar and at the very end spend a few minutes talking about going deeper and working with you instead, in addition to the paid webinar. I hope this is helpful. I'm always open to your questions and let me know how it goes as you try the strategy.
