Joel Erway — Current Tactics To Get Amazing Results With Webinars

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. I'm here with Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. My name is Matt Wolfe.

That's awkward.

And he's Joe Fear.

You're with Matt Wolfe.

I am with Matt Wolf.

I'm always with Joe Fear.

Yeah, that's a great time today.

Who do we have?

We. We're talking with a great, great person, and I don't want to say his name. I want to leave it blind. I want to leave what we're talking about blind.

Well, what are the benefits, Matt?

The benefits are you're going to learn how to run webinars.

I couldn't keep it blind.

You're going to be able to create a sales message that resonates with folks, even cold audiences. We will discuss with this unnamed guest. This is weird.

Yeah, no, it's Joel.

So he's the webinar man. He has an agency for this. He deconstructs these things. He studies them. The most successful probably studies the worst ones, too, and figures out, okay, so what works, what doesn't. But he's gonna break essentially everything regarding webinars down on this podcast and how every industry, every person can use them. There's actually different styles we've never heard of before. So we'll talk about those. Different applications, different ways to present that might not be commonly taught out there right now. I know we've been doing it. I wouldn't say wrong, but probably the not most effective way. And we'll break that down as well. I'm sure you guys have listening probably have done the same thing or similar.

Yeah, no, we literally walk through every phase of the webinar with him, from how to get traffic to the webinar, how to get more registrations on the webinar, how to get more people to show up, what to do on the webinar once you've actually got them, how to handle the replay sequence. We basically went down the line of every phase of a webinar and. And basically ask for his best advice and what he would do with his clients in those scenarios. And he gives us a lot of great information, and it's great for.

Even if you're not doing webinars currently, and if you don't think that they're for you, give it a listen, because you're probably gonna get some ahas. I mean, if you listen to him, like he has all these variety of types could even be just legion.

Or even a 10 minute webinar.

Or a 10 minute webinar. These mini webinars. And he'll break that down too. So just keep an open mind because webinars, a lot of people will be like, nap. Not for me. Rethink that really quick. There's a lot of uses for these things and you can automate them. So it's nice.

Yep.

So we'll dig into that here with Joel in a minute. And actually right now, not in a minute. You don't even have to wait. It's great.

Yeah. And you can get the show notes and a bunch of cool other stuff over@evergreenprofits.com go check it out.

Hey, Joel, how you doing?

Hey, what's up, fellas? Doing great. How are you guys doing?

Awesome. And yeah, we just wrapped up. What was it last week? I believe it was. We were on your show and that was a fun time. Yeah. You have a cool crew over there. You do the whole Facebook lives. Do you normally do that for all your shows?

I'm starting it. So I'm trying to boost our engagement with our podcasts. And so I had this community, which I'm trying to figure out ways to scale my efforts while increasing engagement without killing my personal bandwidth. And so this is something that we're testing with going live in the groups, and people seem to like it, so it's another way for them to. For me to get my guests in front of my audience and also boost the engagement. So we just started a couple podcasts ago. It's going well so far.

Cool. Yeah, no, I actually want to kind of circle back around to that Facebook Live thing in a little bit when we. Because I do want to kind of touch on podcasting with you a little bit and talk about your strategy there. But before we do, let's kind of get a little bit of a backstory. Let's set this seen for our audience and let them know who you are and what you did before, you're doing what you do now and kind of how you got into what you're doing now.

Of course, I'd love to. So I am a former engineer turned marketing nerd.

And this all ties together with what I'm doing with webinars and sales presentations and the whole nine yards. So jumped into. Went to school for mechanical engineering Technology, graduated in 2009 from Rochester Institute of Technology, and I made it all of eight months before I decided that that was not my career path. So five years in. In college and I lasted eight months in, in the engineering world before I wanted to just completely pull my hair out of my head. So I, I was looking for a new job and I stumbled across. So I was a design engineer for commercial heating and cooling systems. And when I, when I was at my first career job, we would have these sales reps come in and they would give presentations on different products that they represented because they wanted us to design our projects around their stuff. So when I was a design engineer, I really had no idea how these people made money. I just couldn't connect the dots because as a design engineer, we're not writing checks, we're just designing. So I'm like, I don't know how you guys make money, but okay, cool. Anyway, when I left that job and I started looking for a new job, I saw an opening for a sales engineer with one of these firms that would come in and give lunch presentations on their products. And so I went in, interviewed, learned a little bit more about what they did, and like, well, there's no way they're going to hire me. I have zero experience in sales. And I guess I was wrong because they offered me the job and I ended up taking it. So I started working for them, worked with them for about five years. And the primary method that we would generate leads was these lunch and learn presentations. So I would now, I was like, where I previously worked, they were now my potential customers. Like, they were my leads. So we were supposed to go around, do all these presentations, bring our manufacturers in, get these presentations. And for the first two or three years, it was a slow, slow burn, and it was an uphill battle left and right. I was responsible for growing a brand new territory and we were just struggling. I was like 22, 23 years old at the time. I had no sales experience and I was trying to, you know, after two years, like, it was 100% commission only role. So I ate what I killed. And I learned a lot of great lessons in business, a lot of great lessons in entrepreneurship. But I had to look at what we were doing from a sales and marketing perspective and figure out, like, what worked and what didn't. And I realized that when we were bringing these, when we were bringing all of these manufacturers around and giving these presentations, our manufacturers were engineers, and we were giving presentations to engineers. And so engineers talking to engineers is some of like, the most boring stuff that you can ever listen to. And, you know, it's kind of contradictory to what we might think because you're like, okay, great. Well, two engineers talking like, they'll, you know, that they should be able to drum up business, right? Well, completely wrong. Like, when I would look out in the audience, I would see the audience, you know, our office that we were presenting to, they would all just fall asleep. There was no engagement, and it never matriculated into any projects, any leads. And so when I was, you know, at two or three years, I'm like, something's got to change. I identified that as, like, the biggest opportunity for us to grow. So I said, okay, obviously, I'm not making a whole lot of money, so something's got to change. So I decided that as I was flying around the country learning about these products so I could come back to our territory and sell them. Every time that I'd have a layover in an airline.

I would grab a presentation book, like, a book on how to give effective sales presentations, and I started to learn. And I don't want to say master the art of it, but I wanted to figure out, like, how to make our presentations better. And it didn't take long. Was like two or three books. After I read, I saw the trends, and I could identify what we were really doing wrong. So I decided then to start to give these presentations on my own, because before I had to wait, you know, like a year to. For our manufacturers to come in and they had to fly in and I do a dog and pony show, and, you know, we'd. We'd. You know, they would give the presentation like, well, number one, if I want to be more efficient, I need to give these on my own, on demand. And number two, I need to completely rewrite these presentations because they just. They suck. They're awful. And so the very first one that I rewrote, I went in, I gave the presentation, and immediately. Immediately it turned into.

Like, well over a million dollars in business for our. Our company. To put that in perspective, my territory for the first two years did. In year one, it did, like, $500,000 in sales. In year two, it did, like, $800,000 in sales. And the first presentation that I gave turned into well over a million dollars in sales in lifetime value for that one particular customer. And then it turned into another $450,000 project on another one that I gave. And so it's like night and day difference. And so that was kind of my first exposure into the world of sales presentations. So I grew that over the course of two or three more years. And then I decided to jump into the world of online entrepreneurship and stop me anytime. I keep going, but yeah. So any questions so far?

Yeah. Well, I love the fact that you put your ass on the line from day one. The fact that you took 100% commission role is already very scary. Obviously you were just, you know, you got out of college and you worked the, I guess a corporate style job.

Yeah.

You know, and going straight to sales from engineering. I mean, I have a lot of engineering friends and like you just said.

Like, I can see they're not.

Yeah, I can see why you had glazed over people in the audience. Do you know why it was why their presentations or yours, when you started out weren't hitting, hitting the audience with engagement?

100%. 100%. And I had this assumption, I had this hunch every time that I listened to these presentations. But at the time I was this young buck, I was the green kid. So you didn't really want to speak up because I'm listening to these guys who are 40 and 50 years old give these presentations. And I'm 22, 23. So kind of know your role, know your place.

Right?

So what these engineers would do is they would just completely go technobabble and engineering jargon during these presentations. Right. Like, so we had one, I'll never forget, with one manufacturer's rep who's awesome. Like, he's actually one of my, one of my best friends inside of that, that niche, that industry. And, but he would talk about airflow measuring stations and he'd talk about, you know, airflow resistance and pitot tubes and like these K factors. I'm just like, good God, man. Like, they, like the only, this is what I realized. Like, the only thing that these engineers cared about was how we can make their lives easier. Because they were, they were just designing. They really didn't even care about energy efficiency. Right. Because that's not what they cared about. All they cared about was how our product could make their lives easier on the design side. And it was night and day difference. Like once you kind of figured that out, it was just understanding really what they wanted and speaking to those needs. They don't care about engineering jargon. In fact, like, it just, it does the exact opposite. So technobabble is like a killer for sales conversions right now, I'm assuming.

Are you a mechanical engineer?

Yes.

Yes. So was there anything that you took from your education of mechanical engineering that you use today as far, you know, outside of the sales sort of thing? I'm just curious if there's anything you took from, like what engineers tend to do and the sort of engineer mentality that you Use now, I think definitely.

It'S cross relative or cross pollination, however you want to call it. But I had some transferable skills that definitely still show up today.

The number one transferable skill that shows up today is just problem solving and having an analytical mind still in everything that we do right now, I'm always forward thinking. I'm always looking ahead at what potential problems could arise. A lot of times that hurts me more than it helps. But there are plenty of times where that pays off.

Very, very well in my favor for being a little more cautious, a little bit more forward thinking. Mechanical engineers, I think by trait have to be great problem solvers. And so I think that has translated in my ability to just think about business as a whole and different decisions that we make. So it's. If I had to point to one skill, it would be that, it'd be that. Yeah, yep, 100%.

I think what I love about this the most is that you are coming from an engineering background and granted you weren't like 20 years in where you're probably like stuck in your ways. Luckily you kind of got out fresh, more or less. But it should shine a light to the folks listening. If you are very analytical and you don't think you could be persuasive, that it is possible if you kind of study, if you observe yourself or others like you. And you said the exact same thing. It's all that jargon, it's the over explanation, it's the filler. It's all that stuff that really doesn't resonate with like, okay, how are you helping these folks you're presenting to? How are you going to make their lives easier? What are the benefits?

Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like I almost have like a sort of engineer kind of mind. I didn't go to school for engineering, I actually went to school for finance. But I do think there's some overlap in the sense that I'm very analytical, very detail oriented, very, you know, think things through before going and executing. I think there's a lot of overlap between those sort of areas.

So I forgot where I was going.

With that, but I could tell it's okay.

But no, that you're relating to it. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm definitely relating to that in that sense. Now what? I kind of wanted to shift a little bit and kind of get into webinars and give the listener some real sort of actionable advice. If they're thinking about doing webinars or maybe ways they can optimize webinars. If they already are doing them. So I'm curious, is there a handful of things, you know, maybe, maybe like three things that you feel you do different with webinars that most people aren't doing.

Well. So one of the things that Joe actually mentioned a couple minutes ago, which is directly related to this, to my answer with this, is, you know, being analytical and allowing that to aid in your persuasive ability. Actually, I think that that is a huge piece as to why.

Why I was able to make the leap to sales. So, you know, so fluidly. I don't even know if that's the right way to use that in a sentence, but.

The way that, like, I always think about it, like in, in sales and persuasion, there's the right brain and the left brain and a big piece of allowing somebody to kind of convince themselves that they need to make a shift or they need to buy a product or they need to use a new service, whatever it is, is they have to trigger that analytical brain a little bit. It's mostly emotional with a little bit of logic to kind of counteract that. And I use a lot of stats, not a lot of stats. But like in my mind, when I'm developing sales presentations, I want proof. I want third party proof to.

Know that this opportunity that I'm claiming is real. I want to know that it is real. I think when I started writing presentations, that I started doing presentations, I relied heavily on stats and proof. Because you can't refute that. You can't say that that's not true. You can, but if I can go out and do the research and say, listen, Forbes wrote this article, or Business Insider wrote this article, or Amazon shared this about their finances, it now makes you a lot more credible. And the fact that you are able to cite your sources from a persuasive ability gives you a lot more authority and believability.

I don't know where I was going with that, but I wanted to. We were talking about webinar presentations. What do I do differently?

So that is a big piece. And also I focus heavily on how to turn an opportunity into the biggest mass market possible. One thing that I have learned time and time and time again, I shouldn't say I've learned it time and time again, but after doing hundreds and hundreds of webinars, you really want your webinar to be as mass market as possible. Possible, like as mass market as your market will allow as possible. Because just by the nature of how webinars are set up, like it is a Funnel and you're going to get a lot of, not a lot of drop off, but you're going to get substantial drop off from seeing the ad to the registration, then registering, then actually showing up. And so you really want, in terms of scalability to have your webinar be the biggest opportunity that you can have inside of your particular market. The more niche you go and starting to drive paid traffic, the more difficult it becomes to make it profitable. And I mean, we can talk about that for a little while if you want. But that's one thing that I really am starting to focus on. Well, I have focused on heavily in 2018. I mean we're in October now. So I've been, you know, that's been a primary focus this year is where do webinars make the biggest impact and you know, what opportunities are Right. For webinars and which ones aren't.

Yeah, so I want to go back to. Yeah, because I think this is like a good paradigm shift or a way to view this. You said a webinar is essentially a funnel. Would you say just the presentation itself or like the entire thing you're building? So like you said, the sign up registration page, the emails even that are going to, that the webinar itself follow ups, I'm assuming as well, would you say that?

Yeah, it's a great point and honestly, like, I never thought about it until you've just, you just talked about it. But your webinar is essentially a funnel within a funnel, right? Because you have like it's an hour to two hour long, sometimes even longer presentation and they can leave any time. Right. It's not like an email funnel where they opt in and you hit them with seven or eight emails, then they can open them at any time. Like with a webinar they're very, very effective. But like you have to understand, like there's a lot of work that goes into it to keep their attention to hold them on the webinars. They don't drop off because if they drop off, your likelihood of capturing them as a sale is very, very low. However, if you get them to stick around until the end, the amount of people you get to stick until the end, the odds of converting them are a lot higher than anybody else. Inside of your registration funnel, inside of your webinar funnel. So yes, it really is like a funnel within a funnel.

Well, I want to, I actually want to step back to something else that you said a minute ago too. You said you're going after as wide of an audience as possible. Which I found really interesting because I feel like that's sort of counter to what a lot of the common wisdom, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the other marketers are out there teaching, who are often saying, you know, you want to define that avatar. You want to define your niche. You want the riches are in the niches. Go as small as possible and really go, like, hone in on that kind of avatar. But it almost sounds like you're saying, with webinars, it's best to try to cast a very wide net. I mean, am I correct in how you were explaining that or, you know, what are your thoughts?

You are correct. And I also don't want to. I do believe in the riches are in the niches. Right. This is where it gets a little tricky because you still want to be. You still want to niche down, like the way that I've. I've studied hundreds and hundreds of webinars and over the. Like, in the last month, I talked to somebody who ran a $10 million webinar last year.

And he was just hitting the JV circuit. He was going to lots and lots of JV partners. And here's the thing.

When you can. How do I explain this? It's all about capturing their interest. Okay, let's talk about when you are promoting your message, right. And you're promoting your registration page or your. The title of your webinar. Right. And they had tested this. I can't say that I've done this personally, because I hadn't. This is the first time I've actually ever interviewed anyone who had mentioned this. And what they were saying was they were. And I think I talked about this on one of my podcasts, but they were talking about the idea of going blind versus leading with the thing. And do you guys understand what I'm talking about when I say going blind versus leading with the what we do?

But explain it just very briefly for the listeners here, just in case.

Yeah. So here's the thing. Going blind is kind of like leading with the promise and the end result, right? It's like, what is like leading with the end result versus leading with the mechanism. Right. When I say leading with the what, I'm kind of like, I would have a headline that says, hey, how to make a million dollars with Facebook ads. Yeah, Right. So my. What would be Facebook ads if I were to kind of. And this is just completely pulled off the top of my head right now. So this may not be the best example, but I'm just trying to paint a Picture here. So that would be leading with the what when I'm revealing what that thing is that I'm going to be talking about on the webinar. But if I led with a blind headline, which is like, hey, the biggest opportunity in 2018, like, you know how I made $2 million last year and with the biggest opportunity in 2018, like, that's an awful headline. But I don't reveal anything. Like, I don't reveal the what. I'm just kind of showing the big promise. Right. So that's leading blind versus leading with what? Take a guess at what the. So this guy actually ran hard numbers and had conversion rates to show for it. What do you think outperformed the leading.

Blind or leading with what for registrations or sales?

Sales, Yep.

I would say blind because you're getting more folks in there.

So I was gonna say. Well, I was gonna say going blind probably gets you more registrations. Leading with the what probably makes you more sales. That'd be my guess.

Okay, Joe, what do you think?

I would go with what Matt said, but I'm almost gonna. I'm gonna put my. My money on. Actually, you're gonna make more money, more sales as well, because your message will help filter out the best people.

So what this guy revealed, he said that in terms of sales conversions, he had a 250 to 300% boost in sales conversions. Going blind. Sales conversions. Right. So I would have said the same thing as Matt said. Matt and Joe, I would have said the exact same thing, which is like, oh, you know, you're leading with the thing, so you should have a higher conversion rate. And so when I started talking to him, I was like, okay, well, why do you think that is? And if you think about it, like, as you get them into this big opportunity, like, people don't really care about the what. If you lead with the what, you immediately raise objections to people who want to throw stones at it. Right. If I say Facebook ads, how I made $2 million with Facebook ads. So this is me personally. Like, this is a true story about me. Like, I hate Facebook ads. I just hate them. Like, I hate dealing with them. I've bought probably a dozen courses. I mean, it's a love hate relationship. Let me be clear. Like, they make us a lot of money, but they cause a lot of stress.

So, you know, if I saw a headline like how I made $2 million with Facebook ads, I'd probably be turned off because I'm like, I don't want the last thing that I need right now is another Facebook ads training.

Right?

Makes sense. However, if I would be more attracted to a message that's like, oh, the biggest opportunity in 2018, that made me $2 million last year and how to cash in on it. Okay, now I'm interested in again, and what I deciphered from this and what I interpreted from our conversation with this guy was everyone has the ability to kind of be resold on something, but if they already have the notion and the objection built in their mind and you lead with it, you have no chance of reclaiming that potential lead.

It's like their guard is up from day one.

Their guard is up from day one. And so here's the other thing, too, is in his webinar, it would take him about 40 to 45 minutes to ever talk about the what. So even when he went blind, he never revealed the what until deep into the webinar because he spent the first 30 minutes reselling them on this opportunity, on this new thing. And, like, so you're able to kind of kill those sharks and handle all those objections that are in their mind and say, like, listen, this is why this big opportunity is so great. This is why, you know, I made so much money with it. And then he introduces whatever the what is, whatever that mechanism is, because he now had a half hour, 40 minutes to conquer all of their internal objections with.

I've actually seen this. Yeah, I've seen this before. And Amisha actually remember this. Matt, he was selling. He was an old business partner of mine, and we were doing some app stuff because I done a lot of presentations for clients, and I think I was creating that presentation and he was taking this exact approach that you're. That you're saying right now. I think Matt and I, we both looked at this presentation like, wow, there's like, there's a lot of stats in here. There's a lot of benefits and reasons why this opportunity that I'm not too aware of what it is yet seems to work really well. You know, my life's going to be better. I'm going to save more, I'm going to make more money. And all these stats are showing that this is the trend. And literally, it was maybe halfway through or later, oh, now the what was presented?

Yeah, no, I've seen some webinars like that. I actually am kind of curious if I know the person that you're talking.

About, but it worked really well. Is what I was trying to say is, like, basically it converted like crazy. And at the time, I was like, holy shit. How is this? Like, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of teaching, I guess, like the way that Matt and I approach it, because we've done a ton of webinars and I think a lot of other folks is like, I gotta teach, I gotta teach, I gotta give em a lot of value, you know, on this webinar. But I think the value might be the same thing as, like, here's some stats, here's some proof why this works, some benefits of how your life's going to be better.

No, 100%. Our problem with webinars over the years, especially selling our own internal courses, not affiliate products, but our own internal courses, our problem has always been we just want to teach and teach and teach and teach, and then kind of go, oh, and by the way, we have this offer for you.

Right.

And for whatever reason, our conversion rates on those specific webinars are never the greatest. But I think the problem is when you teach too much, you scratch too much of the itch and then they go, okay, well, I got enough to go off of.

Yeah. So let's kind of. There's a big misconception there too, because.

It depends on where you put your webinar in your funnel, right? If you're giving a webinar to your internal audience and you like, and they know like, and trust you, and you spend 40 minutes kind of showing them the big opportunity, they're probably gonna hate you. Like, because, like, they already trust you. Like, they, they already know like, and trust you. So, like, if you say, like, listen, guys and gals, this is what I firmly believe, and here is why, and spend maybe five minutes on it, that's all they need. But when going to. So what I'm referring to with these numbers going to a cold audience of people who don't know you at all, like, even a JV audience, they don't know you, even though they know the partner, but they don't know you, you do have to spend time selling them on this opportunity. And so that is, that's also very important, right? Because, like, implementing a webinar to different audiences is. Requires a different approach. Right? You know, cold versus warm versus hot. Like, I mean, you can put a webinar anywhere and the formula is not going to be the same. So that is a very, very important thing to highlight.

Yeah, that's a good point that I.

Do want to mention.

Yeah, it's similar to how we run like, Facebook ads. Like, we have Kurt Molly on here. He has the top of funnel, middle funnel Bottom of funnel and each, you know, no matter what section you're in, you're going to be thinking slightly different. The trust level's higher the further you go down. So. Yeah, that's a really good point.

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense now as far as actually. So, okay, actually, before I go to there, do you think that that same philosophy works when it comes to sales letters and VSLs or do you think that sort of come in blind for the cold audience is kind of primarily a webinar strategy?

Man, I think blind works for most marketing. I really do. I'm not a VSL expert. I am studying them currently because I want to. I actually just launched. We just launched our first VSL today. Either yesterday or today, I can't remember. I recorded it earlier this week. I think it went live today. And so I am studying VSLs and it's amazing to see how different they really are to webinars because I thought I was going to be able to pick it up very, very quickly. I ended up hiring a copywriter and like, wow, this guy did a way better job than I did. And I've written hundreds of webinars and the VSL is very different. But I still think the idea of going blind is. That's what I'm talking about with as mass market as possible. Because you don't want to lead with a potential objection because it's going to drastically cut off 30% or 60%. He had a two to three times conversion rate boost when he went in blind. So if you take the inverse of that, that's cutting off 66% of your potential sales by coming in by leading with a natural objection that you might not even be aware of. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And we do the same thing with emails. A lot is a fairly blind email. It's just enough to gain interest, sell the click, and then let the next step do the rest of the work.

Yep, yep.

I love it.

Cool. So when it comes to webinars, there's obviously so many like elements down the line that kind of need to be optimized. And so I was kind of hoping maybe we could kind of go through each of those elements. So for example, you need to get traffic to a registration page and then once you get traffic to the registration page, you need that registration page to convert and get people to register. Once they're registered, you need to get them to show up. Once they show up, you need to get them to buy. Anybody that didn't show up, you've got like a replay sequence. So I was wondering if we could kind of just like work through the process and maybe you can give a couple little tips or hints on each step in the process.

Sure, yeah. So this is kind of like what I do monthly inside of my webinar vault. Like I literally go through and I take like the best performing webinars out there, like, because I'm looking at 10 to 15 webinars a month and I go through all of this stuff. And so this is perfect timing because I just literally in my group today did another webinar breakdown. Love it. The elements that I kind of look at are now everything that you just mentioned.

As we're talking. I'm actually pulling it up as we speak. But today I went through Brian Page's Airbnb webinar, which I have heard is doing very, very well. I do not have any numbers on it, but I heard through an affiliate that promoted it that it's converting very well. But essentially what you've got is you've got the webinar registration page and depending on the source of traffic, that's going to look different. So if you've got JV traffic that's gonna look different than.

If you're running paid ads or Facebook traffic to it. Right. And so the big things that you're looking for there are really the headline, headline and proof. And again, this is, I kind of learned about this idea of going blind. They were going mass market when I was promoting my own webinar. And.

Right now I'm all in on going blind. Like all in every project that I'm working on right now we're gonna test a blind and we're doing it on our registration pages and we're changing the titles of our webinars and reworking the intro to stay blind. So anyway, it all starts with webinar registration page. Then obviously you've got the show up sequence and everyone has their own different methodology with what you do pre webinar, like after they register but before they show up. And then you've got the actual webinar itself and then you've got your follow up sequence. And so yeah, those are, those are the main components. What specifically would you like to talk about?

So, so let's, let's assume they're coming in a little bit colder. Let's assume we're running some Facebook ads because I think that's, you know, let's just assume that listeners don't have JVs available to them. Maybe they don't have A list that they're starting off with. So, you know, my thinking would be that Facebook would probably be their best sort of starting point to drive traffic into a new webinar. So let's start with the traffic piece. What sort of advice do you give people to get others to a registration page?

Yeah. So if you're going with Facebook, what I have found is that produces the best experience from Facebook and the best quality leads are long form ads. I love telling stories. I love kind of talking about the opportunity with long form ads. And I like to. It's a one, two approach. Right. So with the relationship of your ad and your registration page, you never want to oversell it. Right. So here's what I mean by that. If you've got a long form ad, you want a short form registration page. If you've got a short form ad, you want a longer form registration page. But never do you want both to be the same. Like the worst quality you'll get are short form ads and short form registration page, or long form ad and long form registration page. Right. I found the. The best balance is to. Is to kind of provide that yin and the yang. And I like doing long form ads and short form registration pages mainly because I want to sell them with the ad. I can measure that a lot easier than I can with the quality of copy on my registration page.

And you're basically this long form, that's just long text, essentially. Right. On Facebook.

Yep.

And I agree with our ads. I've actually started doing that. In fact, a lot of our ads that we're running, I'll literally take email copy that I wrote that I drove traffic to that page with, and I'll use the same exact email copy as the ad copy on Facebook. Yep.

Yep.

Okay, Cool.

For the registration stuff in the ads, that's really. That's what I've seen.

Perfect. Okay, and now how about if we're going deeper down the funnel, anything on the registration page specifically you would like to highlight? I know, obviously the balance between the two. Add in that.

Yeah. You know, the best ones show images of the presenter and the ones that I've seen show images of the presenter. Brian had one that had a video on his registration page, but the funnel that I went through was a JV funnel. So I don't know if he actually does that with. I actually have not been targeted with any ads. He may not be running paid ads to it.

So he has a video on his registration page, which is interesting. I haven't seen that all that often. Normally, I find videos produced lower conversions because he also had quite a bit of text, too. But anyway, he did have a picture of himself, an image of himself, and.

You know, those are the main, main elements. He also had a couple testimonials on his registration page, which I really liked.

Now, are the testimonials about him? Are they about the webinar, about the product? Like, what are they giving testimony to?

Yeah. So with Brian, he led with the system. So he led with the what? And it was working for him. I do think that he could massively increase his conversions by making a few tweaks and actually made those recommendations kind of in my vault. But he was selling a $997 product. I think he could crush it with an offer model that we've seen work very, very well in the webinar space.

Anyway. But he led with the what. So he led with Airbnb. Right on the headline.

And.

Yeah, I'm not sure what was the question. I got lost.

I'm sorry.

No, no, you answered. I was asking with the testimonials. The testimonials, are they about him as the person? Is it about the product? Is it about a testimonial for the webinar itself?

It was about the system, so it was about the product. Yep.

Now, what tools are you using? Obviously, there's click funnels, LeadPages, Stealth, Seminar AZ, Webinar, GoToWebinar. The list could go on and on and on. What tools do you specifically use for the landing page and then actually presenting the webinar?

So I've been born and raised as a clickfunnels advocate, and the longer that I am a clickfunnels advocate, the more I hate it. It's been as it evolves, there's been other technology that has far surpassed clickfunnels, and clickfunnels just keeps having bug after bug and issues coming up that are just very, very frustrating for anyone that's running any sort of substantial online business right now. I'm kind of married with clickfunnels, so I still use clickfunnels, but it comes with a lot of regret. I've messed around a little bit with Kartra and have been kind of impressed with that. It's hard to make a software switch, especially with something like Funnel builder, just because you're like, you're just in bed with them.

It's a lot of work.

Yeah, we've experienced the same thing. We're all in on click funnels, too. Pretty much everything we build, we build on Click funnels. We've tried to copy them over to LeadPages. At one point that was a pain in the butt. We tried. What was the other one? Oh, Convertree. We were using Convertree for a little bit, but that was just a pain in the butt to get everything moved over. And so we're at Kartra as well. Yeah, we actually do have a different business that's purely running on Kartra right now. But yeah, that's interesting. I actually love the designs of ClickFunnels, but we do run into issues from time to time. I think out of all the ones that are available, I think the designs that ClickFunnels has pre made for you are some of the best.

I would agree with that. They do give you a very.

The startup cost or the. The barrier to begin is very low with clickfunnels, which is nice. It's nice. They give you a lot of templates and I like the concepts of the funnel builder, but I just wish they would invest a little bit more. I'm sure they're investing tons of money into software development, but God, sometimes it seems like they really aren't. It really does.

Just lots of bugs. Actionetics is just garbage and you know.

Anyway, did I forget to mention we're sponsored by ClickFunnels? No, I'm just kidding.

We're not.

That'd be pretty funny. Now we'll never get that sponsorship. That's okay. Well, so, okay, so you use other.

Software that I use. On the webinar platform side, we use Zoom and we use GoToWebinar kind of as you know, the live webinars, those are tried and tested. GoToWebinar is rather expensive, so we typically stick with Zoom. On the automated webinar platform, we do use everwebinar and that comes with some bugs and that comes with some questionable statistics, but it gets the job done. When you get into the automated side for webinars, I mean there's just so much that you can do for a long time and we still don't even touch the funnels really. I study funnels, but I don't ever like to sell funnels. Like, my ball of wax is primarily an offer creation and script writing and like coming up with the angles and the hooks and the copywriting. When it comes to automating a funnel, I really try to refer out to that. I really do. If it's a lead gen funnel, meaning like the call to action at the end is a strategy session, then okay, we'll build a simple funnel for that because that's a lot easier. But when you get into direct selling and deadlines and bonuses and trying to automate it all with all the different CRMs that are out there. Good God. I mean it's a lot. It is a lot. And so we do refer out for that.

Yeah, no, I mean that's validating because you're pretty much using the exact same tool set we are. We're pretty much clickfunnels, zoom and every webinar. So yep, it's pretty much pretty much the same. Same set of tools. Yeah. So when with the actual. For us, our biggest struggle with webinars has it hasn't been getting traffic to the registration pages or even getting people to register. Our biggest struggle has actually been getting people to show up on the damn webinar. So. So what sort of advice do you give people who that's the struggle? Because I think across the board most people I talk to about webinars that is sort of the thorn in their side around webinars is I can get people to register but everybody just knows there's a replay coming. So I can't get them to frickin show up.

Yeah, there's a couple ways that we've been able to getting people to show up is.

You know, that's something that you deal with all the time and you know, you always want to get more people to show up. Always want to get more people to show up. Right. What we've been trying to do and we haven't run exclusive test data on this yet, but we really want to focus our follow up sequence to say okay, great, if they like because there's a lot of money in the replay. We've had a lot of people test and say like okay, don't provide a replay and train them to show up. It's like okay, well if you do that, that's a long play. That's really a list building play and just educating your audience to show up for a webinar that they register for. I don't really think that's a longev great longevity move. I understand the psychology of that, but there's got to be a better way to do that without holding back the replay.

I think it was Travis Sago actually who recommended this was to get them to ask for the replay. So he had an email follow up sequence that was like hey listen, I can't remember exactly what it was and I do want to give him credit because this is all his idea. But basically getting them to reply for them for the replay, getting them to request a replay. So I don't have any data on that. Travis has said it usually doubles or triples or I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he usually gets a very, very big uptick in percentage, in sales conversion percentage when you get them to ask for the replay. Because now they're really interested, like to themselves, I'm really interested now.

When you say ask for the replay, are you kind of saying send out an email once the webinar's over and say something to the effect of wow, what a great webinar. It was amazing. Maybe give some benefits of it and then say if you're interested in seeing it, shoot me a reply. Is that kind of the idea, something like that?

I think it's actually simpler than that.

It's somehow getting them. Like I said, I haven't tested this exclusively because it's something that we are going to be testing with one of our partners coming up. But.

From what I understand, it is very much just get them to start to pull back or to come to you like, oh hey, I missed it. I was really planning on watching the replay, but just instead of mass automation and sending it all out, striking up a conversation and getting that engagement to get them to ask for the replay, they ask for the live webinar. Get them to ask for the replay now too. And yeah.

That'S something that we're going to test and I think that based on other things that we've been doing in the email marketing world, I think that that will give us a boost in conversions because then we can run a different sequence specifically to them.

That makes sense.

That's really interesting.

Yeah, I mean it's just play with their. The psychological benefits of this is like commitment and then the follow through is just much greater on the other end of that. So that's perfect. So getting people to show up, it's obviously difficult. I know. Matt, what you guys used to do and learn to blog was what you gave it like a little PDF worksheet prior to that, essentially said what? Print this out, bring it to the webinar with you.

That was one of the things we did in the sort of pre webinar follow up sequence. We gave them a cheat sheet. And on that cheat sheet there was like things that were left blank that they would fill in the blanks as they were going through the webinar that I think that improves show up rate a little bit. We also did things where when you were on the webinar we had People like tweet out that they were on the webinar and we would pick like one person that tweeted and give them a free access to the course and things like that. I don't know how super effective they were. And it was also a different time. It was a time when we were, you know, 60% show up rate on webinars was about the norm, which is not the norm today.

Well, that's why I was curious about that. Joel. Obviously in the marketing community, everyone has heard of webinars.

Do you span different industries with yours or are you kind of niched into specific areas?

We have done lots and lots of different niches and some are way more effective than others. I've seen some people run cold traffic to automated webinars that sell 197 or 297 product, which I would never do. Just personally in my niche. I would never do that low of a product with a webinar. But I've seen them be very profitable and. Well, I shouldn't say very profitable. They're profitable. I would never take on that project because it's just, you know, especially the running paid traffic to it. That's a.

It'S, it's, it's a very, very low ceiling. And.

And yeah, we've done lots of different markets. I am personally, I am starting to niche down in two or three select markets that I know their market language, I know their avatar very well. And really I just need to put my focus on how do I create a different webinar for them, how do I create a unique angle and how do I apply my offer structure to what they're doing? But we've done tons and tons of different niches.

I guess my question on that is how would you like, are there specific things you would adjust depending on the industry you're in, or is it just learning the industry their wants and needs?

Yep. So it's a great question and it's one of the reasons why we have. I've decided to niche down on two or three select markets because they're not translatable. Like not at all. I really wanted to believe that the webinar formula could be translatable into every single niche, but it just really isn't. It really isn't. And I learned this the hard way in the personal development niche. I took on a client, they paid me 25 grand and we wrote them a webinar and built them a funnel and they were in the personal development niche. I'm like, okay, cool. Listen to their Stuff did our research, put together a great webinar and we ran it to Warm Traffic. It did awesome. They made a bunch of sales. It was a fifteen hundred dollar offer. When they went to Cold Traffic, good God, it bombed. It bombed so hard. And I had to, you know, I really had to fall on my sword there. It was a tough, tough project to work on. And I know people who have been successful in the personal development space, but it is a different animal in your language and how you present the webinar for a sale. Because the people in personal development, they learn and they comprehend things differently than say in the biz ops space or in the marketing space. And so.

That'S where we're focusing on now is just kind of picking our two or three top performing niches and just going all in with them. It helps us systemize internally and we get the best results for clients.

It sounds like it's like it's a language thing. It's understanding how they learn, how they're perceptive to a presentation in general. Yeah. Because I mean we're in niches like the home beer niche, the home brew niche. So like a lot of those guys, craft brewers are adverse to marketing, period. It's like you have to almost like be very careful or at least presented in a different way. So I could see you just gotta understand your niche. It sounds like at the end of the day.

Yep. With the actual webinar presentation, is there, have there been like any things that you found that once people understand this, their webinars will be just more effective? Like you know any. I don't even know exactly what I'm looking for here, but I'm like, I'm just wondering if there's, there's some sort of paradigm shift that once people have this paradigm shift about actually creating their presentation, all of a sudden stuff starts working a little bit better.

Well, I can say this, I can say this, Matt, it's that. And this is just true for all marketing. You have to learn how to create a great offer. That is like the number one rule in my book with marketing is you have to learn how to create a rock solid kick in the pants, no holds bar type offer that people just cannot refuse. Because above all else, that is what's going to sell or not sell. If you have a great webinar presentation and you have a terrible offer, you're dead in the water. If you have an okay presentation and you have an excellent offer, like you're going to do better than 9 out of 10 webinars. That have an awful offer. You'll do better than 10 out of 10 webinars that have a terrible offer. Your offer is absolutely everything. It's like the 80, 20 of webinars. Like, you have to have the absolute greatest offer in the world. And that takes a lot of study, a lot of time. People think that it's just super simple, like, oh, I've got a course. I'll just throw like the best guarantee in the world, right? I'll give them a triple their money back. And like, that's not an offer. That's a band aid that's holding you. That's. That's creating a lot of risk for you, the business owner. Right. So, yeah, if I had to point to one thing, it is, it is definitely the offer.

Got it.

I love it. Now, a few minutes ago, you actually mentioned the pricing. You said something like, you know, I wouldn't really do webinars at, you know, a 297 price point. What's sort of your threshold where you decide, okay, from this point over is where it makes sense to do a webinar.

So let me kind of backtrack on that because I'm a big paid traffic person, right? So I reviewed Dr. Axe's webinar last month or two months ago inside of the webinar vault, and his was, you know, 197 bucks or 297, I can't remember. I think it was 197 bucks. But he also gets like 10 million hits a month on his website. So he was advertising it as like on the footer of his blog posts. Right. So he's probably getting just insane amounts of traffic coming to it organically through the blog with a paid traffic funnel. I want to make sure that I'm going to be profitable. And I usually don't go below 500 bucks. Normally I'm not going below 1000 bucks just because of the niches that I play in. I know that we can command that and we can convert. But also, I'm playing the law of averages here. I know that X percentage of the people aren't even going to show up. And the whole nine yards.

It all depends on the traffic source, really. If you're paying for traffic, you want a higher priced product. If you have lots of organic, then, okay, cool. If you can generate 1,000 registrations a month, then.

Sure, we may go for a lower ticket offer. But honestly, I love webinars because you can command a higher ticket offer. They're spending time with you, and that's the Number one element that you need to command premium price points. They have to trust you. And with time comes trust. So why put together an hour long presentation if you're just going to sell them a $50 or $100 offer when you could sell them something that's five to ten times that?

Well, it brings up a good point because I know there's different styles of webinars we've seen out there. I believe you've had some podcast guests talk about this too, where it's like you can have a mini webinar or I think there was someone else on your show that did like an interview style webinar. So it seems like there's just different style. And we don't have to go too deep on this because I know we're almost up on time. I want to make sure you're good there. But are there styles of webinars that you'd like to highlight? Highlight that you just like, oh, yeah, this works really well rather than the standard webinar that we all know.

Yeah. So I honestly think that the interview style webinar works fantastic. So I personally have not done it, although it's very similar to what we're doing here. Right. I mean, it's like we have this conversation, we're asking questions and we're being open and we're being transparent. And anyone who's listening onto this podcast, you know, there's a high likelihood that they're probably going to buy any one of those the things that you or I are selling because that level of trust is there. And this is a lot easier to produce because it's just a conversation between two people. I have a client who listened to that episode that you were referencing, the interview style webinar. That was my episode with Dan Kashell, who's a great guy, and he was doing these interview style webinars and he was crushing it. So my client said, hey, listen, after I listened to that episode, I decided to do an interview style webinar and. And our conversion rates went through the roof after we did it.

In terms of speed to launch. A lot of people get held up with trying to write or script a webinar. And I totally get. Can be a lot of work if you have somebody that can interview you and it's great on camera. That could be a great test run for the first one or two webinars that you do. And then just making the offer. The mini webinar approach is something that we coined and we created that is used to generate high Ticket leads. There has been a fad that still works. We have clients that use long form webinars to drive leads and applications and it still works. But we had been finding we were running long form auto webinars to generate high ticket leads about a year and a half to two years ago. And we were finding that it was just our costs kept going up and up and up and up and up and our cost per applications. And I realized that a lot of times we were overselling them. Like a lot of people with our target market, they didn't need to sit on a webinar to invest into high ticket leads. And so I basically cut out all the fluff in my long form webinar and I created a quick 5 to 10 minute mini webinar presentation that we extracted from the long form webinar, used that and I was generating. My cost per acquisition went down by like, I don't know, 80%, 90%. It was just night and day difference.

Just a little bit. So this was basically you had like a 10 minute webinar, but you did the whole same register process that you would do for any other webinar.

Yeah. So we would get them to opt in and it would be an on demand presentation. So there's no.

They weren't signing up for a date or time or anything like that. It was basically, we call it a mini webinar because we still take some of our scripting formulas that we use inside of our long form webinar and we just trim it down into a video so it's on demand and it's just a shortened version. So there's no register for this date or time. It's a very direct approach, but it has worked like freaking gangbusters. We're, we're putting a heavy focus on developing that even further for our clients.

Yeah. And I love the idea. So. And you're not selling anything, right? You're basically just generating the lead and then selling something down the line.

Correct. Got it.

Very cool. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. I do have one last question and then we'll ask our sort of wrap up questions. So you've got a couple podcasts, you've got the Sold with Webinars podcast, and you've got experts unleashed, I believe.

How did those podcasts fit into your business model? You know, what's your goal with those? I'm always curious to hear it. As podcasters ourselves, you know how that fits into your bigger picture.

So with Sold with webinars, that's a Primary lead gen tool for the webinar agencies. So we have, we have two businesses, Experts Unleashed and the Webinar agency, both have their own podcast. I started sold with webinars in February of 2017, January of 20, 2017, just because a guy that I was working with, we had kind of done a barter and exchange of services and he's like, hey, listen, you know, you should really start a podcast. I don't know why I should start it. I don't listen to podcasts at all and I've never, you know, I don't really know how to do it. He's like, well, we'll produce it for you. No big deal. Just record a couple episodes. I think you'd be great at it. So I did and I ended up loving it. Like I loved to do podcasts and it turned into an excellent lead gen source for us. And I don't even know how because we do a terrible job of promoting. It has just grown organically, slowly but surely over the course of a year and a half, almost two years now. It's grown organically. But I'll tell you what, man, it has been a massively valuable source of leads for our agency. And we sell five figure offers, nothing lower than five figure offers. And the quality of leads that come from that podcast are just fantastic. And the strategy with that is much different than the strategy with Experts Unleashed. So with sold to webinars, I do have guests on there, but it's primarily solo. I'd say it's like 80, 20, you know, 80% is solo, 20% is interview based.

And I think that's important because I'm the authority. Like I want to be positioned as the authority and people see me as the authority. That's why I do solo episodes and I share, you know, my thoughts on the state of webinars, you know, on a weekly basis. So I launched Experts Unleashed because we've launched a new brand that is focused on a bigger picture. Not just Internet marketing and not just digital marketing, but helping the expert based community as a whole build infinitely scalable expert based businesses. When I launched that podcast in like February of this year, I decided to make it a.

A brand awareness play. So I really don't have a call to action at the end. I think I tell them to go join my free Facebook group, but it was heavily based on interviews. I think it's 100% based on interviews actually. And you know, it's the typical model, like, hey, I'll interview you, share it with your audience and that's how we kind of pick up listeners. So right now we're doing.

We've picked up steam recently, and.

I'm a pretty horrible promoter of our podcast. I think they both can be at least 10 times bigger than they actually are. But we just officially launched the monetization piece of Experts Unleashed, like, three weeks ago. So we will be changing the strategy a little bit with Experts Unleashed, but we really wanted to get the audience first and then focus on monetization on the back end. But as of right now, that hasn't. I don't think that's made us a dime. The Experts Unleashed podcast. I could be wrong, maybe indirectly, but nobody has said, oh, I signed up because of this podcast.

And that's an interesting thing with podcasts. And I love to hear that perspective because folks listening, a lot of folks will be interested in starting a podcast or something like that, but there's always different intentions. If you go into it like you did with soldiers with webinars as an agency, you know, hey, you're going to build some trust with your listeners. And you know, those are high value listeners. Boom, here's an offer for them. It's an amazing tool to grow that trust. And inherently, you know, podcast listeners, all the stats show at least that they have a lot more money. Typically, they're more invested in time with you.

So, I mean, your content has to be great. Like, you should present unique opinions, unique value to your listeners, and they will reward you for it. 100%.

Yep. Well, cool. Let's wrap up here. And we like to always ask if there's any specific book or a couple books, something that resonates with you. Maybe you go to it every year or pretty often or you find yourself recommending it. Is there something that kind of shines out for you?

Anything by Dan Kennedy? I shouldn't say anything by Dan Kennedy, but. But one that I've referenced, one that I've referenced multiple times recently, has been the Ultimate Sales Letter is a great one. And the no BS Guide to Direct Response Marketing. There is so much money in that book alone. That no BS Guide to Direct Marketing or Direct Response Marketing. Any marketer, every marketer, needs to read that at least once a year. Because that's probably the single, the single book that has made me the most money in all, in my entire library. And it's just like, wow, like, okay, cool, now I know how to. Like, I knew this principle, but, like, I've completely forgot it. I've completely ignored it for the past, you know, year. But it is a great, great read. So that is my recommendation.

Yeah, I just. I looked at my bookshelf when you said it, because I have most of Dan Kennedy's books, and that is actually one that I do not appear to own.

I'm surprised by this. Yeah, usually Matt has them. I know. Ultimate Sales Letter. We both read that. We both have it. That's an awesome one.

Yeah, that's a good one. But I think that, like, understanding the principles of direct response marketing. I mean, like, I say that because it's. That's very basic. Like, understand the principles. And especially for us, we've been in marketing for, you know, a while now. Like, we should understand the principles. But you read through that book, like, oh, crap. Like, yeah, I should try this again. That worked.

There's always good reminders. Yeah. Awesome. Joel. Well, I know you mentioned the webinar vault that you have. You obviously have your two podcasts anywhere. Specifically, you want folks to go check you out and see more about you.

Yeah. So, I mean, they can sign up for my podcasts sold with webinars, my webinar podcast, and then Experts Unleashed. We have about 30 or 40 episodes on each of those podcasts. They're awesome. Both awesome podcasts. And then if they want to check out the vault, you can go to soldwithwebinars.com, you'll see information on the vault there. Or the webinaragency.com. there's info there as well. But. Yeah, man. Yeah, guys. I always say, man, that's my default. Yeah, men.

No. I had a blast. This was a lot of fun. I always love talking about marketing.

Definitely, man. I think it's funny because I'm looking at the board. There was, like, half of the stuff we didn't even get to. So I'm thinking there's a round two in the near future here. We say that with guests, definitely, that we are rolling with. So we'll get you back again. Thank you, Joel.

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, guys, for having me. Had a blast.

Thank you. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing. And if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.