MBA1260 Q&A Wednesday: How do I come up with a topic for my first webinar?

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Today's question is from George and George asks how do I come up with a topic for my first webinar? Hey Omar, I know that you run a webinar software called Webinar Ninja and know a whole lot about running webinars. I'll be doing my first one very soon, but I'm not sure how to come up with a topic for the actual webinar. Your help on this would be really awesome. Thanks George. Well, thank you George for sending a question. For Q and A Wednesday. I'll be answering this question and providing the best strategies for coming up with a compelling topic and title for your webinar. Something that people actually want to attend. You don't have to guess. You don't have to read people's minds. You don't have to be a marketing ninja. You're just gonna follow my strategy step by step, and it's gonna be easier than you think. A lot of people think they have to do the impossible to find out what people want. I'm gonna give you an easy way to hear directly from your potential customers on their pains, their struggles, what they need to know so that you can build a webinar topic around that. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Shameless Plug. Obviously, I love webinars. We run a webinar software called Webinar Ninja. I started doing web because I saw how powerful it was to be able to build my email lists and my audience and be able to sell my products and services, as well as keep the customers I was working so hard to get. So since 2014, I've been running webinars and I wanted an easy solution to run these webinars. So we created Webinar Ninja, which is a software that allows you to do it easily. But one of the things I do at Webinar Ninja is also give webinars, give workshops, and I've given several workshops on this topic. How to choose a topic for your next webinar. So I'm gonna be sharing my strategies and all our new users love using this strategy because it's a really low pressure. You don't really have to do a lot to find out exactly what your customers want to learn before you run your actual full fledged live webinar where you're gonna be giving value then maybe even offering your products and services. But if you are interested in learning more about webinars, just know that we do a live workshop that you can attend live and ask question, learn a whole bunch. Just go to webinarninja.comworkshop to sign up for the next one. Okay. To answer George's question, there are several things you can do to come up with a great topic your audience wants to learn about for your free workshop for your free webinar. But I'm gonna start with the easiest one and the most effective one. It's interesting that the easiest one is the most effective one. And then I'll move on with some other options if you'd like to take those on. So my main strategy when it comes to finding out what people actually need to learn, want to hear, want to sign up for Is this your first webinar? Actually should be a open Q and A webinar. So you're going to create a webinar. You're going to make the title of this webinar open Q and A or Ask me anything. And obviously you're going to just mention on the registration page or in the title what your area of expertise. Ask me anything when it comes to life insurance, Ask me anything when it comes to cat grooming, whatever it is, right, whatever your area expertise is an open Q and A workshop where people can ask questions about anything in your area of expertise. And you're going to invite everybody that you know, anybody who is on your mailing list, anybody who's in your, you know, social profile followings, your Twitter, your Facebook, your Instagram, your whatever. You can even email people via Gmail, say, hey, I'm doing this webinar. Here's a registration page link if you have any questions. I'm doing an open Ask me anything webinar. Now, the reason why we're doing this is because you want to find out what people are curious about. Instead of you guessing, you're gonna run an open Q and A. And what you're gonna do is that you're gonna answer those questions. Now, with our software, Webinar Ninja, we actually save all the chat messages and all the questions that people submit. So later on, after the webinar is over, you can go to your statistics page and you can review all the questions people asked. What's brilliant about this is that you can find out which questions are really hitting a nerve. You'll notice in the webinar, when you're running the webinar and people are ask, people will say, hey, can you elaborate on that? People will post comments on that question. Like, I have that, you know, issue too. I have that problem too. What about in this situation? You'll see where the pain points are based on how much, you know, traffic, how much interest people have with questions that are being asked. And you can refer back to this later and that could be the topic for your next webinar. That hot. So say, for example, I get asked a question in my. Ask me anything about a basketball. I'm a basketball coach. And one of the questions is, how do I shoot free throws in critical moments when I'm really nervous? What are some techniques to help me out? And let's say, for example, that question is really getting a lot of buzz. People are saying, hey, I have that same question. Can you please elaborate on that? And I see that in my statistics later on. I notice it during the webinar. But later on I say, oh, that question really was a, a hot topic. I will create a new webinar with that topic. I will create a workshop teaching people how to take care of that, how to actually solve that problem. I actually did it in a mini version by answering the question during the webinar. But now I'm going to make a whole workshop out of it. All my techniques, when it comes to calming the nerves, visualizing, making sure that you're squaring up for the free throw, blocking out any noise, all that kind of stuff, that becomes my topic for my webinar. Again, you're not guessing. You're choosing questions that people are asking. They're coming from your crowd. Now, a couple pointers here. A lot of people, they get nervous, say, hey, you know, how do I get the momentum going in the beginning to get people to feel comfortable asking questions? Well, what I like to do is I like to actually ask for questions before the webinar. So when they register for the webinar, with Webinar Ninja, we offer email notifications. These are automatic emails that go out to remind people and obviously give them a confirmation email saying, hey, here's all the webinar information. But also to remind them, hey, your webinar's tomorrow. Your webinar is starting in an hour, your webinar is starting now. All that kind of stuff. And in those sequence of emails, I always have a P.S. or some sort of message that says, hey, this isn't ask me anything. If you want to submit a question early, I'll get to your question first. So just reply to this email with your question or questions. So when people register and they get these emails, you're gonna get people that will ask questions right from the get go. You know why? Because they signed up for this webinar because they have a question, right? They're saying, ask me anything about this topic. Well, I have a couple questions I want to ask. They sign up and they can jot down that question or questions right then and there when they reply to the email. Now you have a whole bunch of questions that you can start off with. You can say, hey, welcome everybody. As people coming in, you know, hey, if you have any questions, put them in the questions area. I'm gonna be answering them in this open Q and A. But let me start off with some questions that got emailed to me in advance. And you start with those questions, you answer those questions, and that gets people thinking and feeling, hey, it's okay to ask questions. There are so many questions are being asked. I want to ask a question. This technique is brilliant. I wish I could take full credit, but I actually just kind of learned it through trial and error. And I actually kind of picked up on it because I was being onboarded for a new service, Intercom actually, which is another app. And they asked me a question while I was signing up and I thought to myself, hmm, I love this idea of asking questions in emails. Maybe I should do this for Q and A webinars. So that's a gift. It's brilliant. Use it. So having an open Q and a webinar and ask me anything Webinar is a great way to find out what topics people want to learn. And guess what? At the end of that one Q&A webinar, you might have three or four topics. Five topics for your next five webinars, giving you a bank of of great workshops. Now what are some other ways you can find out what people want to hear? What are great topics? Well, you can get social on social media. So say for example, you love Twitter. You can tweet out, hey, I'm thinking about running a webinar about basketball. I'm a basketball coach. You guys know me. What are some things you're struggling with? What are some areas you want me to teach? Let me know. And people are going to start chiming in and you know, replying to your tweet saying, oh, I would love to learn how to have better ball handling skills or how to communicate on the court or increase my stamina. And you know, you're going to get all these responses. Now what's brilliant about this is you're getting all these responses. People are going to like certain responses. You're going to have sort of like a polling or voting system going on here and you can even run a poll if you want. But I kind of like just like leaving it open ended instead of, you know, giving them choices. And then when you choose one of those topics, you can then go back to social media and say, hey, remember this tweet? Remember when I sent out this? Well, actually I chose this topic. I'm running the webinar. You know, this day you can sign up here. People already bought in because they've participated. They actually gave their two cents, they gave their opinion and they're going to be more interested in registering for a webinar that they've participated in already. So getting social on social media is a great way for nailing a great webinar topic. Now I want to say that webinars are Fantastic. And what I love about them is that you learn so much in the process. You experiment with titles, you experiment with content, you experiment with offers. And what's great about webinars is you look at the statistics later on and say, okay, how many people registered? How many people attend? How many people actually watched the whole webinar? Okay, this one really did well, but this one not so well. And you can find out why. And then you can really kind of double down on things that work. So just know that there's going to be some repetition and there's going to be some experimentation along the way.

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Guys, today's question from George. How do I choose a topic for my first webinar? I shared my best, best advice, my best techniques when it comes to this. This stuff works. I highly recommend you try it, George and everybody who's listening. As you can see, I'm super passionate about the topic of webinars because I love how much of an ROI it gives you. The amount of time you put in is pretty minimal compared to what you get back. You get so many leads, you get so many people interested. You build connections, you build a brand, you learn about your customers, you learn about their needs, you help them, they start to know like and trust you. There's so much value there. To me, it's like a no brainer. You should be doing these. And that's why I've heavily invested in webinars by building a business around it. Again, if you're interested, and this is totally a shameless, plug. But if you want to see a webinar in action if you want to learn about webinars, we run a webinar regularly, a live webinar, one that you can attend and ask questions. Just go to webinar ninja.comworkshop to sign up to the next one. Thank you so much George, for asking your question and thank you so much for listening. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at omar100mba.net and we'll make sure we answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Webinars are a lot of fun, you know, and one of the things I advise people is just to do their first one, just to get out of their system. I know a lot of people are nervous at the start, but it's totally fine. You can just do a Q and a webinar. You don't have to prepare material or remember a script or anything like that. You don't have to make an offer or sell anything. You can just go ahead and offer your advice via a Q and A platform. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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