Notes on Blair Enns’ Webinar Webinar

Following are my notes a webinar about webinars by the handsome and talented Blair Enns of Win Without Pitching. Blair’s insights on many business topics are amazing and I think paying for his content is well worth it. You should check his stuff out here.

Why do webinars?

• Make a public commitment to get yourself to do something
• Deadline driven and therefore gets done
  • Put at least four per year on your calendar
• Generates reusable content quickly
• Clarifies your thinking on a topic
• Validates which subjects are of most interest to your audience

What shoud I talk about?

• Talk about an expertise of yours, or
• Talk about a problem of your clients, or
• Talk to a specific prospect (without them knowing it) <- this is genius

How do I promote my webinar?

• LinkedIn ads (better targeting than Facebook and Google for this)
• Phone key prospects
• Bring in a partner from an adjacent space who has a big list (JV)
• Mandatory sign-up fields: name, email, company
• Optional fields: title, “what do you hope to get out of this webinar?”

What should the content be like?

• Go narrow and deep
• At least 2 meaningful things that they can immediately implement
• Three ideas:
  1. Predict the future
     • You don’t have to be right
     • “Here’s the trend I’m seeing...”
  2. Challenge convention (aka AW’s “contrarian” approach)
  3. Bring in outside experts? Examples for my mobile biz:
     • Clay Shirky
     • Seth Godin
     • Horace Dediu
     • Tomi Ahonen
     • Cory Doctorow
     • Daniel Suarez
     • Wiliam Gibson
     • Neal Stephenson

How do I deliver the webinar?

• Get someone to monitor the tech
• Host and presenter
• Try to slow down; tendency is to rush

How do I follow up after my webinar?

• Auto email everyone an hour later
• Post Q&A blog post the next day that answers all the meaningful questions, especially the ones you didn’t get to
• Individiual phone call / email next day or so with valuable content
  • “Would you like a link to recordings or Q&A?”
  • “I’ve been thinking about the question you asked...”
  • “Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to ask?”
  • “Before I let you go, is there anything I can help you with/how might I be of assistance?”
    • They say No -> “Okay, I’ll follow up in 6 months”
    • They say something other than no -> treat opportunity appropriately

How should I leverage the webinar recording?

• Clean up recording
• Send direct link to attendees
• Post on site behind a “name, email, company” squeeze page
• Chop up into 1-4 minute segments
  • Add open/close with CTA + link (”to watch the entire webcast, click here [SITE LINK]”)
  • Title each with likely search terms
  • Post on YouTube
  • Great for SEO

What about format and technology?

• Promote as 30-45 minutes (even if you know you’ll prolly go 60 with Q&A)
• Questions are gold!
• Set up in a way that makes the slides/videos option in case you want to deliver as audio only
• GoToWebinar is (or was at the time) simplest for viewers and therefore BE’s fave

Misc

• Companion article https://www.winwithoutpitching.com/quick-lead-generation/
• Webinars are prolly best for lead gen and prospecting, but...
• ...if you’re going to charge for access, maybe about $99 per webinar is a max
• Blair was making $75-80k per year selling webinar recordings in 2011
• BE’s definition of a lead: “someone you haven’t spoken to before and you don’t know where they are in the buying cycle”
• 30-90 day lead time for actual promotion, although you can plan out content and systems a year in advance
• Don’t bother with video of your face. It’s just one more thing to go wrong.
• Stuff WILL go wrong - have contingency plans in place so you don’t flip out when they do.

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