MLP010: Why Webinars are Great for Growing Your List w/ Sarah Santacroce

Ashley: Thanks for joining me again, Sarah. We’re on #2 today, people. We had some problems this morning, and we’re trying again for a second time, so thank you, Sarah, for your time yet again.Sarah: Sure, no problem. Thanks for having me again.Ashley: Yes. We’re going to try again to talk about webinars this morning. I asked Sarah onto the podcast to give us her knowledge on webinars, because she’s been doing it for a number of years and has a lot of experience. So we’ll certainly see what Sarah can teach us, and yeah, let’s begin.Sarah, what would be your motivation, I would say, that you started webinars in the first place?Sarah: I think I started getting into webinars about 2 ½, 3 years ago, when I really wanted to go into this direction of running an online business. As you, actually, I’m based in Switzerland, as you know. Our world is rather small, so in order to increase that reach and get people from all over the world, I realized that webinars is a great way to do this.So I started looking into the technology and what it takes to run a webinar. It was very intimidating for me at the beginning, but I thought, “Well, this is the way I have to do it.” And yeah, that’s kind of how I got started.I think what you need to realize when you run webinars is that you kind of have to have already an idea of first of all, what it is you want to do, but also in terms of presentation and content, but then also what do you want your audience to do with this information?

Are you just running webinars to build a relationship with the audience? Or do you want them to buy a product at the end of your webinar, or do you want them to just sign up to your email list? Already ahead of time, have a plan, and not just go in there and say “Oh, I’m just going to run some webinars.”

I think the worst webinars are the ones where it’s just sales pitch after sales pitch, and people think that they’re going to invest their time and learn something, and then all they learn is about the person and how good they are and all the certifications they have and all that.

So getting back to what do you have to do before you get started, is having a plan in place about the content you want to share and realize that you want your viewers to take an action, and then what action it is that you want to take.

Ashley: That’s actually an interesting point, because I’ve heard a lot of complaints on the email lists for exactly the same thing, which is – and I’m on some of them as well now; I think I’ve been getting some emails from a particularly famous person recently, and I don’t blame them for it, but it’s been eight emails or something in the last 2 weeks about a new product.

It’s starting to get a bit old. It’s kind of like, “Okay, you normally give me a lot of value, so I’m willing to forgive you,” but it’s starting to get to the point where I’m about to unsubscribe because – yeah, okay, “time is running out, subscribe to my offer” – yeah, great, okay.

I think with webinars, that’s even probably more important, because someone’s not just getting a bunch of emails they’re ignoring, but they’re investing potentially half an hour or an hour of their time, and if 15 minutes in, they still haven’t heard anything apart from how amazing you are, then what’s the point?

Actually, I heard something recently from quite a famous webinar guy, or at least quite successful; I don’t think he’s that famous. But he said he doesn’t really pitch anything. He says, “Look, I’m going to give you an hour of awesome content, and at the end I’m going to tell you where you can go for more information.”

And that is then something to buy, but he doesn’t talk about it like that. It’s basically just an extension of what he’s given you. “I’ve given you great stuff. My intention is to give you great stuff, and if you want to take it further, you can get in touch with me.”

Sarah: Exactly. I think that’s the end. Either you do that way and then your pure goal is to really establish a relationship, or you tell them upfront, “Listen, I’m going to share some valuable content. At the end of the call, I’m going to take 2 minutes out of your time and share some information about a product.” Most people are okay with that if you’ve given them valuable content before.

I think some of the big names out there, what bothers me about their webinar is that they go into this “blah blah blah,” 10 minutes of “blah blah,” how great they are, and this is the company they worked with and this is the certifications – I’m like, by that time, I’m already bored and I’m already switching off.

If I signed up to your webinar, there’s a very good chance that I did my homework, and I know why I’ve signed up to your webinar. So you don’t have to tell me how good you are, because I wouldn’t be on the webinar if I didn’t think that you have some valuable content to share.

So I would suggest don’t go into too much – 2 minutes of intro is enough, and then go into the content. That’s why people are there.

Ashley: I think it’s similar in all content we do, like blogging, where it’s nice to give a little bit of personal information to solidify the relationship, but they’re not there to hear about your weekend. And same with your qualifications.

So having a good idea of want you want to do on a webinar is obviously key; what you want to achieve, as you’re saying. Do you want subscribers? Do you want to just have a sales pitch? Do you want to just demonstrate your expertise? It could just be that you want to establish your expertise.

Moving on with webinars – we’re already diving into the details here – this morning when we already discussed this, we discussed some of the technologies, and you talked about some of the options available, from the more basic to the more up-and-coming. We’ll quickly go over that again.

Sarah: Yeah, when I first got into webinars, the one that everybody talks about, and even now, 3 years later, is GoToWebinar. That’s kind of the standard of the market. It’s still a very robust platform; however, it’s also quite clunky. I don’t like the interface. It’s not great because people have to install something on their computer. It’s a plug-in, or I don’t know how you call it, to actually be able to view the webinar.

But if you’re just starting out, that’s a good option, to go into their basic program, which is called GoToMeeting, because you can then sign up for that for much cheaper. The regular GoToWebinar account is 99 USD; the GoToMeeting I think is 25 USD. But you’re limited to 25 people who can view the webinar. But it’s a good way to practice and get accustomed with the technology.

For my webinars, I was using InstantPresenter.com. I like that platform because it has much better chat functionality. GoToWebinar does not have a good chat functionality; people can only chat with the presenter and other people can’t see what’s going on in the chat. I want my webinars to be a social experience. I want people to see that there’s some kind of connection going on, not only with me, but also among people themselves. So that’s why I’ve used Instant Presenter.

The other reason I used Instant Presenter is because it doesn’t require an installation. It’s web-based, and so you just send people to a link that opens a new page, and they go to the webinar platform like that.

It also offers a much better recording than GoToWebinar. GoToWebinar’s recording is really difficult. It’s hard to download and to do anything with it. They basically own the content. There is ways to do it, but just so complicated.

There’s many more webinar platforms out there. Now the trend is to go, I think, away from these webinar platform providers, because we have been introduced to Google Hangouts On Air. That’s the new technology now. Google Hangouts On Air are basically live broadcasts where you have an unlimited number of viewers that can see your – it’s kind of like a television broadcast.

Up till now, it was not possible to have people sign up for that; it was just being publicly announced on Google+. However, what we discussed this morning, there is now different platforms, but the most popular one, probably, is called Webinar Jam. That’s a platform that now allows to integrate the Google Hangout technology with a way to gather emails via email list integration, to have a chat functionality also within the webinar.

So I think for a lot of these big webinar people, that’s the way they’re going to go. They’re going to use Google Hangout and maybe integrate it with some kind of platform that allows the integration of email lists and chat functionality.

Ashley: And as we were also talking about this morning, that then integrates with quite a number of the list building or email service providers, so you can then collect the lists. Whereas GoToWebinar saves them on their system or something, or you don’t – do you even see them on GoToWebinar?

Sarah: You do, but it does not automatically integrate with your list, so people had to come up with a sneaky way to have people sign up to the webinar and then sign up to the AWeber list, for example. Which was not a problem for people who were using MailChimp because they didn’t require a double opt-in, so you could just export the list from GoToWebinar and import into MailChimp. But for most other lists, it was kind of annoying to have people sign up twice, and most people actually didn’t do it.

Ashley: So you lose your list, basically. Or you lose a lot of the people that you gathered for your webinar.

And also, we were also discussing this morning, you found that the list building potential of this kind of service or online promotion for yourself is fantastic, that you get quite a lot of people signing up compared to a normal blog post, email gathering numbers that you get. And from what you were saying, the numbers you were saying, I think it’s actually a really great way to go about getting people on your list.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that brings us back to why I got started, and that was one of the big reasons why. I wanted to build my list, and I’m a big believer in the “give before you get” approach. So yes, I wanted to get people onto my list, but I wanted to give them something.

I think a webinar is the best way to give something. An eBook is nice, but as we know, everybody gives eBooks now. A podcast is a great way, but the webinar is probably at the top of the range there because not only do you share content, but you also show, most of the times, you show your face, and people can connect with you that way.

So yes, that’s how I got started, and it did build my list quite rapidly because if you promote it well – obviously, if you don’t promote it, then it’s not going to work. But you have to promote it, just like you would promote any other event, and so you can really grow your list quite rapidly that way.

Ashley: How much promotion time do you give ahead of your actual event?

Sarah: I used to start out with a lot of promotion time, more than 2 weeks, but now people have such a short attention span that 1 week is probably enough. You give people 1 week notice, and you just promote the heck out of it during the week, and you’ll do fine.

Ashley: So you then promote it just as a plain tweet or whatever, or do you do a specific blog post promoting it as well?

Sarah: Yeah. Pretty much everything you can think of, so that could be videos and tweets and blog posts.

As you and I know, blog posts not just promoting the webinar, but picking one detail out of the content that you’re going to share, write valuable content, and then at the bottom of the post, “By the way, I’m promoting this webinar that is going to happen next week.” You can do a series of posts. Usually I do three posts leading up to a webinar, and I always have that signup box underneath the blog post.

And then you can do visuals on Facebook or Pinterest and LinkedIn. Depending on the topic, of course, you’re going to present during the webinar.

Ashley: Okay, that’s really a cool way, because I’ve been reading some stuff from Tim Bonner recently, and he’s getting into the same mentality as well, which is building a plan, having a goal at the end of a series of blog posts, whether it’s promoting sale of a specific item or keeping an idea in people’s head for longer.

He hasn’t gone to the actual position of having webinars, but I can see potentially that coming from the exact same mentality that he’s adopting, and I think I’m also starting to adopt, which is yeah, just posting whatever you can think of for the week, or whatever isn’t really achieving anything, sure, you’re getting more shares and you’re getting more readers, but you’re not reaching any actual goals. So I think in combination, that sounds really powerful.

Sarah: Exactly, yeah. It all fits into your overall yearly marketing plan. Ideally, and I know for us, things always change a bit, but ideally you set up your plan at the end of the year for the next year, and you already know, “In June I’m going to have this and this webinar, so leading up to that, that’s going to be my topic of the month.” I think that would be the ideal way.

And you’re right, there should always be a call to action, or even better, over a certain amount of time, like you just mentioned.

Ashley: Okay, so promotion, basically you’re doing whatever is in your power to do with content, related content or related posts, or just small – I think you were also, for ones that I was participating in, when you were doing Hangouts, you were doing little small related videos, posting those around and so forth. Some cool ideas there.

Sarah: Of course, just thinking of your previous interview or podcast with Ron…

Ashley: Oh, Rob Cubbon.

Sarah: No, it was Ron Sela, I think his name is.

Ashley: Oh yeah, Ron Sela, sure.

Sarah: He was talking about influence for marketing. Of course ,if you can get a great guest onto your webinar and convince him or her to help you promote it, that’s probably the most powerful thing you can ever do. So get a really popular guest speaker onto your webinar and promote it together.

Ashley: Yeah, I’ve seen something similar with what Pat Flynn was doing with LeadPages. He got the owner of LeadPages, Clay Collins, on, and then Clay gave all of his knowledge on LeadPages, and then Pat promotes LeadPages. It’s a double whammy from them. So yeah, I can see the benefits there, for sure.

And the other thing this morning, we were talking about, just quickly, the prices of the different webinar services? I think it was – maybe you know off the top of your head?

Sarah: Yeah, GoToWebinar is about $99 per month, so that’s the standard in the industry. Depending on whether or not you’re hosting a lot of webinars, it might be worth it, but if you’re just running one a month or one every two months, $99 bucks is quite the investment.

This new platform called Webinar Jam, they’re actually charging a flat fee per year, and I think last time I checked it was $279, which obviously, considering that you can also have unlimited number of viewers, is a great deal. Because you pay once per year and then you can run as many webinars as you want, and if you do the math, it’s going to be much less than the $99 per month.

Ashley: Yeah, about $25 or something. Okay, that’s quite reasonable. That was a similar mentality I had when I got into LeadPages. I started adding up all the costs, and it was quite expensive, but they have a year discount as well.

Then if you’re really going to use something like that for creating landing pages or sales pages, and you use that again for your webinars, that’s your webinar landing page system. And it takes you probably 15 minutes to whip up a brand new webinar page, and then you send all of your signups to that particular page, and it takes 15 minutes. It’s really a huge timesaver.

You end up paying, I think, for the full system, something like $37 a month or something like that, if you buy it on a yearly basis.

Sarah: It’ll be interesting, if you really do think you’re going to do webinars, which one you’re going to choose. Because Webinar Jam allows you to do the exact same thing; it creates webinar landing pages in a second.

So I’m actually – I don’t know if I should say this on a public podcast, but I’m actually going to get rid of LeadPages when it runs out and just use Webinar Jam, because that’s really what I was looking for when I started with LeadPages, and now Webinar Jam replaces that.

That being said, LeadPages is still a very good product for bloggers who want to build their list. I’m just not doing it enough in order to really benefit from it.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s like any product. You need to be using it. I mean, LeadPages is great for any kind of page, I’ve found. I’ve used it all over the place. Yeah, if you’re only doing one webinar landing page, and your webinar provider is providing that for you, then what’s the point, right? Obviously you don’t need duplication of costs.

So then back onto topic, something we were also talking about, just running through my list here of things I wanted to cover – topic finding, I remember this morning we were also saying that not just chatting about a generic topic that will bore people who can find 50 posts on the same thing in 10 minutes on social media. It’s not worth doing that on a webinar. Your advice was if you want to –

Sarah: Yeah, you want to go into some level of detail. Obviously you don’t want to share too much, because then people don’t need you anymore. But it’s kind of like on a blog, exactly. You don’t want to just come up with a blog that says “This is why you should be on social media.” Everybody knows that already.

Give me the reasons why exactly, or give me some kind of tips on how to use Pinterest, something a bit more specific rather than just this global, giant topic that doesn’t generate any comments or contradictions or anything. Yeah, that’s what you want to cover in a webinar, and make sure you share some really valuable action, small action steps that people can take after they have attended your webinar.

Ashley: Yeah, and that’s what I’m trying to do here, and I try and get out of all my guests in the podcast as well, is “Okay, this person knows more or less this broad topic very well. What are the things that we can learn from them and walk out of here today after this time listening and go ahead and implement? What’s the actionable tips?”

I think that’s why a lot of this discussion – and maybe I need to do more quick 20, 30 minute discussions – is what can we do? So basically, you’re saying pick your technology, pick your topic and your call to action, what is it you want people to do at the end of it?

“Call to action” may not make sense to most people, but do you want signups? Do you want them just to follow you? Do you want them to buy something from you? So quietly, subtly leading them to a sales page. Not necessarily pushing stuff on them.

So you want to have that in place. You want to know who your audience is; you want to promote to them using a variety of topics, whether it’s two or three blog posts, a video, whatever.

And then I think the last thing we discussed this morning, which was something that really made me think, too, which is that webinars expose you to the people you’ve gotten to sign up, so you need to be really careful that you look professional. Did you want to quickly touch on what we were discussing there this morning?

Sarah: Yeah. Basically, you asked me, if somebody wants to start doing a webinar tomorrow or next week, what should they do? I told you that I refused a client who said “I have to host a webinar in 2 weeks; can you help me?” I said, “No, I can’t, because your reputation is going to be my reputation. If your webinar is going to go really badly, then I’m on the line too.”

In the end, you need practice. I think it takes at least 3 to 4 months of practice with webinars. If you’re already comfortable with videos, if you’re doing videos or other kind of presentations, you’re a professional speaker, then of course it’s a different story.

But if you’re just your traditional blogger and all of a sudden decide to do webinars, then you need to practice, because these people are going to sign up; they want value, and they don’t want to be bothered by technology. People are forgiving, but they will still judge you, and they will not say, “Oh, it’s just the technology that didn’t work.” They will say “Oh, Sarah’s webinar sucked because I didn’t even hear any sound or anything like that.”

So you need to be really comfortable with the technology, and that needs practice. So that’s why I was saying that probably the best idea is to sign up for GoToWebinar or practice with Google Hangouts, if that’s the way you’re going to go. But you really need to practice with other people so that you are totally comfortable with the technology and you know how to handle any glitches, because there will be glitches. So you have always a backup plan.

Ashley: Yeah, like on this show, we had a massive glitch with my microphone this morning, and then when I looked at the recording, it sounded horrible, so we’re doing this again. Because to me, that’s not something I want to put my listeners through.

Yeah, it’s the same with Hangouts, and I know when you were doing Hangouts, you specifically did it as a trial with small groups. Nothing serious happened, but you had a couple of minor issues, and of course, you don’t like that. And you don’t want to present yourself as a webinar host with those kind of issues.

Sarah: Exactly.

Ashley: Okay, so basically, if people want to get into this, they should start small. Maybe get a small group of forgiving people, maybe people they know really well who are interested in the topic, maybe discussing it with them and getting on a technology that’s maybe cheap. Like you said, GoToMeeting is up to 25 people, so that’s quite small.

Because you also need to have a reasonable mic and make sure that that’s working. I’ve had issues on the podcast with that. You get reverberation in the room, and your desk might squeak. I’ve had to really seriously fix this desk before I started podcasting. I spent hours on that, because it was squeaking, and you could hear that. You can’t accept these things on an hour-long discussion. It’s just not possible. Even if my chair here was creaking, you can’t have that, because you’ll move and people will hear it, and that’s horrible.

As they say, on all videos, sound is probably 80$% of the video, because if the sound’s horrible, it doesn’t matter what you can see; without good sound, you’re really in trouble. And of course, you have a good mic as well.

It doesn’t have to be hundreds and hundreds of dollars. You can get an Audio-Technica mic, I think it’s the 2020 or the 2005; there’s a bunch of them for about $50 or $100 bucks you could get. So having good technology, practicing with it, listening to your recording, looking at yourself on video as well, I think.

Because I find I move too much as well, even when I’ve watched myself on your Hangouts. I’m too – yeah, I don’t know whether it’s nerves or what, but I move around too much and it doesn’t look great. I notice that with you, you’re very good at sitting still and presenting.

Sarah: Oh, I blush.

Ashley: We all have something we can improve. So practice, get your topic down, find your audience, and try out some of these technologies as well.

I think that’s one of the biggest things. The technology can kill you. If you’ve then got 150 people – okay, it’s probably going to be difficult to get that number, but if you’ve got say even 30 or 50 people listening, and it bombs, then you’re going to lose those people. Which is a shame, so you might as well make sure it’s…

Sarah: Maybe one more thing that we said this morning is just know that if you want to run a business and run a successful business, you have to invest in it as well. I think we were saying this morning, you need to invest in a platform, in the technology, sometimes also just getting some help with that.

There’s a lot of people out there, including myself, hint hint, to help you with setting that up. I think it’s important to invest in your business in that way. You don’t want to just spend hundreds of dollars on everything, but when it counts, you need to make it count.

Ashley: Yeah, exactly, and that’s what I also recently did with the LeadPages stuff, and now I’ve also been playing around with microphones. Initially, when I was blogging, I didn’t see it as a business, and so any expense seemed too much because I wasn’t really making any money.

And even now, as I’m struggling to make money, it still seems too much, but I’ve realized that you have to spend money to make money. What is it that companies are doing? They’re advertising, for example, or they have an office. They put money out there before they get money in. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Actually, I think if you do it the other way around, you’re restricting yourself severely. You’re basically choking yourself. “Oh, I don’t want to spend any money on a decent website” or “I don’t want to spend any money on a mail list system. I want the cheapest one possible.” Which is what I did in the beginning. And then I moved my list to a paid system, and I lost half of them.

Okay, it didn’t kill me, but it was a big mistake, because I didn’t pay in the beginning. Even though it’s only, what is it $10 a month or $20 a month. And altogether, I think I spent, I don’t know, $100 or something a month.

Which isn’t, for a business, if you think of that as the basis for a business, we can start a business in our living room or in our office. You don’t need a building. You don’t necessarily need to start a company. You can do it all at home, spend $200 bucks a month or something.

Yeah, so investing stuff. That was the other thing, I think we were going to put your links on, just to wrap up. You also have a link for Webinar Jam as well; we’re going to put that in the show notes, if I remember correctly.

Sarah: Yeah, Webinar Jam is the one I’m using and I highly recommend. I think it has huge potential, because it has that yearly fee and it’s much cheaper than any other platforms.

If you want to start small – and Ashley and I started small, too, so we totally know how that is – I have a little webinar basics eBook that I put together last year, so that costs you only $7 bucks. Bitly.com/WebinarABC. you can download that if you’re serious about webinars and want to get started with that.

Ashley: If it’s a summary of everything you need to do in one place, then $7 bucks is a couple of coffees or something. That’s often what I think when I buy something. I’m like, “If I went out tonight and bought a few beers, I would spend $20 or $30 bucks.” And it’s completely wasted, in a way.

Sarah: You can easily find the information for free; I’m not saying that’s not the case. That’s definitely the case. If you have time and you want to find the information and search on the internet, if $7 bucks is too much for you and you have time, then do that. Search on the internet, and you’ll find the information there.

Ashley: But usually you have to read – at least I found, when I was reading in the beginning, you have to read tons of stuff because there’s a lot of…

Sarah: Takes more time.

Ashley: Yeah, there’s a lot of garbage out there. Or you hear the same thing five times, but it’s not necessarily from someone who’s done it; it’s just someone who’s written an article about it.

And that’s what John Paul said to me last week. He started this new Brainy Marketer, which is a collection of 13 – he didn’t want to use the word “expert,” but he said pros in their field, and he says you can go to that website, and they’re all there. You don’t need to go searching for them, because he’s collected them all together because he knows they’re all good at what they do. In this day and age, where there’s a gazillion blog posts out there, I think that’s really useful.

Anyway, thank you again for Round 2 of Webinar 101 for everybody, and I hope anyone who’s interested in that will certainly have some basics to go off and do. We’ve gone over them a number of times.

If you want some more help, Sarah’s got her eBook there, and I’ll put the link in the show notes, which is madlemmings.com/episode10. That’s the number 10, not t-e-n. Otherwise, you can look at it on the blog post and all of the ways to connect with Sarah.

We’ll have her address on there, simplicitysmallbiz.com, and LinkedIn is the best place to get hold of her. You prefer a personalized invitation, of course, which usually requires going to the profile, right?

Sarah: That’s right.

Ashley: I think probably 19 out of 20 invites I get are all generic as well, and yeah, it’s nicer to have a personalized invite.

So if you’re on LinkedIn, go to the trouble of clicking on the person’s profile and writing them at least a sentence that you heard Sarah on this podcast and would like to connect with her. Or with me, or with whoever. But make it personal. It’s nicer. We appreciate it, and we get to know you faster.

All right, thanks again, Sarah, and have a good day.