How Personal Branding Can Help You Make Money Through Webinars
The term “webinar” is a clever blending of “web” and “seminar” and represents an online lecture, workshop, or presentation. The key feature of a webinar is the promise of real time interaction between the audience and the presenter. Webinars are radically accessible, offering potentially valuable content, generally free of charge, to geographically disparate individuals from the comfort of their own home. In this way, webinars are tools for immediate customer engagement and dynamic avenues for content marketing strategy.
Once you have convinced individuals to set aside an hour of their time to listen to your message, you have already converted them to potential leads; in exchange for the content you are providing, they have already given you contact information, most likely email addresses. You are perfectly set up to grow your brand, increase your reach, and establish your expertise; webinars are the perfect way to achieve this.
To successfully build your brand, you need to provide value. You are competing with a flooded online market; you have to offer more than what the competition is offering. Now, in addition to email addresses, you have the attention of your target audience. Don’t drop the ball. Your job is to follow through by providing high quality, lively content that actively engages your audience. Use your knowledge of a given niche and match it to your target audience to provide important information in an area of interest. If you manage this successfully, you will be rewarded with a priceless gift: trust. Your audience got something they needed for free and, in the process, has learned to trust your brand and become aware of how your products and services can help them.
The numbers clearly and demonstrably back up the claim that webinars are an effective way to bolster your brand and, in turn, increase your earnings. Studies show that over 60% of your audience will turn to vendor websites, dramatically increasing traffic, immediately following your presentation. Webinars also boost word-of-mouth marketing. If you deliver valuable content, then over half of your attendees are likely to share your website information with their network. Webinars statistically increase conversion rates with an average of 34% of attendees following through with a purchase. If you send a follow-up e-mail after the webinar, a whopping 70% of your audience will go on to register at vendor websites.
Not all of the traffic that you generate will result in a direct purchase, of course. Advertising specific products and services are only one element of the overall objective which is to build a loyal following for your brand, including future endeavors and related offers. Webinars can help you accelerate the transition from prospects to leads and from leads to loyal customers, paving the way for long-term content marketing.
If you want to use personal branding to turn your expertise into a profitable business, then you need to learn how to make your content generate customer engagement on a daily basis. Once you have mastered the art of real-time webinars, start experimenting with platforms like ClickMeeting which allows you to record, automate, and track engagement during your lecture.
