master class video player

This guide is based on Mixergy’s interview with Lewis Howes.

After an injury ended his career as a professional football player, Lewis Howes started a successful webinar business and made $6,300 in one hour. It was all done using webinars to drive sales, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.

Lewis is the author of The Ultimate Webinar Marketing Guide, the book that teaches you how to connect with your audience, build your list, and use webinars to sell.

Here are the actionable highlights from the interview.

1. Choose a product so you can promote it with webinars and earn money

Lewis didn’t have a product to sell in his first webinar, so he decided to offer three hours of live training on LinkedIn for $150.

Take Action:
Select a product you’ve already built, create a new product using your expertise, or choose another company’s product to sell for a commission.

2. Build a large email list so you can invite more people to your webinars

Lewis created groups on LinkedIn and collected 30,000 email addresses from the group members.

Take Action:
Use social networking to gather email addresses of people who might be interested in your product.

3. Prove you’re an authority so people will be eager to learn from your webinars

Lewis wrote guest posts about LinkedIn for Mashable and TopBlogger, and people told him that the logos on his site gave him credibility.

Take Action:
Offer to write guest posts for respected blogs, then display the blogs’ logos on your website.

4. Schedule webinars at a convenient time so you’ll get a bigger audience

Lewis schedules webinars between 12 and 4 p.m. Eastern standard time on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Take Action:
Choose a time in the middle of the day, when your audience has been at work for a few hours but isn’t getting ready to leave yet.

5. Follow up with webinar participants to sell to people who didn’t buy right away

Lewis invited one of his early webinar attendees back for additional webinars until she finally became a paying customer after a year and a half.

Take Action:
After a webinar, send an email asking participants to register for your next webinar and reminding them that your product is still available.

6. Create a clean, simple landing page so more people will sign up

Only 20-30% of landing page visitors joined Lewis’ webinar when the page showed a video, but the rate went up to 50% when he replaced it with a text-only GoToWebinar page.

Take Action:
Design a landing page with text and (at most) one image.

7. Tell stories to inspire your audience to stick around and buy your product

Lewis’ student Steve did dozens of webinars without making any sales, but after he started telling stories he made $6,500 from a 150-person webinar.

Take Action:
Talk about experiences that people can relate to and use facts to back up your stories.

8. Keep your audience interested so they’ll stay until the end of the webinar.

Lewis welcomes attendees by name, tells them when to take notes, and holds a Q&A session.

Take Action:
Every 10 minutes, ask attendees to answer a poll, write something down, or take action.

9. Ask people to buy your product to turn webinar attendees into customers.

Lewis mentions at the beginning of a webinar that he’ll offer a product later, and he spends 5-10% of his webinar time selling the product.

Take Action:
Near the end of your webinar, spend a few minutes explaining the benefits of your product and asking attendees to buy it.

Want to make sure you get results?

Watch the full interview now
Written by Sarah Brodsky, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz