Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/using-webinars-to-sell-your-products-and-services-with-lewis-howes/

Welcome back to the show.

This is episode number 10 of the multimedia marketing show.

We've got Lewis house, who is not only an expert LinkedIn marketer

or an expert in LinkedIn, but he's also run so many webinars That

he's an expert at running webinars.

Now, in a few episodes ago, I spoke a little bit about how I enjoyed his his

book the ultimate webinar marketing guide.

So I really thought that you would get some value out of hearing a

little bit about Lewis and how to.

Go about running a webinar.

So we've got him on the show this week to discuss a little bit.

How you go about setting up a webinar and he shares some absolute gold.

So rather than put it off any longer, let's get straight

into this week's interview.

Lewis, how are you?

I'm doing great.

How are you?

Oh, fantastic.

All right.

So going back a few weeks, Lewis, I mentioned you on a, on an earlier

episode because I was looking at holding some webinars myself and asking a few

people around the traps as to good resources on webinars your name kept.

Popping up.

So I went out and purchased the ultimate webinar marketing guide just on the

Kindle and for such a dry subject, I felt that you presented it and

explained it in such an engaging way.

So I thought, gee, I need to get you on the show.

I tried to tell some good stories in there, it's a work in progress.

Yeah,

it really is.

I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the book.

Yeah, you've done an awesome job with that.

Now as you're probably aware, the premise of this particular

show is multimedia marketing.

So while webinars is not exactly multimedia marketing, it's certain,

certainly a platform to actually offer sales for everybody doing this.

So I'd love to go into, in this episode, a little bit about how

you hold a successful webinar.

How does that sound?

Sounds great to me.

Awesome.

So for those, a few listeners out there who may not know a little bit about you,

Lewis, how about you give us a little bit about your background and what

has brought you to where you are now?

Sure.

Yeah.

I used to play professional football back in 2007, 2006, 2007.

And that was my dream.

My entire childhood was being a professional athlete.

I thought to myself, if I could get paid.

To run around and hit people and throw a football and catch a football.

And that would be a pretty sweet dream come true.

I thought in my mind, and I've made my dream come true.

I played arena football in the United States, which is indoor football.

It's not the NFL, but it's about a step below.

And I was working my way towards the NFL.

However, I had a career ending injury.

I broke my wrist in a game and had to recover for about.

12 months from this injury.

I couldn't really work out for a while.

So I decided to retire from playing football anymore.

And I was trying to figure out, I was in, I had three credit cards.

I was in debt in, I was had student loans.

I was sleeping on my sister's couch for this entire year and a

half while I was recovering from this, the surgery and this injury.

And I was trying to figure out what my next move was going to be.

And I realized that I didn't really want to go work for someone.

I didn't think a nine to five type of job was something that I was built for, made

for once you're getting paid to wear a helmet and hit people in the head, you

don't really want to go sit on a desk and take orders from a boss when you felt like

you're on top of the world as an athlete.

So I decided to figure out how was I going to make money on my own?

How could I be an entrepreneur?

Or make money be my own boss and I started actually researching a lot of

bloggers at the time who are making money.

I was reading different blogs, learning about online businesses.

Social media started to become a huge topic around that time.

And actually, 1 of your previous guests, Chris Brogan.

I was, he was one of the blogs that I started reading early on actually

about how to leverage social media, how to grow an audience, how to generate

sales online and things like that.

And I started following him and a bunch of other people and just

learning about how they did it.

I would reverse engineer products.

They would create how they would write email copy and

just study what everyone did.

And then I just copied a little bit of what they did and applied some

of my own thoughts and ideas to it.

And from there.

Thank you.

Really took off I wrote a couple of books early on and then created

one product which led to many more products which led to where I'm at

today.

Yeah fantastic it's a really interesting story and it's amazing I guess probably

what doesn't come out in a quick intro is how much time and effort you actually

had to put into to becoming what you are now what didn't come too easy.

Yeah,

I definitely for the 1st year and a half, I didn't make a dollar.

And I remember thinking to myself, when am I going to be able to

move into my own apartment and be able to take care of myself?

I'm 25 years old and I was thinking, gosh, my grown ass man, and I still I

live in my sister's place and it was just more of maybe it's more of an

ego thing, or it's just like I needed to be able to take care of myself.

And at the moment, I couldn't take care of myself.

My basic needs were not met.

I couldn't provide my own food for myself.

I couldn't buy myself clothes and I couldn't pay for my own apartment.

For me, it was just like, I had nowhere else to go except for

learning how to make money and learning how to provide for myself.

And I spent all day all night.

Studying, researching, taking action.

I had mentors.

I was doing whatever I could to finally figure it out.

And I didn't stop.

I really didn't sleep until I figured it out.

Yeah.

Cool.

All right.

So moving on to continuing to paint the picture a little bit.

So LinkedIn is where you become really an expert.

I believe you started off holding in person events.

That's

correct.

Yeah.

I, I realized that I was building this large audience pretty fast on LinkedIn.

I was spending probably six to eight hours a day on there for a number of

months, really just trying to connect with people to see what type of

business opportunities were out there.

And at the time I was looking for job opportunities, but I

didn't want to take any of them.

I was just like, what is out there?

So I was connecting with these decision makers and these hiring

managers and I built this.

Huge network pretty fast.

I was creating this different business related groups in various cities and

just trying to learn all about linkedin and see what other people were doing.

And I said to myself, I started going to local social media events, and they

were lame and I said, okay I think I could throw a better event than this.

And I think I can get more people here.

So I threw an event and I had 350 people show up.

And I sold about 1, 000 worth of sponsorships for like little

tables, like little booze.

And I said, wow, this is this is the first money I made was a

thousand bucks from this event.

And I said, I wonder if I could charge people for this event

and if they would still show up as opposed to making it free.

So the next one I did, I charged 5 and 400 people showed up.

And I said, wow.

Okay.

And I sold sponsorships and I said, okay, I wonder if I can charge more for this.

And if people would show up and charge more for sponsorships.

So I kept increasing the sales.

I kept, I started charging 10, 20.

I was increasing my sponsorships.

I thought, okay, what if I charged asked the place, the restaurant or

the bar that I was hosting it at?

What if I asked them if I could get a commission on sales for any food and

bar sales for the three hour period?

So I started to make an extra, 15, 20% from all food and bar sales

from 500 people that all adds up.

Then I wrote a book about LinkedIn and started selling my book at the event.

So I started to learn how to leverage these events to generate more

income, started getting clients.

I started doing consulting about LinkedIn, all these different things stem

from building an audience on LinkedIn.

And the goal was to bring people together, to add value to them,

to help them grow their business.

And while I was doing that, I realized that I could start

charging for different things.

That's really how it all got started for me.

All right.

Then how did you make your way from holding physical events all around the

country to moving into the webinar space?

And I realized that events were really starting to drain my energy.

I was promoting these things and I would travel around the

country and hosting these events.

And it was just a lot of time consuming.

I said, I don't want to do any more events.

I did.

20 in the first year and they were getting me by, but they weren't

generating passive income and it wasn't really smart money coming in.

I remember i was trying to figure out really how to create products online

but i had no clue what i was doing i didn't know how to write copy i didn't

know how to do anything technical with sales pages and i had this

linkedin book that i wrote however and there was a guy named joel calm.

Who asked me to come on a webinar that he was hosting a bootcamp series about

social media, and he didn't know anyone else who was talking about LinkedIn.

And he had an expert on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.

Luckily, I had met him at an event just before this and was pitching him

on why he should use LinkedIn to help him in his Internet marketing company.

And so I got on this webinar with him and I didn't have a product, but he

said, I want you to have some type of training or some type of product

where we can sell at the very end.

You're going to give 60 minutes of great content for free and then

you can offer something at the end.

I had no clue what I was doing, but I offered basically like a three day

live training on advanced LinkedIn strategies for people at the very end.

And long story short, I made 6, 300 in that first webinar I did to his

audience and was blown away at that.

For me, that was the most money I've ever made in my life, basically, in a

day and let alone like probably a month.

And I was blown away that he could do that online and it was

like this aha moment for me.

I said, wow, I don't have to.

I was literally in my underwear.

And on behind the computer screen just presenting on a topic that I know so much

about linkedin and I was able to sell my information to people who wanted to learn

how to accelerate their business and grow their business using linkedin after that.

And I said, wow, I could do this every single day if I want to make 6300 dollars

on a webinar and I said, how can I.

Perfect this system, how can I make more sales?

How can I add more value to people?

What can I, who can I find to promote these webinars?

So I started really diving into that whole system of webinars and learning

everything you could about it.

And it's been pretty interesting over the last couple of years doing webinars.

Yeah, so how many webinars do you think you would have helped on it?

And,

I think six months ago, I think I tried to do the numbers.

I probably did over 500 about six months ago.

So I've started doing a lot less probably only doing a few a month right now.

But I was doing some weeks.

I was doing like 10 a week.

It was insane.

And when I could, I was just, I couldn't line them up fast enough.

Basically, like once people heard that, I was able to add that much value

and then generate a lot of sales and webinars, it was like I was signing

people up every day I could to promote me.

Yeah,

certainly 500 webinars plus makes you an expert.

So you've gone on you've written a book about it.

You've created a number of programs, one in particular, I think, was it a

magnetic webinars around holding webinars?

Correct.

Okay.

Let's move on to the actionable steps here for our listeners.

Who should be holding webinars?

Anyone who has a product or service an expertise software or events

that they would like to sell you can also have some type of membership site

or things like that, but if you've got a product service, software, or events,

or you're an expert at something, then that's who should be doing webinars.

Yeah.

Okay.

So products is this a digital product or can this be a physical

product as well?

This can be both.

Now the majority of people that I work with and the majority of products

that I sell are digital for me.

It's just, it's easier to sell a digital products and it's easier to

manage the process of shipping stuff or not shipping stuff afterwards.

But.

We do work, I do help people who do have physical products and

they still do extremely well.

But just the profit margin isn't as high as a digital product.

Yep.

Okay.

No problems.

All right.

So what I'd like to do now, Lewis is let's do a bit of a case study.

I'll be really selfish here.

And let's say I've got my own product here.

I want to start holding webinars myself.

a, I've gone through the last six months.

I own a travel agency here in Melbourne and I've been shooting a lot of video

after the last Six months and I now feel that I've got something to offer

other businesses about how they can go about setting up their own video

production and getting video out there.

So I want to hold a webinar and help people out.

I know nothing about webinars.

Let's go through the process for our listeners and put together a webinar.

So wait, is your product, your travel industry or video stuff?

It's video stuff.

It's definitely video stuff.

But what makes me an expert in it is the fact that I've been doing it in my other

companies.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So you.

Your product is a video marketing or how to course.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So it's a digital course.

It's a live training.

It's something like that.

Correct?

Yep.

Okay, cool.

So if you're going to do a webinar and you want to generate some

sales for this digital products, basically, you'd want to just.

The 1st thing is you need to either have your own email list, or you need

to find someone who can promote you who has an email list or an audience online.

It could be a big Facebook page.

It could be whatever, but you need to figure out how you're going to get people

to get on the webinar 1st and if you don't have a list, if you can't find

someone who has a list or an audience.

Then you can do Facebook ads or some other ads to drive traffic

to a webinar registration page.

So that's the 1st step is figuring out where you're going to drive traffic

from to a webinar registration page.

The next step would be setting up a clean call to action on

a webinar registration page.

I like to use gotowebinar.

com.

They're like the.

The standard in the industry, everyone's seems like everyone's

been on a webinar from go to webinar.

So they understand how to use it.

So you go to our dot com sign up an account there and set up a

webinar registration page with a clean call to action in the title.

So it could be the 7 step process for.

Building your business through video marketing, and then you'd have a nice

intro paragraph, some bullet points of how they're going to, what they're

going to get out of the webinar, how it's going to increase their

business by using your strategies.

And then the opt in form at the bottom.

So you're going to drive the traffic there and I'm going to give you

a brief synopsis, but basically you'd want to spend a couple of

days driving traffic to the webinar registration page, letting people

know about it, getting them excited.

Telling them to get on there early once they get on the webinar and it starts,

you want to make it about 60 minutes long.

So with that, you can have 30 to 60 slides.

You want to create a presentation that's very clean, and it has

lots of more image focus than text focused and has great examples.

For your tips or strategies, things like that.

You want to there's a whole process for actually selling without being

salesy but for the sake of time you basically want to have a strong

introduction that's going to hook people To stick around to the very end.

So what's your big promise?

What are you gonna?

What are you gonna promise people that they're going to receive if they

stick around through the very end?

Because if they don't stick around to the very end Then you're going to

decrease your chances of getting sales Once you give them your introduction

And you give them your promise of what they're going to learn.

You've got to send them through your content.

You want to give them some of your best tips possible, your biggest

secrets, the best strategies, the things that really work for you

or your clients, and give it away.

Give them your best stuff.

Don't be afraid to hold back and just give basic stuff.

After you give them the content, you want to lead them into the offer,

which should be your video marketing course, and send them through.

A number of slides that will let them know what the product is, why they should

sign up, who else has gone through it, the success of other people's businesses that

have used your program or your strategies and send them through to a sales page

where they can buy your product there.

And that's pretty much kind of an overview of a webinar.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

That's fantastic.

A couple of questions are surrounding that.

Let's look at a webinar registration page.

I'm sure you would have done a lot of the testing, but there are a number

of different platforms out there that offer what they call higher converting

webinar registration pages over the traditional go to webinar page.

What are your findings on that?

We did a number of testing because.

I thought at first, you can't really customize the go to webinar

page that well, you can't have a video, you can't add this.

And so I thought, what if we had a video on here and nice

looking images and buttons and.

Arrows and all this stuff.

I wonder if we could optimize our conversions better because we were getting

around 50% opt ins from people that went to the page the webinar registration page.

And we tried this for about six months to a year.

I did a webinar with Brian Tracy, who's like a top sales coach in

the world and a big kind of like big name, the business world.

He did a personal video saying, Hey guys, Brian Tracy here.

Number one, New York time bestseller yada, yada.

And I am so excited to come on this webinar with Lewis Howes.

Make sure to sign up.

Here's what you're going to learn.

We thought this was going to blow it away and like it got 10% conversion.

We tried everything with different buttons.

Nothing converted as well as the simple look of go to webinars registration page.

So for me, we went back to that and just stuck with what works.

That's really interesting and I guess would you assume that's

because people are familiarity that's

probably one of the things that it might it may just be our audience

who knows so maybe you know if you've got a different audience and you're

not getting conversion so we want and try a different page yourself but it's

probably because they started off.

With us for a year like that, and then we changed it up.

Maybe who knows?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

And in terms of the platform, you mentioned go to webinar.

Do you think there's anything else in the market that is, is comparable?

I don't think there's anything as good

that's as consistently good.

And gives you everything you need to get results.

There's some other stuff that has different like widgets and buttons and

videos and stuff, but it's more expensive and not as reliable in my opinion.

Yeah,

that's that's my findings indicate that as well.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

All right.

So moving on then.

So initially you're promoting LinkedIn.

You moved a little bit away from, or I wouldn't say moved away, but you're

actually bringing in other different expertises into the product stable.

What else you're focusing on now?

It's really on all social media marketing that works.

So we've created Facebook product.

We've got a YouTube product.

We've got our LinkedIn product.

We've got a webinar product.

And we're just expanding our product line because I'm just

talking about LinkedIn all the time.

They want my customers want more information as well.

And other social.

Media sites also how to build their business better online.

So going into broader how to grow your business online as well.

All right.

That's fantastic.

So this has been a nice short, sharp interview, and I really appreciate

you coming on Lewis we're mentioning before we hit record that you're

coming out with your own podcast.

Yeah, I'm really excited about this because I do a lot of

different content about business and online marketing and social media,

but what I'm really excited about is connecting with the most inspiring

minds in the world in athletics in business and kind of the celebrity world.

So I have a new show called the school of greatness, where I interview these.

Inspiring minds elite athletes and celebrities on how to

become great at what they do.

So I'm gonna be introducing these great people to my audience through this podcast

and something I'm really excited about.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.

It's it's a great premise for a show.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Excellent.

Listeners, keep an eye out for that particular podcast, but Lewis, where

can our listeners connect with you?

Best place to come find all my information is at

my website, lewis howes.com.

That's

fantastic.

Louis, thanks very much for coming on the call today.

Thank you very much, Jake.