Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl Webinar Tips That Turn Cold Facebook Leads Into Profitable Customers Fast - With Amanda Goldman-Petri
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  84
  • Amanda Goldman-Petri

Summary:

Webinar expert Amanda Goldman-Petri walks us step-by-step through the webinar marketing process she uses to convert cold Facebook leads into profitable customers on autopilot. If you are looking for a consistent, reliable way to sell higher ticket products faster then you MUST listen to this interview.

Amanda’s software recommendations:

Transcription Episode 84: How To Use Automated Webinars To Convert Cold Facebook Traffic Into Profitable Customers In 60 Minutes.

Welcome to the Project Ignite Podcast, a podcast just designed to skip all the hype, skip all the BS, bring you real actionable tips and strategies from real digital entrepreneurs to help you grow your business and income on the Internet.This is your host, Derek Gehl.

Today, we’re going to be talking about webinars and webinar tips and how to start leveraging, frankly, one of my favorite tools for growing your digital business.

Our guest today/webinar expert is the founder of marketlikeanerd.com – I love that brand – and is an internationally renowned work smarter, not harder, which I also love, online marketing coach for entrepreneurs who want to maximize profits and minimize amount of time they put in which I know that’s a lot of our listeners.

She’s overcome some hurdles in her life including coming from poverty, child abuse, rape, teen pregnancy and near death. Despite that, she was able to persevere, and she created her first $10,000 a month within four months online at the age of 22 and then generated over 150K in her next business within four months at the age of 23.

Her first Market Like A Nerd launch, she generated $120,000 in 90 days. I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Her clients’ numbers speak for themselves as well. She’s helped clients turn $700 into $100K using Facebook ads, $300 into $16K using webinars. She sold out coaching programs in 90 days. I think she’s got a lot of wisdom to share with us today. She’s been featured in huge media outlets, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, the list goes on.

Guys, without further ado, I’m really excited and honored to be able to welcome Amanda Goldman-Petri to the show today.

Amanda, thank you so much for being here to share your webinar tips.

Hey, thanks for having me.
Now, before we kick things off with tips for a great webinar, walk us through your journey. You started obviously as a young entrepreneur and you found success quite quickly. Walk us through your journey that’s brought you here today in this moment as the webinar tips expert on this podcast.
Yeah, absolutely. All right. First, thanks for having me. Thank you guys for listening. Like you said, my name is Amanda Goldman-Petri. My friends call me AGP though so you’re welcome to call me AGP.
I like that.

Like you said, I started out as an entrepreneur very, very young at the age of 21. I’ll take you back a little bit before that because it really impacted the way that I grew my business. Like you said, I had to overcome a lot as a child. I grew up in poverty in a blue light district of BloodyMore, Murderland AKA Baltimore, Maryland.Because I grew up in such a crazy household … I mean, I love my mom to death but terrible choice in men. I do love her but, man. Because of that, growing up with a drug addict for a father and an abuser for a stepfather, I buried my head in books.

I became a type A overachieving nerd who really believed that working hard and hustling was going to make me successful. I was successful by society’s standards. I got into a top 15 university in the entire world. I was valedictorian of every school I ever went to.

When I got to that university, Johns Hopkins, I was like, “Awesome. Now, I’m going to be successful and be able to create a different life for myself.” Well, it didn’t really work out that way.

When I was 18, well, 17, I walked out of the dentist office. I had just gotten my braces off, and I was about to go back home to have one last hurrah with some of my friends before we went off to college. While I was walking across the street, there was an 80-year-old man driving his minivan going 50 miles an hour and he hit me.

He collided with my leg. My head shattered his windshield and then he finally realized he hit me. He slammed on his breaks but my body flew into the intersection. My head was about a foot away from being crushed by a passing 18-wheeler.

That was the moment that changed it all. That was when I realized, crap, I’m mortal. I’m going to die eventually. I lived this time. If I had died, I would have spent so much of my short life not really being happy. I would have been doing everything that was expected of me by society. I didn’t have a childhood. I didn’t really enjoy myself.

That’s when I started going on this journey to figure out what’s going to make me happy, what’s going to make my life meaningful.

Long story short because I had to … It was a lot of trial and error. I found marketing. When I found marketing, it was like … You know when you hear those stories about when you meet your lover, and your eyes meet, and it was like love at first sight? That’s what marketing was like for me.

How to present a webinar

I fell in love. I quit grad school. I quit all of my jobs. I went out at the age of 21, started my first business. It was rough. First one, not so hot. The second one is when I got it. Again, like you said, four months, I had hit my first $10,000 a month at the age of 22 and I’ve learned lots of webinar tips and tricks and had bigger and bigger successes and faster and faster time frames since then.

Now, I’m really focusing on the next stage of my journey, scaling the business to multi-millions.

That’s awesome. It’s funny. I mean, more and more entrepreneurs, I guess … Especially in the digital realm where we are, I hear that more and more often. It’s not primarily about the money. It’s about the fulfillment, about doing what you want, and it’s about the happiness and freedom that you get out of that.Just recently I interviewed a gentleman. He’s built multiple businesses, seven, eight-figure businesses. Again, he’s at that point as well where he’s saying, “No. You know what? It’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom, and the happiness, and the fulfillment that the entrepreneurship can give you.”

I think you’d agree that it’s not all roses. There’s some challenges along the way. I think it’s a really inspiring story. One of the things that fascinates me, you didn’t end going … Did you go to university, grad?

I did. I graduated from Johns Hopkins in four years with seven different honors and three different majors because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and so I just ended up taking everything.
Well, there you go. You’re well-rounded.
Yeah, exactly.
That’s great. Now, let’s dive into webinar tips. First of all, why webinars? What drew you to learn how to present a webinar? Let’s start there.

Originally, I just learned how to present a webinar because that’s what everyone else was doing. Now, knowing what I know now, it’s for a much more strategic reason. What I discovered throughout … This is my fourth business. Through all of that trial and error and developing webinar tips, what I’ve discovered is that people really over complicate marketing. They make it so complicated.You hear all these different things about list building, and giveaways, and social media marketing, and Facebook advertising, and telesummits. There’s all these different things that people tell you have to do to market. What I wanted to do was I wanted to simplify it and say, “There’s got to be a way that all these things work together.”

I discovered there’s a system. There’s a three-step system that you use to make money online. Everything you see out there that people are teaching you falls into one of these three steps of the system. The system is attract, nurture, convert.

The first step is you have to attract leads into your business, get people to become aware of who you are. Typically this means they’re on your mailing list or they’re in your Facebook group. They’re on some type of list where you can market to them later. You’ve attracted the lead into your business. They know who you are.

The next step is you have to nurture the relationship because it’s not enough for them to know who you are; they have to actually like who you are and trust you enough to buy from you. You nurture the relationship. Once they’re at that stage where they’re not just members of your community, but they’re evangelist for your brand, that’s when you put an offer in front of them and that’s when stage three comes, which is convert. You convert them from an evangelist into a paying client.

Everything that you see out there falls into one of these three categories. When people talk about list building, that’s the attraction system. When they talk about telesummits, that’s the attraction system. When we talk about Facebook groups and social media, that’s your nurture system. When they talk about sales, that’s your conversion system. It all falls into one of these three.

The reason I love webinars and have learned so many tips for webinars is because it actually does all three of these at once. It makes the sales process incredibly fast, plus they’re automatable. When I talk about scaling a business, I always say, “You need three things. You need leverage, automation, delegation.”

On a webinar, with the right webinar tips, you can sell a leveraged offer. You can automate the entire process, and you can delegate the process of sending ads to the webinar. It’s incredibly scalable. Webinars, you build your list. That’s your attraction system by sending Facebook ads to the webinar. That’s how you mail the first step, the attraction system.

While they’re on the webinar, you’re giving them so much value. You nurture the relationship. Then, at the end of the webinar, you pitch something and they buy. That’s the conversion. It’s a really fast way to go through the process. It’s why it’s totally worth learning tips for webinars.

Why do you think it’s faster than other methods, say, your online funnel, stuff like that? Why are webinars faster?

Well, once they’re automated. Let’s take a step back. Once they’re automated, they are faster. The live versions do take a while because the live versions, you have to promote it. Then you have to do the webinar live and everything. Once it’s automated, typically, the way that I’m running them are the webinars are running every hour on the hour.If someone, like for example, opted in to one of my webinars on demand right now … It’s 2:18 where I’m at, and the next webinar would start at three. The webinar would finish at four. Within less than two hours, they would have already bought. That’s a really, really quick time frame from someone to go from not knowing me to buying from me.

Wow. Now, let’s dig into this because I think a lot of the listeners are going, “What? You have a webinar every hour. How does that happen?” That doesn’t sound like work smart, right? It sounds like you’re working a lot. How are you doing a webinar every hour?

It is automated, which is one of the best webinar tips. I have a tool, a software, that’s doing it for me. At one point or another, I did do the webinar live. I do tell people you should do your webinar live first to make sure it’s ready to be automated, and I can walk you through that process a little bit later.You do it live first. Thence once it’s automated, I usually use something like Stealth Seminar. It’s a piece of software where it basically sets it up so that every hour the video file of you presenting the webinar actually reruns every single solitary hour without you.

Speaking of webinar tips, big fan of Stealth Seminar. I’ve had Geoff on the show in fact. He was one of my first interviews well over a year ago. Stealth is awesome.
They’re amazing.

The reason why is because it just does everything for you which is incredible. You don’t have to mess with the technology. Now, I’m curious to dig into this process that you’ve created because I love short, I love fast and I love getting a good result, that’s my favourite webinar tips. I know all of the listeners do as well.Let’s start at the beginning with webinar tips. Right now, you’re running Facebook ads. Is that your primary way to fill webinars at this point?

The automated ones, yes. When I’m doing them live, I do it a little bit differently. Generally, this is what I tell people. If you want to fill a webinar, you literally just pop the registration up and then you send traffic to it.There are three ways to send traffic. There’s free traffic, which is usually your email list, or if you have a Facebook group, it’s your Facebook group. It’s usually traffic you own. There’s paid traffic, which is things like Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising, LinkedIn advertising. Then there’s affiliate traffic where you get someone else to promote it for you.

When I’m running it live, I try to do a mixture of free, paid and affiliate traffic. When it’s automated, I usually just let the Facebook ads do the work.

At the end of the day, if you want true automation, and scale, and reliable, consistent income, unlocking that code for the formula for buying traffic and converting that paid traffic, that’s the best way to do it for, I think, over time. If you’re relying purely on free traffic, it’s not consistent and sustainable nor is …
It’s slow.
It’s slow. Same with affiliates as well. You can only go to an affiliate so many times before they’re going to say, “Well, no. I burnt out my list on this.” I think that’s one of the secrets from all entrepreneurs I know and all of the success I’ve had with this is you’ve got to find a way to buy consistent traffic and conversion.

I think that the big problem there, and not just with Facebook ads either or paid advertising, but also with webinars and with automated marketing funnels is people get impatient and they give up too soon. It does take set up work and it takes time, and testing, and tweaking to get it right.Once it is right, it works like crazy and you don’t have to put in any effort to make the sales anymore. For example, my Facebook ads, it took like five … My automated webinar funnel, it took like five iterations for me to get it just right, but it’s right now. We have cold audiences, people who have never met us before, going to our landing pages. 71% of them are opting in to our webinars.

Wow, that’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Right now, instead of webinar tips let’s focus on the Facebook ads. I want to walk through the process of what you’re doing here. You’re buying the ads on Facebook using their incredible targeting options.When you’re running the ads, give us an idea of what you’re putting out to these people. What does the ad look like? What are you having success with?

I love this. I have a very, how do you say, interesting brand? I’ve actually noticed that the crazier my images are, the better the click-through rate is. My branding is actually perfect for Facebook ads because it really, really pops.I wear really weird clothes in my ads, and I have really bold color schemes for the images so crazy images of me in weird clothing with some sort of quick text about what the webinar is. I have a long name for the webinar, but then I also have a really short name for the webinar.

One of them, for example, is Discover How I Repeatedly Welcome 50 New Ideal Clients Every 90 Days And The 3 Leverage Launch Strategies You Can Use To Do It Too. It’s really, really long but that can’t all fit on the ad. The text on the ad image is 50 Clients in 90 Days, Yes. Something like that. That’s the image.

Then the copy, I actually usually write at least the positioning of the copy myself or the idea of it and then I give it to my ads manager to go and finish. Normally, what I’m doing is I’m breaking down each webinar or offer into a couple different angles or positions.

For example, we just launched a new funnel going to a video program. With the video program, there’s a few benefits of it. You’re going to increase your confidence, not just on camera, but in your business in general. You’re going to be able to increase your impact. You’re going to be able to really stake your claim as an authority and you’re going to be able to increase your income.

Those are four different benefits of this webinar and this offer. I actually created an ad for each messaging. Then I put it out there to see which message is going to resonate best. That way, when I’m tweaking my funnel later on, I can make sure to really laser in on the message that converts the best.

I just want to stop because what you just said there was so powerful, and that is you test a whole bunch of different angles effectively and positioning to see which ones are getting the best I would assume, interaction click-through. Then once you’ve determined, then you’re adjusting your landing page to be more congruent with the ad that is performing the best.Everybody listening, that is a brilliant process. I don’t think enough people do that. When you find a winning ad, make sure your landing page is as congruent as it can be to that message. That is awesome. I love how much you’re testing it.

I just want to go back to one other point that you brought up here, and that is it takes time to make this work. Everybody listening, let that sink in. I’ve seen too many people put up a ad, drive to a page and go, “It didn’t work. That sucks. I give up.”

The first time I did this, I had to spend $1,500 before I ever made a cent back.
Well, that’s it. Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. We’re talking beforehand. I’ve come out of the Dan Kennedy circle as well. I’ve done direct mail like snail mail back in the day. It takes forever to get results. You want to talk about lose-
That’s hard. That’s hard to split test, too.

Totally. You want to talk about lose a lot of money. When you say today that I lost $1,500, anybody that’s been in the advertising world, the direct response world and it’s done offline and stuff, I was like, “Really? That’s it? Then you’re profitable?”That’s incredible, right? I think new entrepreneurs getting started, they really have to shift their expectation of how they’re going to get result. If you get a result right away, high five. That’s the exception, not the rule. Sorry I interrupted, Amanda. It’s such an important point to bring home, so I just want to really reiterate that.

Back to Facebook. Now, let’s shift to webinar tips for landing page for webinars. You create these ads. You got the crazy clothing. Just a side note, another thing to point out there is very compelling, clear benefits that you’re putting into your ads. 50 clients, 50 days, yes, right? Your images are loud, bold and standout, right? They’re a little wacky.

Guys listening, when you’re creating your Facebook ads, that’s what works. If you’re just-

Have fun with them.
Totally. If you’re totally vanilla, it’s not going to fly. Well, it may. I shouldn’t say that’s not going to fly. It just may not be as effective as it could because people are overlooking it. You get the ad. Then the landing page. Give us some webinar tips – what does a webinar landing page look like?

If you’re doing it live, typically what I’m doing is I actually have two landing pages. One for a warm audience who already knows me and then one for a cold audience who doesn’t know me yet.I know it sounds a little complicated but honestly once you’ve set up those two templates for every single solitary webinar, you never have to set it up again. You literally just duplicate the two pages and then change the text. It might sound like a lot of work but it’s really not.

You create these two templates: one for warm, one for cold. Then for every webinar you do there after, you just duplicate it. Change the copy.

The reason why I do this is I’ve actually tested this a whole lot, and I’ve noticed if I send my warm traffic to a page that had a ton of text and persuasive copy, it actually only converted at standard. Industry standard is 20% of the people who go to the page will opt in.

For a warm audience, I think that’s really low. I aim a lot higher. I want 40, 50, 60% of people who know me opting into my stuff. I actually took away a lot of the copy. I noticed if my page just had a picture of me, the headline and a countdown timer, if they knew me, that’s all they needed. They are just going to opt in from there. It’s 40 to 70% of people are opting in to those warm pages.

If I sent cold traffic, people who didn’t know me to that type of page, it bombed because it wasn’t enough information. They didn’t know me. My face doesn’t matter to them. I created a different page with more persuasive copy.

I have my headshot on there to start that facial recognition from there, but it’s not at all the focus of it for people who don’t know me. The focus of the page is persuasive copy so it’s usually the headline, a button, three bullet points of benefits for what they’re going to get out of the webinar, a warning about what my capacity is for the software for the webinar and then another button. The cold one has a little bit more copy.

I use both of those when it’s the live webinar because I’m usually promoting with my email list and affiliate traffic with the live webinars. Once it’s automated, I’m usually just using the cold landing page because I’m just sending cold traffic from Facebook ads.

Right. Guys, just to reiterate what Amanda said there, which is so important, treat your cold leads different than your warm leads. Again, I see it all the time, right? People post Facebook … They’ve create a Facebook ad. They’ll target all the people that like them, that follow them but then target to people that have no relationship with them all driving to the same page.It doesn’t work that way. You’re skewing your results. I want everybody to take … That was a powerful nugget of wisdom there that you guys need to be taking into consideration. When you’re buying advertising, treat your cold leads different, which is awesome.

That was a really powerful tip there that you gave. I love conversion strategies like that. It’s why I love these interviews. I went, “That’s brilliant.” The countdown timer, the headline, the picture of you for warm leads converts more than the sales stuff. Guys, everybody listening, that caused Amanda a lot of money to discover. You just got that for free. Amanda, thank you. That’s amazing.

Now, let’s move down the process and delve into more webinar tips. Somebody comes. They’ve now signed up for your webinar. Let’s say, you have two. You have the live and then you have your automated. Now, let’s talk automated. It happens every hour, correct?

Yeah.
I know Geoff pioneered this with Stealth Seminar. Every hour when somebody comes to the website, they see that there’s a webinar starting within the next hour, correct?
Yeah.
Now, Geoff said to me the attendance rate when you do that, I forget exactly what it was, but it was something ludicrous compared to the 40 or 50% or less people get on live webinars. What are you seeing there from turn up rates?
Just so that you can see how crazy it is. When the webinar is live … Actually, honestly, if you don’t really have a list, your show up rate is usually only 18%. The average is around 30% for a live webinar. When you automate it, it’s usually at minimum 50%, but I’m usually seeing over 70%.
Over 70%. For cold traffic, somebody just went, they entered their name and then showed up for a webinar. That’s enormous. Right when they sign up, let’s discuss some webinar tips for this part of the process, what kind of communication … It’s only happening an hour so you’re not going to put them in a responder sequence, I assume.

Well, I do. I do. I do because it depends upon how early they … If they sign up 45 minutes beforehand, I want to remind them when it’s about five minutes before it’s about to happen. If they sign like three minutes beforehand, they’re not going to get anything.I have one auto-responder that goes out immediately no matter what time they sign up. That is just like the generic auto-responder that says, “Here’s what it’s about. Here’s why you should show up. Here’s the link to show up.”

Then for people who show up who opt in anytime before five minutes before the webinar starts, if it starts at three and they opt in at 2:40, wait, 2:54, then they’re going to get one more at the five minute mark. It’s just a really quick one because I don’t want them reading. I want them heading over. It’s a really, really quick one just with the dial-in information or the link that they can join and it sends them to the webinar.

Right. Now, some webinar tips on your live webinars, I assume you don’t do one of those every hour. You’d have no life. When you’re doing a live webinar, how far out in advance do you start advertising it and driving signups?

If you have an email list, I actually … Actually, before I say this, a quick little nugget. The shorter your promotional period, the higher the show up rate. If you promote 24 hours in advance, you’ll probably have a higher show up rate than if you promote it two weeks in advance because people will have less time to forget.Usually, for my mailing list, because that’s not really something I have to test or have to gather over time, usually for my mailing list, I’m sending an email out 24 to 72 hours in advance and that’s it. I don’t promote any further out than that, 24 to 72 hours max.

Got you.
Then for Facebook ads, if I’m using Facebook ads for the live webinar, that’s usually going to be like a seven to 10-day time frame. That way I have time to test things and get the traffic working.
Got it. Got it. Now, let’s shift to the webinar itself and discuss webinar tips. Again, we’ve got automated. We’ve got live. I’m going to dig into the automated a little bit more here. First question that everybody asks when I talk about webinars, or evergreen, or automated webinars is they’re like, “Well, do people think it’s live?”

Well, for the automated ones … I really build my business based on integrity. I rant about integrity and business ethics all of the freaking time. I actually purposely never call it a live webinar. If it’s automated, I’ll call it webinar on demand.If someone asks me, “Do I have a webinar?” I’ll say, “Yeah, I have a webinar on demand right here.” In the Facebook ads, I don’t say it’s live. Actually on the landing page, I don’t say it’s live either. I’ll either say it’s a webinar on demand or I’ll just call it a webinar, but I never say it’s live because I don’t want to lie.

Honestly, I was probing there because I was curious. I’m totally in line with you. Here’s the reality. People are going to be smarter and smarter. Here’s one of the questions. When I do webinars now, inevitably somebody always ask when we’re just getting started, “Is this live? Are you real?” Right? People have been to these webinars, they’re like, “Hey, welcome to our live webinar.” Some bot answering questions. It’s not real.

Well, you know what? I did this when I first started automating so I’ve learned this over time. When I first started automating webinars, I got that. I got people putting in the chat box saying, “Is this live? This isn’t live. This is such a lie.”It really hurt me because I didn’t want to be deceiving people. That wasn’t my intention. What I realised is it was the way that I was presenting on the webinar that made them feel gypped.

If you just placed a completely replayed version of the live one, you’re going to be answering questions to people who aren’t actually asking questions. In the live version, you’re asking questions or you’re answering questions. You’re going to be communicating back and forth with people. You’re going to be telling people to ask questions.

If you place just the replay of that in an automated way, people are going to feel deceived because they’re like, “People aren’t actually live asking these questions.” What I did is every time I do a webinar live and I see that it’s converted, I actually re-record it on my computer, and I take out anything that could be misconstrued as me potentially answering people’s questions, anything like that.

If I ask an engagement question, I’ll just say, “Put it in the chat box.” Then I’ll say, “Typically, when I ask this question, people are saying blank.” I’ll just summarize what my answer would be if people asked. When they’re watching my automated webinars, they’re actually not really asking questions which is good. I don’t want people asking questions on an automated webinar and me not answering.

Of course. Of course. Guys, everybody listening, I think the positioning that Amanda’s using there is brilliant. I love the word “on demand.” You’re not saying to people this is live. You’re not portraying it to be live because frankly people are smart. If they feel that their first encounter with you was less than direct, you’re going to lose them. I think that on demand is a brilliant way to position that and works really well. We’re getting some great webinar tips here.Let’s dig a little bit into webinar tips for webinar content. When you take somebody off of Facebook, particularly a cold lead, they don’t know you. They’ve signed up for this webinar. It’s within an hour. They probably have an immediate problem that they’re trying to solve. They’ve got some reason that they’re there.

Give us some webinar tips on what this webinar structure looks like, length, how you’re building credibility, content versus selling.

I actually do things very different and weird in comparison to the way that most people do them. You’ll probably learn a lot here. 60 minutes, that’s not weird. That’s pretty normal. It’s a 60-minute webinar.When people do live webinars, they might wait for people to hop on if they’re late and they might take just such a long time explaining what they’re going to be talking about and they welcome people.

I don’t do that on my webinars. I just say, “All right. I really want to honor your time. I said we’re going to start at three, we’re going to start right at three. Let’s dive in.” On each slide, maybe for not even a minute, I have about a 120 to 180 slides for every single webinar and it’s only 60 minutes, so I’m going through them very, very quickly which keeps the visual interest.

Then a lot of people also go on and on and on about who they are and their own story. I only have three slides about me. I weave them into the story so that it’s almost like it’s a part of the content. It’s a teaching point. This that you’re about to learn is what allowed for me to boom, boom, boom. Then I give three points about successes I’ve had in my business or my life as a result of this.

It’s more like it’s part of a story. I’m not saying, “Who am I and why you should listen to me.” That’s boring.
Then the other thing that I do that I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else do this. I’m not sure. I get people to give me a promise in the beginning that keeps them until the end.

A lot of webinar gurus will talk about webinar tips for having a stick strategy, something that gets them to stick until the end. You will say, “Hey, if you stick with me until the end, I’ll give you this gift.”

One of the things I realize is if I do that, it detracts from the pitch at the end because people are like, “I got this free thing. I don’t need the paid thing.” I tried the normal guru stick strategy and it didn’t really work.

What I do now is I get people to make a promise, and they have to fulfill the promise at the end of the webinar. I actually say, “Can you pinky promise me this? Go ahead and say yes or no in the chat box.” They’ll say yes. They just made me a promise. They’re not going to break their promise. They’re going to stick around to the end now.

A great example of this would be in my 50 Clients in 90 Days webinar. I say, “After I walk you through these three launch strategies, I need you to pinky promise me that you’re going to choose one strategy to focus on for the next 90 days in an effort to get 50 clients. You don’t need to choose the strategy now. You haven’t even learned them yet. After you learn the three strategies, promise me you’re going to choose one and focus on it for 90 days. Go ahead and say yes or no in the chat box. The faster that you answer, the faster we can move on.”

Brilliant. That’s awesome webinar tips. You’re actually getting commitment virtually. There’s power in that, right? When people promise something whether it’s virtual or not … It’s a marketing principle. There’s studies on this, right?
Yeah.
It’s amazing what people will do versus … I’m trying to remember if it was in the book Influence potentially. They did a test where they had people volunteered to help out versus people that were paid to help out at something. I don’t remember what it was.
Eating cockroaches, was that the thing? If they’ve got paid to eat the cockroaches, they reported that they had very, very negative feedback. If they volunteered to do it, they had very …
No, I haven’t heard that one. Glad I wasn’t part of the test either. No, it was actually in a volunteer work environment. Hey, can you be there to help me? We’re moving. When people actually volunteer something like that versus paying them, they work a lot harder. I love how you’ve done that there. I think you’re applying that same psychology.
Actually, I talked about how in every stage of my webinar I’m getting micro commitments. The more times you can train them to say yes to you, the more likely they’d say yes to your paid offer.
Absolutely. I do a lot of speaking. If I’m positioning a product, it’s getting commitment. You watch the best guys that can sell from stage at events and Harv Eker, people like … Harv Eker, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched any of Harv Eker’s stuff but that’s what … He’s always asking the audience yes or yes, yes or yes, right? It drives me crazy. He’s getting that commitment over and over. That’s powerful webinar tips. All right. Keep going.

All right. Then the other big thing about my webinar, after I have introduced the topic, introduced my story and gotten the promises, then I get into the content. What a lot of people do on their webinars is they give tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of content because people think content is value. I know that’s not true. Transformation is value.

One of the webinar tips I’ve learned is I design my webinars to provide a transformation. What I found provides a transformation on a webinar is really honestly just getting people to make a decision. You get people to make one decision on their webinar and that’s incredibly transformational because most webinars just give info.

What I do is I actually only give one little how. That’s it. I talk about what the step is, why it’s really important, what the pros and cons are like the bad stuff, the good stuff. I give one tiny, little how like how you can implement this step and that’s really it.

Then at the end, I get people to make a decision, which is usually what the promise is. Remember when I gave the example you have to choose one to focus on for 90 days? That’s me getting them to make a decision by the end of the webinar. I’m giving them only the information that they need to be able to make that decision.

Again, it’s such another powerful lesson with there webinar tips there because too many people get on, and they over deliver and just bombard people with so much information that they sabotage themselves even when they do make an offer.
Yeah. Well, they think they’re over delivering. They’re actually under delivering by doing that because if you want to give value to people, you have to recognize that information is not value. When you’re overwhelming people, they can’t take action and action is where the transformation happens.
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s now shift to webinar tips on the action, right? How are you driving people to action and converting them from just somebody that just saw you on Facebook an hour ago to now a paying customer?

It has to do with the pitch and the follow-ups. Once I’ve gotten them to make that decision, if the decision is not in alignment with my offer, they can go. They can leave the webinar.If the decision is in alignment with my offer … For example, if the decision is, yes, I want to use Facebook ads to grow my business and make money from it this year, awesome. I’ve got an offer for that.

If the decision is I want to use launch strategy number one to grow my business, awesome. I’ve got an offer for that. If the decision is in alignment with my offer, they keep listening to the pitch.

I essentially walk people through what the features are for … Well, actually first I do the benefit. First I say, “Here’s the offer and here’s the desired outcome for it.” I always have an explicitly stated, clear desired outcome for all of my offers. Here’s what we’re working towards in this offer.

Then I’ll say, “That’s what’s really important but I know that some people like to know what you’re going to get, so here are the vessels by which I’m going to bestow that outcome onto you.”

Then when I list out all of the stuff that they get, the calls, the Facebook group, the modules and all of that – I’ll list all of that out – then I’ll say, “Here’s what the value of it is.” I always do this very differently.

To most people, I say, “The value of this is based on the real results me and my clients have achieved from this, so I legit had clients make this amount of money using this. That’s what the value is because I’ve tested and proven that’s what this creates. Here’s what the usual investment is and that’s what I sold it for in the past. Here’s what the investment is today.” That’s usually a webinar special.

Then I’ll go through objections. One of the objections is usually money. This is another thing I do that’s very, very different. I’d actually never seen anyone else do this before. I’ll say, “If money is a concern, here’s another option for you.” I’ll give a payment plan option. Here’s what I do differently. My payment plans have no financing fees.

You know how people will tack on an extra amount and you end up paying extra because you’re choosing a payment plan?

Sure.
I say, “There’s no financing fee with this payment plan and here’s why. If you are not able to afford the pay in full right now, it is a responsible decision on your part as an entrepreneur, as a business owner to choose this payment plan because you’re preserving your cash flow. Who am I as a coach to punish you for making the responsible decision as a business owner? For me, I actually love preserving cash flow. Even if I can afford something as a pay in full, I choose the payment plan all the time anyway. How can I expect you to do any differently? I’m not going to punish you. If you can’t afford the pay in full, just go with the payment plan. Here’s what it is.”
What is your split between people who take payment plan versus full pay?
Almost everyone chooses the payment plan.
Obviously. You just sold me on the payment plan as well. I love how you position that because you just built your credibility. You create a connection. You gave me an option that made the price feel even lower to me. My god, why wouldn’t I do this, right?
You know what else is cool, too? A lot of people get worried that they’re going to … If they do payment plans, it’s risky for them because people won’t finish paying. I have a less than 1% rate of people not finishing their payments or asking for refunds. I don’t even remember the last time someone has asked for a refund.
Wow, that’s fantastic. That’s awesome. Now, you’ve gone through webinar tips on the positioning, the offer. When you say today’s webinar discount, are you positioning any urgency in there, time limits, anything like that? What are your webinar tips for this?

Yes. I say there’s a 48-hour time limit. One of my webinar tips is the way that I do this is when they click over to the sales page, there’s a countdown timer that’s set up to be evergreen through a piece of software.There’s a lot of different ways to do it. I personally use Timerlay so you go to timerlay.com. I think there’s a yearly fee for it but pretty much every funnel I use uses Timerlay. It’s set up to register people’s IP address.

When you go to the page, I know you just visited the page at this time. It’s going to start counting down. If you pass 48 hours, the page redirects somewhere else. I usually redirect them either to a sales page with what I said the usual investment is or to a page that says, “Sorry. You’re out of time. Click over here to join my Facebook group,” or to a downsell. I’ll say, “I’m sorry. You’re out of time. You missed this offer but here’s a different one so you don’t leave empty-handed.”

Right, right. Now, here’s the million dollar question, which everybody I know is wondering. What does conversion look like with all these webinar tips? What price points are you dealing with off of cold leads?

You know what? It’s interesting. I used to think that the lower price points would work better because they’re lower. Well, it was like a few months ago, I relaunched one of my funnels everything being exactly the same except I changed the price point from $99 to $297. Actually, the conversion went up, which I thought was kind of interesting. We have funnels at a lot of different price ranges and they’re all pretty successful.

Actually, my business is very atypical in that I completely rebel against the idea that you can only teach one type of entrepreneur. I know that there is wealth pyramid. There’s a ladder of stages of business where some people are in debt. Some people are not in debt but they’re broke. Some people are looking to scale, et cetera.

I actually have an offer for every single stage of business. I have price points as low as a $197. Even that one makes profit on the front end. You would think I would break-even but no, no, I make profit on that one.

I’ve got a bunch done at $297. I found that that’s a pretty good price point for some entry-level buyers. Then you upsell them from there into higher ticket offers. Then $497, $997.

If I want to get over that … Technically, you can sell anything up to $2-3,000 on a webinar. Personally, if I’m going to sell over $997 – I don’t know why that was so hard for me to get out – I am just sending people into a phone call. Then they’re getting on the phone and then I’m selling to them from there.

That makes sense. One of the things I want to point out here to the listeners is one of the powers of webinars is very similar to why I’ve done so many live events as well. It’s the fastest way to take somebody from cold, not knowing you, to much more significant investment price point into a higher level package that if you’re not doing a webinar or a live type of event, it gets much more difficult. This is why these webinar tips are so important.If you look at a lot of the formulas, if you look at Ryan Deiss’s The Machine, stuff like that, they’re talking about tripwire offers or low-priced products to get them to make the buying decision and then up-selling them from there, which my experience has been with webinars, you can bypass that and just go straight to what they really need anyway and move them up much quicker.

I assume that’s exactly what you’re experiencing.

I love sales funnels. I’ve tried a bunch like a ton of different types of sales funnels. I have to rein my creativity and my serial “entrepreneur-ness” down to just focus on webinars and webinar tips because they really are the most successful ones that I’ve seen.

Everybody I’ve worked with, people, students of mine, different programs, the ones that are selling service, information products, higher ticket items always have the most success with webinars right now. Hands down. That’s just the way it is. Huge, huge value there.Now, we’re almost out of time. You have completely over delivered with webinar tips, Amanda. That was awesome. There were so many knowledge bombs in there that I just hope the listeners truly appreciate that because they don’t understand how, I guess, the time, and effort, and money that it takes to discover the stuff that you just shared.

That was just a huge fast track for people that are either doing webinars or thinking about doing webinars and looking for webinar tips.

Now, before we wrap up, where can our listeners find out more about you? Where can they sign up for these webinars and connect with you?

Well, all of my webinars and lots of webinar tips are listed on marketlikeanerd.com along with all of my blogs and my podcast.However, like I said, I have a different resource for each stage of business, and I’m really big on giving you the most appropriate resource and webinar tips for your stage of business. What you’re going to need if you’re a new business owner is going to be a lot different than what you’re going to need if you’re making $10, $20, $30,000 and you want to scale it from there.

If you go to marketlikeanerd.com/quiz, all you have to do is put in your name, your email address and then just tell me what stage of business you’re in. If you don’t know, it’s okay. I’ll give you descriptions on that page, and you just pick the one that sounds most appropriate for you.

After you press submit, I will actually email you what I believe is the most appropriate action step for you to take based on your stage of business and a webinar on demand that makes sense for you from there.

Awesome. That is fantastic. I would highly encourage everybody to get over there, and enter their email address, and start learning from you because I just learned a ton, and I’ve been doing webinars for a long time. I love that because you gave me some different ways to approach stuff and great webinar tips. When we get so focused on the conventional, well, here’s how everybody does it, right?
I love rebelling against convention.
Look, I’m all for models. Model what’s working, right? When there’s an established system, that’s great. I love it when someone like you who throws the system out and finds a better way to do it. Then I can copy you. That’s amazing.
You’re free to model me. That’s okay.
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Amanda, thank you so much for being on the show today to share webinar tips. I know our listeners appreciate it and I truly appreciate it as well.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me and thank you guys for listening.

Awesome. All right. Everyone, that was webinar expert Amanda Goldman-Petri.As always, any of the links that were mentioned in this interview will be included in the show notes along with our kick ass transcripts of this episode that you’ll find at projectignite.com/podcast.

If this is your first episode, you’re not subscribed to the podcast, go to iTunes. Click subscribe. If you like what you heard, leave me a review. Leave me a rating. Guys, I love that. That gives me the fuel to keep going and making this the best podcast possible. If you’re not an Apple user, you’ll find us on SoundCloud or now in the Google Play Store as well.

Now, it’s time to take all these webinar tips and tricks and strategies that you’ve learned here today and apply that ingredient that is essential to actually making this work. That ingredient is action.

Go forth. Take action. Apply what you’ve learned and stay tuned for more info-packed episodes of the Project Ignite Podcast.

This is your host, Derek Gehl, signing off.

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  1. That was an awesome podcast Derek. She really is an amazing woman, and provided such great info. Totally agree with you – the hits she described could takes years and big dollars to learn.

    Thank you.
    Lisa

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