Webinar Ninja
Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl The Webinar Ninja Reveals The Secret To Selling On Webinars Without Selling
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  72
  • Omar Zenhom

Summary:

Omar Zenhom, the founder of Webinar Ninja, reveals how he uses webinars to sell more by selling less while at the same time creating better and happier customers. This is a “must listen” for anyone who is considering using or already using webinars in your business.

To find out more about Webinar Ninja: webinarninja.co/course

Transcription Episode 72: The Webinar Ninja Reveals The Secret To Selling On Webinars Without Selling

Welcome to the Project Ignite podcast, episode 72, a podcast designed to skip all that hype, skip all the BS and just give you guys real actionable tips and strategies to help you guys grow your digital businesses.

This is your host, Derek Gehl.

Today, you’re going to be learning some ninja webinar strategies to help you grow your digital business.

Now, I’m a huge fan of webinars. In fact, they’re probably my number one favorite selling and conversion tool online today.

In this episode, to help us educate you on how to use webinars the right way, we have a guest that is a long-time digital entrepreneur. He’s a co-founder of the $100 MBA. He’s also the host of iTunes Best of 2014 podcasts, which is the $100 MBA Show, which has over 50,000 daily listeners.

More relevant even so today though, he’s also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja which is an all-inclusive easy-to-use webinar software platform built for digital entrepreneurs. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Omar Zenhom to the show.

Omar, thanks for being here.

It’s good to be here, Derek.

Fantastic. Now, before we get started discussing Webinar Ninja, can you just take a second to expand on your introduction more specifically, just share your journey as a digital entrepreneur. How did you get started online and give us the overview of that journey you took to get here today, to this moment as the feature webinar expert on the show today?

Well, my journey to get to Webinar Ninja is a little bit unorthodox which is usually the case. I started out as a teacher, that’s why I went to school in Iowa as an educator for over 13 years at the high school and university level. I have a master’s in Education.

That’s where I started my career as a young adult and while I was in teaching at the institutions I was working for, I was doing some hustling on the side. The internet had just started to pick up steam. It was early 2000. I was just interested in the idea of an alternative income making money online.

Actually, I was just experimenting to see if I can actually make money online. It just got exciting as I made my first dollar and I started building some small businesses on the side, things like an eBay store and started doing some arbitrage, things like that.

I started to feel my way around entrepreneurship and see what kind of entrepreneur I would want to be but after 13 years of working in education, I left the university I was working at.

My last five years is in management and I was a middle manager, head of department at the university I was working at and then I decided to make that leap that everybody talks about, that leap into entrepreneurship. I went full time and that was about four and a half years ago. That’s when I started the $100 MBA.

One of the things that I always tell people when they start a business is I’m one of the believers that passion is really overrated, I really do. The mantra of follow your passion, Peter Thiel always asked, “What’s one thing that you believe in that most people don’t?”

The answer to that question for me is I believe that passion is just completely overrated. It’s not really what you should be doing.

What I really believe is that you should be following what you can add value to. Where do you have a competitive advantage? Where do you have a strength that other people don’t have? For me, it was teaching.

Webinar software
I was going into the world of online entrepreneurship and I was looking around and realizing, a lot of these people don’t really know how to teach. This is what I went to school for. This is what I’ve been trained for. I’ve been teaching all my life. If I can manage a room of 30 teenagers, I definitely can sell a crowd.

For me, that’s where I came from when I decided to leverage teaching to ignite my business and things like that, so I started the $100 MBA which is exactly what it sounds like, $100 MBA education to help people start businesses, to understand the fundamentals of business.

I tried to teach it in English, in terms that people can understand. When I was building that community, I started doing webinars. That was about 2-1/2 years ago. I just wasn’t happy with the webinar software solutions out there.

I was just really frustrated with all the moving parts that you had to put together, so I decided to build a solution of my own which is Webinar Ninja which is our software.

That’s how Webinar ninja came around to it. For me, webinars come very, I don’t want to say it comes natural because I don’t really think anything comes natural. Even walking as a child, you have to learn how to walk. Nothing comes natural. But it’s something that I have experienced in. I’ve talked a lot, so webinars for me is a comfort zone.

Yeah. There were so many great little nuggets in everything you just said there. We haven’t even gotten to webinars yet which is awesome, but I wholeheartedly agree with your comment on following the passion.

I believe that we have a whole generation, because I have a kid that just finished high school and stuff, and we have a whole generation that’s being told to follow their passions.

Great, if you can follow your passion and find something that you love to, great. But realistically, if you want to create value that people are going to pay you for, it’s exactly what you said. What are you good at? Where can you add value?

That’s such a profound statement but there’s this whole generation thinking, “I just need to follow my passion. I’ll be successful in this.” What if nobody wants to pay you for your passion?

The thing is that I don’t mind that, like you can go ahead and follow your passion but you have to ask yourself the question, do you want to win?

Like do you want to actually do well?

Yes.

No one promised that by doing your passion or following your passion that you’re going to have a competitive advantage, that you’re going to be able to … I love basketball. I love it. I played basketball when I was young. I still play basketball in the league. I’m very competitive.

I want to be the best player in the league and all that stuff, but I’m not going to play in the NBA. It’s not going to make my livelihood. I just know that because that’s not my strength to that point.

I think a lot of people have to realize that for me, I wanted to win in business. I was just like, “How can I win in business? Like I got to use what I got, my strengths?” I can’t just constantly think about, “Oh, what like lights my fire?” That’s not going to make it at the end of the day.

Yeah, totally agree. I’m the same as you. I love mountain biking. I love cycling. The fact is I’m never going to make the Olympics in it. I’m passionate about it, but nobody’s going to pay me to do it.

It was interesting, I was reading an article, I think, that you wrote and related to $100 MBA. God, there’s a whole other conversation, we could go down that rabbit hole, but we’re not going to.

We’re going to re-track back to webinars and Webinar Ninja as we promised because webinars are such a powerful selling tool today. I don’t think enough businesses are using them. I think to an extent a lot of people don’t use them because they’re afraid of them.

They’re afraid of the technology. They’re afraid of getting on a webinar. They’re not really sure how a webinar fits into their business.

Let’s start with that obvious question right at the beginning. Why are webinars important? If somebody is listening to the show today, they have a digital business and they’re not using webinars. Why should they be?

Because of the internet, period. I’ll tell you why. Because of the internet, you have more of an informed customer. Whether your business is online or offline, people do research all the time on what they want, what is best for them.

I’m sure that you can remember when you shopped for your first car or you shopped for your last car. You compare to contrast and you watched videos on YouTube. You read articles on consumer report. That’s all content marketing. Every customer wants to make an informed decision.

One of the best way is to inform your customers and build a relationship is to teach them. It’s to teach them why your product, why your service is the right one for them or how to use it, how to utilize, how to win with your product or service.

I believe that there’s nothing that can compare to that other than teaching on a live webinar with Webinar Ninja because it’s interactive.

Say, for example, I write a blog post about a product I sell. Say, for example, I have a product that teaches you how to increase your free throw shooting. I’m a basketball coach, let’s say, for example. The article could be great, but I can’t really interact. I can have some comments but they’re not live. I can’t catch them when they’re there.

What I love about webinars is that if somebody has any questions, they have rebuttals, they have buying questions, they could really be interested in buying but they have one little gripe, one little question. They want to know if it integrates with this or if it works with that, or if I have a knee injury, will I still be able to use this program?

With the webinar on Webinar Ninja, you can go back and forth with your customers, with your audience and they can learn. More importantly, the whole reason why this whole thing works or why webinars are so impactful is that it quickly builds trust with your audience and we only buy from who we trust.
Webinar tips
You can look back at any purchase that you’ve made and you only bought from that manufacturer or from that company because you trust them.

I’m talking to you right now on a MacBook, but my MacBook is not my first Apple purchase. I first bought an iPod because I needed an MP3 player. MP3 players were coming out. I used the old one, the wheel thing. That’s the first iPod I had. I thought it was really cool. I thought it was interesting. I put a thousand songs in it. It was easy to use.

When my phone died, I was like, “Okay, let me look into this iPhone thing,” because I really like my iPod. I’ve built trust and rapport with Apple because they prove themselves to us.

We’re not Apple. We can’t have this interrelated products that we could do this and easily do that, but what we can do is that we can build trust and rapport through our value, through the knowledge that we can give to other people.

You don’t have to be the expert. You just have to know more than the people that are there. You just need to know a little bit more, show them a few steps and give them a little bit guidance.

It could just be as simple as giving a demo of what you offer.

This is why webinars are so powerful.

I’m going to go off in a bit tangent here because a lot of what you said there was building trust and rapport and answering questions and a level of interaction that exist on a webinar, versus watching a video.

Now, let’s talk about Evergreen webinars. Just for our audience listening, we have live webinars and then we have what are deemed Evergreen webinars which is a webinar that, for all intents of purposes, in many cases appears to be live. They show up, they watch it a time but it’s actually pre-recorded.

Based on what I’m hearing from you, you’re saying there need to be this live interaction. How do you feel that Evergreen fits in? And can you create that same thing with an Evergreen because the one downside of a webinar as a selling tool is the fact that if it’s live, it requires you to be there all the time?

Right. This is a really important question and I have a very strong stance on this. I have a lot of statistics. I just actually released a blog post that talks about the best time you can run a webinar in terms of the time of day.

The way I was able to write that post is because we have a lot of data from our users on Webinar Ninja as a platform. We know what works, what doesn’t, what converts.

Live webinars, no matter what you compare it to, it’s always going to do better than any other type of webinar whether it’s hybrid or Evergreen like you mentioned.

Just right off the bat, it’s just going to do better just because you are there live especially if you show your face on camera. It just adds another level of trust and rapport.

Number two, when it comes to Evergreen, I know there are other people that do it differently. They practice things differently but we have a very strong stance at Webinar Ninja and we built our software to back up that stance.

I do not believe in telling people that it’s live or making it appear that it’s live. There are some other softwares that have simulated chat like these fake chat messages that show up. At Webinar Ninja we don’t do that. We don’t have a chat when there’s Evergreen because it’s not live. We do have a hybrid version where you can have a recorded video and be chatting live.

We really believe in being transparent with your audience. That’s the whole point. You try to build trust here as soon as people … I’ve been on these webinars, these stealthy webinars where you go on and you realize, like the chats don’t match the conversation sometimes and none of my questions get answered. It’s very obvious.

I’ve seen some people that I looked up to in the industry and I’ve been on their webinar and I thought it was live and I saw it. I really lost trust in them and my opinion of them really plummeted. I wouldn’t want that for my users.

I always say that if our Webinar Ninja users win, if they win, they do well, they’re successful with webinars, they do more webinars, we win. I’m just being honest here. We’ll win when you do more webinars. More exposure for us on our Webinar Ninja platform.

That’s where I stand with Evergreen webinars on Webinar Ninja.

I really believe there’s a right way to do this and do this with my Evergreen webinars on Webinar Ninja where I tell them, “Hey, I have a live webinar going on this Tuesday at 1pm PST, but if you can’t make it, you have a couple of choices. You can either register and watch the replay or we have an Evergreen webinar. This is last week’s webinar that’s recorded. You could watch it. If you any questions, you can email it. There’s an offer there if you’d like. There’s a special offer for the Evergreen webinar that is different from the live.”

I usually give a little extra something in the live post of the Evergreen on Webinar Ninja and I just tell them straight up, “Hey, if you can’t make it this time, you have some options to watch a recording.”

In an online Evergreen webinar, I’ve put it in the text on the title this is a rebroadcasted webinar, because I think people, when they see that, they’re like, “Oh, okay. This is not live. Okay, this person is actually saying it’s not live but I’m still getting something out of it. It’s still content.”

The other is that if everything is supposedly live, then why they’re going to show up live? If the Evergreen has the same value as live, the whole point is that you want them to show up live so you can interact and you can answer questions and you can take polls and you can be able to do all that kind of stuff.

There has to be a differentiation and more importantly, you have to get in front of them and be honest with it.

I 100% agree with everything you just said there. I too have experienced that you get on a webinar and you realized it’s not live. I’ve given so many webinars. One of the first questions that I get more regularly these days is when I’m doing webinar…

Is this live?

Exactly. Is this really live? Are you really there? There’s almost the surprise when they find out, “Wow, you are actually live. There’s a real person behind that.” If it’s not, you’re going to immediately create a level of distrust particularly if you market it as a live webinar which … Totally behind you on that, totally agree.

For everybody listening, look, you’re going to check out certain webinar platforms and they’re going to try and suck you in with what sounds like appealing features to effectively automate the entire process. Sometimes, I believe you have to ask yourself, “Is automation the right answer?” In some cases, I don’t think it is.

Now, webinars, they can be used for so many different aspects of a business through the marketing cycles, through product support, training stuff like that. Let’s talk about some webinar tips. Where today should digital entrepreneurs be looking to use webinars in their businesses?

There’s a whole bunch of ways you can use it. It depends on where you are in your business. If you’re getting started with webinars, if you haven’t established business or you’re just getting started on webinar so you want to get your feet wet, one of the most common ways to use webinar is just purely for content marketing to give back to your audience, to be a thought leader, to be an authority in your market.

One of the easiest ways to do that is just to say, “Hey, I’m doing a webinar for 30 minutes Q&A. I’m going to answer all your questions.”

You can answer questions in your field of expertise or whatever and we can shoot the breeze and be able to ask some questions to get to know each other. Often, this is just enough to get your feet wet, to understand how webinars work, to get comfortable with your platform and be able to work through the feeling of being on live webinar.

That’s what I did and I know a lot of people do that too. You could do a few of those in the beginning. But there are some other ways you can use them.

One of the webinar tips I really think is really underutilized is a live content marketing strategy like a live show, like do a regular once a week show where you can say, “Hey, today, we’re going to be talking about Facebook ads. The next week, we’re going to be talking about Google AdWords, and next week …” Like if you’re on the social media marketing niche.

You can bring on guests. You can take questions from the crowd just like back in the day Oprah did or whatever. It’s online. It’s right there on camera and the best thing about it is that you can download the recording and you can put it on YouTube. You can put it on your own site. You can build a blog post out of it. You can make it into a podcast.

You could do whatever you like, but the point is that you have a live portion of this weekly show that people can tune in and participate in.

Imagine you can have that. I have a daily podcast and one of the things I yearned for is interaction. Podcasting is not an interactive platform. We don’t even know who our listeners are because iTune’s system is not that sophisticated yet.

I love you, iTunes. But we’re looking forward to the future here. The point is that you want to be able to make some sort of live content marketing strategy. Another way you can really grow is to partner up with other people, people that have audiences that you want to get in front of. But what I like to say is get started with the other way around.

Some of the biggest names that we have on our platform, like Michael Port, like Pat Flynn who use our Webinar Ninja are there because I actually reached out to them first and said, “Hey, I would love to run a webinar for your audience. I will invite my audience. All I want you to do is show up and I want to expose my audience to you and your work and your products. I don’t want any affiliate commission. I don’t want any money. I just want you to show up. I want you to enjoy the platform. I want you to enjoy just getting to know me and the way I work.”

How could they say no to that? It’s free money. It’s free exposure. They’re going to say yes. They’re going to make time for that.

If you go to them with your pitch looking for a handout saying, “Hey, I would love to work with you. How about we do an affiliate thing?” You’re already asking instead of giving. I would give first, build a relationship with them.

It’s better for them to owe you one rather than you to owe them one.

You should definitely build that relationship with them and then that’s exactly what happened. I invited Pat a few times. I got to know him when he ran his first webinar on Webinar Ninja. I coached him through it. I showed him how best to utilize it.

He loved it. He fell in love with it and then he, just out of a blue a month later, said, “Hey, man. I’m going to do a whole episode on SBI TV about Webinar Ninja. I want to do a demo. I just love it so much,” and that’s it, like he didn’t even want anything in return. I was like, “Oh, it’s awesome.”

People don’t understand the power of reciprocation sometimes. People will reciprocate but you have to give, especially the people that have a larger audience or they’re a bit busier than you or they’re maybe a little bit higher in their market.

You have to give a little bit before you receive but that partnership is definitely there. You can definitely do webinars for each other and be able to leverage each other’s audiences.

Absolutely. One of the things I didn’t hear you talk much about there as far as using webinar is actually using it as a conversion and selling tool.

It’s definitely there and I use it. It’s grown our business tremendously. But I like to put the learning first because I always believe that people … Regardless of what they say, people don’t like shopping around.

When you go to the mall and you’re looking for a pair of sneakers, if you find what you’re looking for or you know there’s a store that always has sneakers you like, you’re going to go to that store. You’re not going to go shopping around the whole mall or going to different malls.

You’re not 18 anymore. You just want what you want.

What I really believe in is that if I can give them value, they’re going to trust me.

Let’s say, for example, I’m the golf expert. I’m the person that’s going to help you improve your golf swing. You come to a couple of my webinars. You learn how to improve your game by a couple of strokes, you’re going to be like, “Wow, this person is the expert.”

When I want to learn, like want to buy a course or want to buy clubs from person, I’m not going to go shopping around. I’m just going to go back to Omar or whatever, like it’s a done deal.

It’s just going to happen automatically, but having said that, I’m not a fool. I know that sales is a technique. Sales is a skill that you have to learn.

It’s something that I was fortunate enough to learn from some really good mentors. But the point here is that I don’t want you to think sales first, teach second because that’s a huge turn-off especially in the internet marketing worlds that’s going on.

One of the things I really tried to do at Webinar Ninja is clean up the webinar world by having a little bit more education than sales.

Having said that, my advice to people that are worried about feeling a little bit icky about sales, one of the things I say is that one of the best things to do is just to show them, don’t sell them.

When it comes to the end of the webinar where you may want to offer somebody an offer, just have fun with that.

I’ll give you an example. Recently, I did a Webinar Ninja webinar with my friend, Jason Zook. We built a course together called EasyCourse which is a course that teaches you how to build an online course in 30 days.

At the start of the webinar, I recommend just be transparent.

We’re completely transparent and said, “Hey, guys. On today’s webinar, this on the menu. This is where we’re going to be teaching you, the three phases of creating a course. Here are some tips we’re going to show you how to price your course, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. At the end of this webinar, the last 15 minutes, we’re going to sell you something. We’re going to show you something that you can buy that’s going to help you build your course in 30 days. This is something that Jason and I built. It’s no secret. We’re entrepreneurs and if you want to stay, you can stay at your own peril. If you don’t, you can leave. No problem.”

They are like, “Okay, cool.” They know that from the beginning and then when it came to the time when the, “Okay, the workshop is over. Everybody’s questions were answered. All right, guys, we want to tell you about this new course called EasyCourse that we have a special offer for today for being on the webinar. We’re going to just pause for the next minute and not talk. If you want to leave, you can leave now because after that, we’re going to be selling hard, baby.”

We just made a joke out of it and it was so funny because we’re looking at our attendee numbers of the webinar and they went up. They were just like, people don’t leave.

People are interested because we gave them value in the first place and you’re transparent.

At the same time, they’re like, “Okay, they’re being upfront about it. I don’t have to buy it if I don’t want to buy.” We tell them, “Hey.”

Some people asked if you have payment options. We don’t have payment options with that course. We said, “Hey, listen, if you can’t afford this right now, don’t buy. We don’t want to put you in any kind of risks or any kind of financial stress. It will be available in six months. Maybe you need to wait. If you can afford it, go ahead.”

The point is that if you are just transparent and just being a decent human being, people will appreciate it. You don’t have to be something you’re not.
Webinar ninja
You could just be yourself and just show them the course, show them inside the member’s area and show them the product even if you’re selling physical products. A lot of people asked, “Hey, can I use webinars to sell physical products?” It’s like, “yeah, it’s called QVC.”

QVC is like the original webinar. Yeah, definitely. You could definitely just show them and not worry about selling them on everything.

Yeah, I love the way you think about that because there’s so many people that approached it of, “Oh, we have to sell them without them knowing that we’re selling them. We have to be sort of sneaky about it and subtle about it.”

I agree with you. You don’t. If you’re giving that much value, you’re creating a relationship that they’re going to be open to hearing about what it is. You’ve been on the webinars. I’ve been on those webinars where you get there and you realized you’ve gotten to the end of it and they’ve left you with very little content.

They filled an hour with fluff and to get anything meaningful, you got to get out your credit card.

It’s not really a smart move because for me, I really believe that if you can give them a win in that hour, in that 30 minutes where they can get that moment in their head like, “Wow, I just learned something. Wow, that was valuable. What else does this person have?”

If they don’t have that kind of sense of you’re proving to them that you can actually deliver, then it’s really hard for them to convince that, “Is this a risk? Should I buy this,” all that stuff.

You know what? At the end of the day, you just feel better about yourself. That’s why, I totally do.

Let’s shift gears now and dive a little bit into the actual content of webinars. When somebody’s just preparing for their first webinar, I think there’s so many questions that come to mind, aside from what do I say but the how long.

How do I call people to action? What really works? Should it’d just me or should there be a guest? There are so many different options out there.

Today, because you have such exposure to so many different webinars and you do a lot yourself as well, what are the key things that people need to focus on or make sure it’s in their webinar if they want it to be successful?

One of the first things you need to do is get very specific about what you want to deliver.

You want to make sure that they actually go home like, again, with a win.

They leave the webinar feeling, “Wow, I learned something.” The only way you can actually do that, because remember, you got like 30 minutes, 45 minutes of content. If you’re going to be talking about your business or your products or services, you have another 5 or 10 minutes and you want to answer some questions.

The point here is that you can’t cover all of golf in one webinar. You can maybe talk about how to putt a little bit better or you can talk about how to choose the right club in certain situations to get out of the rough. That’s a different situation. You’re getting very specific and you can actually deliver on something that’s very specific because you have enough time.

Just choose something very specific in your niche in your business in whatever you’re doing and break it down to five steps or five points and you can create a PowerPoint slide or keynote slide for each of those points.It could be four points. It doesn’t have to be five. It could be four or five points and you want to just base it, break it down into steps or pieces of advice or tips that cover that.

You want to start out again with an overview saying, “Hey.” Just like in school, remember when you’re a kid, the teacher just says, “Today, we’re going to be learning about this. These are the outcomes. This is what you’re going to learn by the end of the lesson.”

You want to do that.

You want to just say, “Hey, today, we’re going to be covering these points. By the end of this workshop, you’re going to be table to do 1, 2, 3, 4. You’re going to be able to improve.”

It’s very important to know what they’re going to get out of this. The first thing they’re thinking of when they get on the webinar is, “What’s in it for me? What am I getting? Is this a waste of my time?”

I love to jump right into it as soon as possible. I spend like two or three minutes greeting people, thanking them for being there. I try to keep it as interactive as possible.

Remember, the point of a webinar on Webinar Ninja is the interaction. You have your slides. You have your PowerPoint, but I recommend you get on camera at the start, show your face. Say thank you for being there.

You can even do your overview that way and then you can switch and share your screen and show your PowerPoint slides, your keynote slides. I’ll stop in the middle every 5 or 10 minutes and just check in with the audience and say, “Hey.”

Even if it’s just to say, why don’t you put like, “Yes,” in all caps in the chat if you are feeling what I’m putting down just to get something back from them.

There’s nothing wrong with asking people to elicit answers. For example, I say, “What is the third most important thing do you think when it comes to increasing your free throw shooting? What do you guys think it is? We already covered two, what do you think the third one is?”

Now, get them to talk in the chat. You don’t have to just give them the answer. You can just ask them that question and they’ll say, “Oh, visualization. No bending your knees, no follow through.” Now, you’d be like, “Oh, these are all great answers but the answer #3 is actually this.” Then you just go through that part of the lesson.

Keep it as interactive as possible. Make sure you have time for questions and answer. If you’re going to make an offer, you want to sure the details of the offer, the highlights of the offer or on a slide or on the page, we have an offer section in Webinar Ninja where you can actually display an offer.

A lot of people are like, “Oh, where’s the link? What’s the promo code? What’s the actual discount? Like how long is this good for?” You want to make sure all those questions are answered in text on the screen either on your page with Webinar Ninja or you can use the slide if you’re using a different platform where you have the actual details of the offer on text.

That’s in a nutshell. You want to break it down into points, lessons, keep it interactive. It doesn’t have to be super long and again, Q&A is a great way to fill in the gaps on Webinar Ninja.

Got it. Now, last section that I want to dig into now is the technology side because over the past few years, more and more webinars solutions like Webinar Ninja have appeared bringing a lot more features that I think we’re in many cases sorely lacking in the old platforms like the GoToWebinar or just the vanilla Google Hangouts.

I guess, my question is two parts.

First of all, when someone is trying to choose the right webinar platform, what are the things they should be looking for? The second part is tell us about Webinar Ninja and how does it stack up against some of these other big players that I know our listeners are going to ask me later.

Well, how does this stack up against EverWebinar or Stealth Seminars? Why? Tell us about Webinar Ninja.

Sure. To answer your first question, I believe choosing a webinar platform or what’s important in a webinar platform is like choosing a gym. You got to choose a gym that you’re actually going to go.

If your gym is a 20 minute drive, you’re not going to go to that gym. It’s just too inconvenient, it’s too far out there. If everybody in that gym is a bodybuilder, you might feel intimidated and be like, “Oh, it’s kind of hard to go there because I feel like a wimp.”

You may want to choose your webinar platform that you’re actually going to use, the one that actually is easy to use, one that you actually are going to create webinars with. Like Webinar Ninja.

There are so many platforms out there that are bloated with features and I work very closely with my team. I actually created the first beta version of Webinar Ninja but now, it’s just too big for my skills. But the point here is that I work very closely with them.

People don’t know that the more and more complicated features you add to any kind of software, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, it’s going to be buggy. It’s going to be very, very hard and it’s going to be confusing for the user to know when and how to use those.

For me, what takes precedence is reliability, is ease of use, is being able to create a webinar quickly and easily and then when you’re on the webinar, that you’re not distracted by so many things. You have just the basic things that you need to pull off a great webinar with Webinar Ninja. For me, it’s a combination of teaching, presenting and sales tools.

Like we have a chat area in Webinar Ninja that’s separate from the question area.

We have a question area on the bottom so you don’t have to search through the chat for the questions that people are asking so you could tell them, “Hey, guys, we have a question area on the bottom. If you have any questions, you can ask questions there and we’ll answer them in the Q&A session or whenever you decide to do that.”

We have polls in Webinar Ninja. We have an offer section where you can hide and display offers at any time so you can be able to give an offer and all those details are there. They’re not confusing.

We have some really cool nifty features that we love that just helps make it easy for people to run webinars. One of the biggest features that differentiate Webinar Ninja from the other platforms is it literally takes 10 seconds to create a webinar which is incredible.

The reason why we created the Webinar Ninja the way it is, is because we believe that a lot of platforms out there are just way too complicated. The reason why I love technology is because it makes your life easier. The reason why people use tools like Facebook or Twitter is because it’s easy to use. It’s intuitive. You can tweet.

You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to read a manual to understand how to send out a tweet. You just click the button that says, “Tweet” that’s it, over.

For us, we wanted to do the same thing with Webinar Ninja. We wanted to be able to create a webinar really quickly. It literally takes 10 seconds. You fill out some small details and you create and it has all the great features of any webinar with all our default templates right there.

For the advanced user of Webinar Ninja that wants to go in and tinker around and change and customize, we have advanced features that are in our advanced edits that you can edit anything from the registration page, the thank you page to the actual webinar page itself.

You can change colors, fonts, logos. We have plenty of templates in Webinar Ninja for you to even start out with and change them up. You can add video. You can add pictures. It’s up to you.

We have all the customization in Webinar Ninja but for those who don’t want to customize that are happy with our default templates, they can create it in 10 seconds flat and that’s it. Even if you do want to customize, at least you create it and then you can customize later. You could start marketing it later after you’ve created it.

The other huge, huge, huge differentiator between Webinar Ninja and other platforms is that we use the technology for our lab webinars called WebRTC which is the latest technology in live broadcasting. It’s absolutely live. There is zero delay which is great.

For me, anything that contributes to the interaction and learning of your audience, that’s really important.

If I ask a question, I want to be able to make sure they can hear that question instantly and answer me as quickly as possible. I’ve been on Google Hangouts. It’s really, really hard to deal with that 15-, 30-, sometimes 45-second delay. It’s an eternity sometimes. You’re going to ask a question and you’re like, got to wait until they see it or hear it.

WebRTC is absolutely live. It’s actually a point-to-point connections so it’s not like I’m broadcasting one feed and everybody is watching it. It’s actually a dedicated feed to each attendee which makes it even quicker and faster using Webinar Ninja.

Webinar Ninja also makes it easy for you to actually share the stage with individuals. We have something called Share the Stage where you can invite anyone of your attendees to come and join with their mic and camera.

This is great if you’re running a webinar on Webinar Ninja and somebody on the webinar is a customer of yours or is a member of your community and you can say, “Hey, Jolene, I want you to come and join us on camera and tell us your experience.”

You can just send her an invite and just her on her webinar page, she gets an invite that says, “Come and Join.” She just hit “Click” and she can just join over instantly.

Webinar Ninja is browser-based so you don’t have to download any software. It’s right there. You just use your browser and you’re good to go. That makes it a lot more accessible.

It means your attendee levels go higher with Webinar Ninja. People actually attend because a lot of people that don’t attend webinar because they like use a different software and they’re like, “Oh, I got to download something? I don’t have time for this or it’s going to blow up my machine or whatever it is.”

They just scrap it or they watch the replay which is a little less effective.

These are the highlights of Webinar Ninja and I would say, if you’re looking to get started with webinars and you just don’t want to get bogged down, we want to make sure that the technology is taken care of so you could just focus on the content. Webinar Ninja is super easy to use but at the same time, it’s still quite powerful.

That’s fantastic. We were saying it before we jumped on the show here, I was telling you I’ve been using GoToWebinar for years.

I’ve looked at different platforms but for everybody listening here, I would never do a live webinar on a Google Hangouts-based platform which many of these third-party platforms run off of because of that 35 to 45-second delay, it’s a killer when you’re trying to have live interactions.

I echo exactly what you said there and I just want to reiterate that for the audience. I would stay away from it entirely.

One other question I have for you and this is always the big question I ask and I’m asking not just for our listeners here. I’m asking as a potential customer because when I looked at this before our call, I went, “Wow, this looks incredible.”

I watched your videos and stuff and I’m going to be signing up for Webinar Ninja very shortly and starting to run my webinars on this platform because it looks fantastic.

Now, the one question I always have is, what’s the reliability and scalability of that Webinar Ninja? Because I’ve been on webinars where it just poops out and 500 people are gone and that’s really bad day.

Yeah, I definitely know about that. When we grew Webinar Ninja, we grew incrementally.

We actually closed the doors a whole bunch of times like when we first launched, we opened the door to Webinar Ninja, we sold that in a day. We closed it again and then we opened up again for 48 hours, closed again because we wanted to make sure that we built the infrastructure that’s reliable.

I often have a very long-term vision with business so I knew down the line I want to have larger, larger names that will be used on Webinar Ninja. I’m fortunate enough to have friends that are in the industry that I have worked with because of podcasting and things like that but I knew that it had to be reliable.

As Webinar Ninja grew, we started growing out our server infrastructure. Right now, we actually have one of the best infrastructures that I know a lot of people in the business that’s out there because we use an Amazon scalable servers.

As soon as our servers … We’re not even at 100%, at 50% load, it spins up a new server.

Automatically, if there’s any kind of load on your server, you have a thousand people on your webinar. You have a thousand people on webinar and there’s four, five, six, ten, a hundred webinars going on at the same time, it will automatically spin up a new server and make sure that takes the load before it gets to the point where it’s too heavy.

The other thing is that at Webinar Ninja we have a couple of very, very, very, very smart people on our team that help us with server infrastructure. We have a server security expert that has helped us. He’s incredible, John Harris. John Harris is incredible. Actually, he worked for the FBI before.

He knows a lot about cyber security and he helps us make sure that everything is secure, that we’re firewalled, we’re protected. I definitely understand that and I, before anybody else would not want to be embarrassed, to use a platform and have hundreds of people, thousands of people on my webinar and it conked out.

I definitely wouldn’t want that, especially for other people that are on my platform that are quite large names. People like Pat Flynn, like the Michael Port’s that have a lot of people that come to the webinars.

We definitely took those precautions and we’re still growing and we’re still building because as you build up new features, we have to accommodate for that.

Another thing that we do at Webinar Ninja, I can’t speak for other platforms but we’re constantly, constantly improving our code. For you techies out there, we’re doing a lot of node.js script to keep things clean, to keep things tight, to keep them fast.

The better the code, the less weight is on the server, the faster things are. We’re constantly improving our code, cleaning it up, revising things that we’ve done two years ago to make sure that this is the most efficient way to deliver this kind of programming. That in a nutshell is what we’ve been working on.

Very cool. Well, like I said, I’ll be testing Webinar Ninja out here very, very shortly. It sounds amazing.

For all the listeners, I’ve been through so many webinar platforms over the years and I went back to GoToWebinar because it was reliable. It doesn’t mean I like it because it lacks a lot of the sales functionality or different tools that we need in today’s webinars as digital entrepreneurs.

That’s fantastic.

Now, before I wrap things up, Omar, where can our listeners find out more about Webinar Ninja, about you, connect with you, projects you’re working on, where should they go?

Sure. I know a lot of you who are listening might be thinking about starting a webinar, doing a webinar, there’s a couple of things that I advise you to do.

One, we have at Webinar Ninja a completely free 7-day course called The Ultimate Webinar course.

It’s actually 14 full videos, 7 audio lessons. We have 7 downloadable cheat sheets that you can have as handy guides when you’re on your webinars and you could check that out at webinarninja.co/course. It’s a very, very powerful course with our Webinar Ninja members and you can have access to that for free at that link.

Whenever you’re ready and you want to start doing webinars, you want to jump in, you can definitely check us out at webinarninja.co.

Webinar Ninja is pretty much one of the few platforms out there that offers a free trial so we have a 14-day free trial. When you check out, you don’t pay a thing. You only get charged on day 15 if you’re happy with the platform.

We actually encourage our members to run a couple of webinars on their trial.

One of the first emails you get from us is from one our support team. You’ll get an email that says, “Hey, my name is CJ and I’m your Webinar Ninja consultant and I’m here to help you run your first webinar.”

She’s there to help you out. She’s there to make sure that you rock with webinars and we want to see you win. That’s there for you if you’d like to give it a shot, give it a try for free.

Awesome. That’s fantastic and Omar, thank you so much for sharing so much information about Webinar Ninja. Webinar tips, strategies, anybody who listen to this is going to benefit massively. It’s a pleasure having you today. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Derek.

Awesome. All right, everyone, that was digital entrepreneur and webinar expert, Omar Zenhom.

As always, any links mentioned in this interview will be included in the show notes along with an entire transcript of this episode and you can find them all at projectignite.com/podcast.

Now, it’s time to take all of those webinar strategies you’ve learned here today and apply that final essential ingredient to actually making this stuff work and that ingredient is action guys.

Go for it. Take action. Apply what you’ve learned today 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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