Irina Milova

Do you know how you can use webinars in your business?

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I recently spoke to a young gentleman at a networking event in Piccadilly, and he built all his business model around webinars.

This is how he does it. He runs webinars once a week and he sells a language course. People who sign up for it are invited for their lessons three times a week via webinar and learn Jamaican with a teacher from Jamaica. Three times a week his students get on a live webinar and study the language.

In this article I will show you a few more examples of how webinars can be used in different businesses. Take a closer look and think how you can apply webinars and make them work for your business model.

If you are a business coach you can set up a webinar on such topics as productivity, motivation, goal setting, life-work balance etc.  You can also develop a series of webinars on “How to build a simple business plan in 5 easy steps” and create 5 webinar sessions with a Q&A part in the end of each of them. It will help your clients get a huge task done and completed within a short few weeks.   You can also help your customers develop long-term plans that will allow their business to function more efficiently and make more profit.

If you are a nutrition coach you can do webinars on simple dietary changes that make a real difference to how your clients feel. For example:

  • Dump the Diet - An effective personalised weight loss programme
  • Detox Diet Course - Detox your body, mind and home
  • Eat Yourself Young - Hold back the years through simple dietary and lifestyle changes
  • How to Eat - A foundation for increased health, energy and vitality
  • Diet MOT - Simple dietary changes to make a real difference to how you feel

You can either create a webinar series for a group of people or each course can be taught on a one-to-one basis via webinars.

If you are a time strategy expert you can bring to the table such evergreen topics as the “Science and Systems of Better Time Management” or “How much more productive could you be if you created a daily written plan of action”  or “How to Increase your daily efficiency by doing less and accomplishing more” etc.

To learn more about webinars as one of the most powerful marketing strategy of the 21st century, take a look at the presentation (link to the webinar recording).

P.S. I interact with my attendees on webinars, so take this opportunity to get on my next LIVE webinar to ask me any webinar related question you have.

How you can expand your business with webinars

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How you can expand your business with webinars:

1. When you do a webinar, there are no geographical boundaries – you can have up to 1000 people all over the world listening to you, watching your presentation, interacting with you by asking you questions, leaving comments, sharing their opinions in the chat box.

2. This is how you have a wider audience to get to know you, like you and trust you as a business.

3. This is how you get more leads, attract new clients and expand your business using webinars as a powerful marketing tool.

 

7 ways to grow your business doing webinars

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1. Webinars are a great marketing tool to get new customers onboard.

By doing an online presentation you give those who attend your webinar an excellent chance to get to know you, like you and trust you. You introduce yourself and your business to potential clients.

It’s a powerful way to get people to know you and trust you enough to become your client, because a webinar is a live, interactive communication with you as a passionate expert.

When you communicate with your subscribers by sending a message or a Newsletter via email, it is certainly good for your marketing, but it is harder to get results and sell your products by doing only that. People buy from people they know, like and trust, and this is where webinars come. By doing an online presentation you build your credibility, you give people an excellent opportunity to get that feeling, to build a good rapport with them, to bond with them, to get your ideas across, to resonate to their style of doing business, so that they can start doing business with you.

When you host a webinar your audience immediately view you as a passionate expert about your services, they learn about your achievements, your experience, your knowledge in the field!

There's always an instant assumption that the presenter is an authority figure in their niche if they are able to host a webinar. So think about that!

 

2. Webinars give you massive leverage.

You can run a webinar with large numbers and there are no geographical boundaries. With a webinar you have an opportunity to spread your word and handle multiple clients at once and from all over the world, not just your own town, city or country, so you interact with a lot of people at the same time, while still offering great value.

You can find an expert oversees and invite them to speak to your audience on your presentation. This technology allows you to interview anyone you want for a training session. Or to introduce a new product that is coming on the market.

Do you see the leverage and the power? You leverage your time, your resources, your money, your energy, technology, internet – everything.

 

3. Use webinars as a tool to build loyalty with existing clients.

Webinars are an amazing way to add value to your existing clients because by running webinars you give people more access to you which means more interaction.

Not only webinars allow you to communicate with your customers on a more personal level, but they allow you to keep in touch with them after the webinar, because all webinar softwares send a thank you email after your presentation to each of the attendees and invite them to send you a question or feedback.

 

4. You create a point of difference by doing webinars: not many businesses are using webinars; and even fewer are using them well.

You can stand out by adding them to your service range.

When I spoke to business owners at the Women Mean Business event in Woolwich a few months ago, out of 11 entrepreneurs only 5 knew what webinars are. Although they were interested in doing them for their business, none of them were actually were doing them in their business at that point, although all of them wanted to.

By doing webinars you go a way ahead of your competitors and your business stands out from lots of others in your niche. This is a great advantage for you!

And this is why it is crucial. According to Google research it currently takes 10,2 interactions between a buyer and a seller before a buyer will open their wallet. So you need to make sure that as many interactions on the way to purchase are taking place with you or your company or your website and webinars serve this purpose very well.

 

5. Provide customer support or product support using webinars: use webinars to answer customer questions, explain how they can use the product more effectively, and get a feedback. Isn’t that great to improve your service? 

You can offer a more effective service to your clients & even sort out your customers’ problems in a timely and efficient manner. And again this takes your business to a whole level because by doing so you create a point of difference.

 

6. You get more exposure for your business online.

This is what you need to do to achieve this. Record a webinar to create instant products: many webinar services have a recording feature built in, so recording your webinar is really easy.

How can you use the recording? You can send it to those who registered for your webinar but couldn’t come, so they can listen to the recording and still benefit from your service.

I also suggest uploading your webinar recording to your YouTube channel to get people to see it, to attract new customers and get more exposure for your business.

You can make a video out of each part of your webinar presentation and upload them separately. Thus you will have a whole range of videos and all of sudden you end up with a lot of content by doing just one webinar.

What can you do with all this content? How do you make it work for your business?
You can upload each of your video on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, your blog or website and because your social media accounts can be connected with each other, all your followers will immediately know and start looking at your content!

Do you see how you can leverage something you have done once?
You have run a webinar once, but you use your webinar presentation multiple times for a variety of purposes to promote and market your business.

One more thing. A webinar recording can be replayed over and over again, generating income for you on autopilot. You can have as many as 50 different automated webinars playing every day!

Here are some providers of this technology:
Stealth seminar
Evergreen business system
Webinator

 

7. Webinars can help you sell more of your products and services.

At the end of a webinar, after you’ve spent 60 minutes giving great content to your webinar attendees, you can make a special offer to them.

Let’s speak facts and figures here. Webinars typically outsell written sales letters 10 times over. Now what does that mean? When you send an email with an offer to buy something from you, you can expect on average 1 to 2% of sales. When you sell something on a webinar, a typical conversion rate is between 10 and 20%.

Let me share one of my real live examples. I was selling an online service for $27 via email. The email was sent to 1600 people, 20 people bought it. That means the conversation rate was 1,2%. If you want to get more sales, do a “show and tell” webinar, demonstrate live the benefits of your service and the solution it brings. And see your sales soar.

Another example for you. I recently hosted a webinar and invited an expert. That was a test webinar, where we tested a new product. She made an offer at the end of the presentation at the cost of $97. Out of 25 attendees, 5 people bought it. The conversion rate was 20%, which is a very good result. Now I know it works, I can do it on a bigger scale.
Furthermore, webinars allow you to sell high-ticket offers priced at $1,000 and higher, whereas it is difficult to sell products at more than $200 directly from a website. As long as you have a good offer and the targeted audience, it is normal to reach a sales point at between 8 and 10% at a $1,000 price point.

In figures that mean that if you have 100 targeted attendees on your webinar, you can bring in between $8,000 to $10,000 in sales from a single webinar! This takes some good practice of course, but it is worth all the effort, isn’t it?

The fact that more traditional methods of promoting and selling products become less effective than before and the fact that more and more consumers prefer to browse and shop online, make webinars more appealing than ever before as a way to drum up and draw sales.

 

How often do you run webinars?
Please leave your comment or ask me a question.

Public Speaking For The First Time – How I Did It!

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Networking events are a great platform for all kinds of business activities, but I never used them as a stage until recently. I was offered an opportunity to have a four minute slot to speak about my business in front of 30 female entrepreneurs at a morning network event in London.

I want to say that I have never been on a course to do public speaking before. Although Dale Carnegie’s book on public speaking is one of my favourite but what helped me with my decision to take this opportunity was that I listen to quite a few presentations both live (where I attended) and recorded; seminars, workshops, webinars as well as short videos.

In my experience when you listen to a lot of speakers you start subconsciously absorbing quite a lot of things even if you are not planning to stand in front of an audience. This also makes you think – if they can do it, I can do it too.

 

How I prepared the presentation

One of my colleagues, who is used to public speaking, says: “Prepare well, keep it simple, don't talk too much.....”.

I want to share some of my thoughts on “prepare well”. I believe it’s a good idea to start with a short presentation, and network events maybe ideal for this. I only had 3 days before the event when I received the confirmation that I got my slot.

Here are the steps that I took to prepare my four minute presentation:

  • Step One. I thought of my outline: introduce myself, add a few questions that show the problems that businesses have with online exposure and how I was going to give them a tailor-made solution.
  • Step Two. I composed my presentation – 400 words.
  • Step Three. I edited it the following day and got a feedback from a colleague of mine.
  • Step Four. I learnt it “off by heart”, rehearsed in front of two colleagues and using their feedback I improved my speech.
  • Step Five. On the day of the event – I took a printed copy of the presentation with me and for the final touch my partner recorded a video of me doing the presentation so that I could critique myself.

 

Standing in front of the audience – strategies I used to help overcome my fear

On the agenda there were six speakers, and I was number five. I was very relaxed and enjoying the speeches until speaker number four began her presentation! At that point my heart started beating fast and loud, I became so nervous that I even thought I wasn’t going to get up on stage and stand there, where she was?...

All sorts of fears suddenly rushed through my mind: what if my throat gets dry and I will not be able to utter a thing?; what if my hands begin shaking?; I’ll be really ashamed!;what if I forget what to say – it would look bad if I read it straight from my notes?; etc.

What really helped me cope with my emotional state was the moment when I started thinking about the audience and not about myself and the value I wanted to give them.

I actually started “talking” to myself: listen, these ladies are here to get some good content from you and you have a valuable content to share. You really want them to benefit from what you have to tell them and what you want to see on their faces is how your content is helping them, not sympathy.

By concentrating on their needs, I shifted focus from my fears to the outcome that the people – the audience - were expecting from me.

The lessons I have learnt: focus on what you are going to give, focus on the results and outcome, focus on them – the people, your audience, your customers. Remember, the main question is always “What Is In It For Them?”!!

 

How you can use your presentation to build authority and credibility

Take your colleague, friend or business partner to record your presentation at the event and take photos that will add credibility and authority to your status as a well established business and expert in your niche.

Not only will you have a great piece of content for your website, blog, YouTube channel as well as your community on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can also turn your presentation into an article and submit it to article directories websites, such as EzineArticles.com.

Improving upon my presentation and my delivery
I could not have my partner there to record my presentation as it was a “women only” event. What we did instead was this – when I was ready with my presentation, he recorded me on a flip camera. This really helped me to “hear” what I was saying and also how I was conveying my message to the audience, so this exercise helps you in the process of preparation.

More than just a presentation
As you can see there is much more to it than building your confidence and getting more exposure for your business. You may be thinking that you are doing a presentation, whereas in reality you are leveraging all your resources: time, money, energy, efforts, technology, internet, social media etc.

Immediate authority
When you move from the audience to the stage, you immediately become an authority much in the same way that an author does when he or she has written a book on a specific topic.

 

Feedback – how it helped me

Who did I ask?
I approached the lady whose presentation was the best at this event and asked her for a feedback regarding my presentation. I got a really helpful feedback.

Feedback
She advised to give people more time to answer my questions, whereas I had rushed through the questions and had not even planned to get any replies, because I thought my task was completely different. By putting a few questions in the beginning of my presentation I wanted to raise their awareness of some problems that I had a solution for.

One of the pieces of advice that I will follow next time I do a presentation is to wait for a few answers to my questions and use these short interactions to build a rapport with as many of the listeners as possible and also to better connect with them as someone who knows what problems they experience, what challenges they go through, what segment of their business they want to improve. This is how you get your audience engaged with you as a speaker.

Remember feedback is to help and improve, so take it as such.

 

What I learnt from my first public speaking experience

I learnt that although it is uncomfortable up until you are in the flow of your presentation, the satisfaction you get after you have done it is worth all the effort.

When I finished, I did not feel like leaving the stage. I have realized how powerful it is when you stand in front of people and they listen to you. It is incredible if you are good at it.

I have experienced exactly what one of the female speakers said about public speaking when she went on stage to speak in front of 700 women in London, and I was one of the 700.

She went up on to the stage, looked at us and said: “Wow, it’s so powerful! You guys, should all try this!”

Well, I am really glad I did.

What was your first public speaking experience like? Please leave your comment.

Number One Thing You Need To Do To Get Traffic On YouTube

by Posted in Youtube 1 Comment

The potential of driving traffic with YouTube is incredible. What you need to start with is your keyword research. A keyword is a word or word phrase that someone types when they search for an answer or solution. The reason you should do keyword research is because you want to get the best traffic. Everything else is secondary. This is the number one thing you need to do to get traffic on YouTube. When you optimise your video by using highly relevant keywords – you get to the top search on Google.

If you are a personal trainer, for example, you want to be on the first page of Google when someone types “how to lose weight” or “how to lose weight on the alkaline diet”. If you teach people how to lose weight using the alkaline diet you can “own” this keyword by creating videos which answer the burning questions and resonate with the people who are looking for the solution.

You could be someone who sells edible gifts and the phrase “where to buy edible gifts” can be you keyword which will bring you tons of traffic. With YouTube you can choose as many keywords as you like and dominate your niche by creating relevant videos which provide solutions that people in that niche want.

To find your perfect keywords, here are two free keyword tools:
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool/ - this is YouTube keyword tool, you can see what people are searching on YouTube.
https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool - this is where you can find what people are typing into Google.

Another one is paid, but it is worth every penny. Market Samurai is one of the best keyword research tools on the market. You can download a free 30-day trial here: http://www.sietsell.com/t/13/tid-blg

Depending on your objectives you can use one of those tools or all three. You may be surprised, because sometimes the search results are quite different: what is searched on YouTube is not always the same what is searched on Google.

When you do a keyword research, pay attention to a combination of these three criteria. Look for keywords that are highly searched, relevant to your topic or niche and what you are selling and also, if possible, words with low competition. If you do that, you are on to a winner.

Whenever you are marketing something, always think about your clients, get in their shoes, and think as if you are one of them. If you had a similar problem, what would you type into Google search box? What would you type into YouTube search box? Is it a word, a phrase or a question? If your video contains the answer to a question that people type in the search box – you have a perfect match.

Don’t forget: it’s not about you, it’s all about them. Marketing is not about your assumptions of what you think people need or should have, it is about gathering the correct and relevant data on what they WANT and give it to them.

3 Types of Videos You Can Create and Put out on YouTube to Make Money

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If you are not harnessing YouTube to market your business, you should start doing it immediately. These are two good reasons why: every hour over 4 years' worth of video is uploaded to YouTube; by 2013, 90% of all traffic on the internet will be on video. In this article I am sharing with you 3 types of videos you can create to market your business on YouTube.

 

How long a webinar should last for

by Posted in Webinars 2 Comments

Every webinar must have a purpose.
You can do a webinar to get more visitors to your website and eventually expand your list of subscribers.
You can use webinars to run Q & A sessions with your clients; to introduce a new product or service or to interview an expert in your niche.

These are all can be called content creating webinars as opposed to selling webinars where we promote or sell something.

How long should a webinar last for? In this video I am sharing the best practices.

 

Harness these four top tips to make more sales at your webinar

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In this video I am sharing with you how to make your webinar offer more compelling and make more sales at your webinar.

When you run a webinar, you normally have something to promote in the end of your presentation. It can be a product, a service, a consultation or a coaching course.

I have attended more than a hundred of live webinars and have done quite a few joint venture webinar projects where my job is not only help experts with the content and structure of the online presentation or training, but also to make sure their pitch is right and the offer is irresistible.

These four top tips will help you make your offer compelling and get more people interested.

15 Tips To Follow To Make A Joint Venture Webinar A Success

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A joint venture (JV) webinar is a project where a few people work in collaboration. Normally one of them is an organiser and the other is an expert.

I organise webinars and invite experts who have something valuable to share with the audience. I have done this both for my subscribers and for other people’s subscribers.

The way a JV webinar is structured is this. The organiser introduces the expert and then the expert delivers a 60 or 90 minute presentation where he or she shares and teaches some content which is of interest to the audience. It may be Facebook strategies, Twitter strategies, success tips for network marketers, some crucial updates on a particular topic, etc. In the end of the presentation the expert makes an offer to the webinar attendees at a special price and they may buy it. The offer usually is available for only a certain number of people and valid for a few hours only. After that the price goes up.

To make your joint venture a success, follow the tips below which are based on my experience and will help you avoid a lot of pitfalls.

1. Have an agreement in place with a list of responsibilities and tasks of who does what.

2. Build your team and distribute the roles in advance to ensure the smooth running of the webinar. I have two colleagues working with me, so we are a team of three people. We utilize and benefit from each other’s strengths and make the best of all our assets.

3. Don’t go ahead with a JV webinar project before you make sure an expert understands how it works and agrees to terms of service including the promotion costs (if they are involved) and profit sharing.

4. Start promoting a webinar at least two weeks before the webinar date.

5. Don’t stop a webinar promotion till a very few hours left before the webinar actually starts. Have a detailed plan for each day of your promotion campaign.

6. Always have a webinar rehearsal/ practice with one of the panellists. If a panellist is not available, do it with your team member.

7. Don’t begin a webinar unless you make sure that people can hear you well. Ask the attendees to type “yes” in the chat box or “raise a hand” and take time to see when a few responses come.

8. On the date of a webinar ask an expert who is a webinar presenter to log in at least 15 minutes before the webinar start time, so that you can check that everything is in order and to begin the webinar in time.

9. Be mindful of other people’s time. Respect your audience. If you invited them to a 90 minute webinar, do your best the keep the promise.

10. Track and trace. Some key indicators for you to measure include a number of registrations every day (you will notice that they differ on week days and at the weekend: Saturday and Sunday are the least active days for registrations).

11. Don’t schedule a webinar for Mondays, Fridays and weekends. You will also notice that national and bank holidays are not good for such activity.

12. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days of the week to schedule webinars.

13. It’s a very good idea to ask a question when you are sending out invitations for people to register for a webinar. It gives you loads of information about different aspects of the topic your attendees want to learn and also what they know or don’t know.

14. It is extremely important to get the price for the offer right. If it is too high for people who are listening to the expert for the first time, you may end up with very few sales.

15. Make sure that you match the right expert and product with the right audience. If you fail to do that, the people on the webinar will get confused and will not buy.

I have a lot more to share with you in the coming articles.

 

 

Latest Statistics On Social Media Networks You Don’t Want To Neglect

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I find it fascinating how social platforms have grown; they really have had an exponential growth in terms of membership, usage and popularity. Here are some latest statistics on Google+, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube that you would want to take into account if you want to stay on top.

1. 43% of all online consumers are social media fans or followers.

2. 53% of small businesses are using social media.

3. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day. Google+ is Google's social network and will feature heavily in Google searches in the future – a good reason to be on there.

4. Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.

5. Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.

6. Facebook has 901 million users.

7. There are 37 million Facebook fan pages with 10+ likes.

8. For every 5 pages viewed online, 1 is from Facebook.

9. 20 minutes are spent on each visit to Facebook.

10. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

11. 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily.

12. 1 million accounts are added to Twitter every day.

13. 36% of Twitter users tweet daily.

14. 175 million tweets are sent every day.

15. 54% of Twitter users use Twitter on their mobile devices.

16. The average visit on Twitter lasts for 14 minutes.

17. 40% of Twitter users regularly search for products via Twitter.

18. 750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.

19. If Twitter was a country, it would be the 12th largest country in the world.

20. 30% of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.

21. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).

22. A new member joins LinkedIn every second.

23. LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.

24. Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.

25. LinkedIn’s revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.

26. There are more than one million LinkedIn groups.

27. Every hour over 4 years' worth of video is uploaded to YouTube. By 2013, 90% of all traffic on the internet will be on video.

28. The most watched video is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, with 470 million views.

29. The most watched non-commercial video is Charlie Bit My Finger Again, with over 458 million views.

30. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.

Statistics from Compete, Twitter Press Centre, Social Times, CNN.