Webinars have become my favorite mode of content creation. They are the perfect live platform for the New Media Content Creation Model and can be done from anywhere in the world (with an Internet connection, of course).
Two days ago I did an 8-hour Webinar with Julie Perry of YouTube Secret Weapon fame. I killed a LOT of birds with that single stone (one day that will be a blog posting of her own) but I learned a number of things along the way that I thought I’d share here.
Webinars are as subject to the whims of Murphy’s law as are everything else. At the home office I have Verizon FIOS – screaming Internet connectivity that can easily handle this – and more. I lost access once during the day and GotoWebinar had a few problems during the day that not only were, well, problems, but came up on the screen recordings we took here. By having an external recording of the event made, we should be able to produce a great video. Also, my MiFi as backup gave not only sense of mind, but saved the day.
Spam is making legitimate email communication harder and harder. Now, I’ll admit that my copy (and directions) writing and is not the best, but a LOT of people didn’t get the mail that put them into the queue. For whatever reason (and there are lots of them), I’m going to have to figure out a new workflow for this kind of thing that includes (probably) a personal check in from my assistant for people who don’t confirm in the first hour.
People will sit through an 8 hour Webinar. Of the hundreds who purchased, many bought to get the recordings and had no intention of showing up for the live event (some people have better things to do with their Saturdays). But of those who showed up, we saw more than 80% of them make it to then end. Those are the same stats I see on a traditional Webinar. A past mentor once told me “the mind can only take in as much as the butt can endure.” I’m not quite sure how to translate that to this crowd.
The New Media Content Creation Model rocks. The promise of this Webinar was 6 hours (or more) with Julie before she took a day job somewhere else that would prevent her from doing things like this in the future. We delivered that well. Good money was made on the event but … the recordings will be leveraged and sold as a product later. In truth, as happy as I was with Saturday’s profit, but what we do with the results of Saturday will, I am almost certain, make me more money than Saturday did. The pressures of 3 digits of people watching the event live pumped the adrenaline needed to produce the show we did.
Upsells always make sense. We gave everyone who bought the chance to buy the DVDs of the event in a one-time-offer (I love Premiumcast). The revenue from what most would call an ‘afterthought’ paid for the video editing, the dvd creation, the dvd artwork, and mailing the dvds to everyone who bought. How great is that?
I’ve been asked if I’d do a Webinar on how I used Premiumcast to run the ecommerce for this and a few since Saturday have asked if I could also teach how we pulled of the Webinar, recordings, backups, etc. We’ll see what we can pull off. If you’d like to see these, please let me know in the comments below.
What are your thoughts on Webinars as revenue generators?
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