As a blogger, you know how essential it is to engage with your audience. Blogging is a great way to get your point across and to elicit feedback and comments for others and, in the end, market your product or simply connect with your target audience.
With that in mind, webinar marketing is an essential tool for any blogger because it allows you connect with your audience in person (virtually), elicit feedback from your attendees, and what’s more – give strength to your marketing efforts.
One of the best ways features of any webinar presentation is that it gives a voice to the message, and the hallmark of any successful blog is the voice behind it. While blog posts allow you to speak with your audience in text, a webinar is much more powerful as it allows that text to come to life with your personality, creativity, and style.
What are the ways that bloggers can benefit from webinars?
- Hold attention. Even the best written blog posts have difficulty in holding a person’s attention. More and more people are taking in information through visual aids – pictures, bulleted points and videos. Webinars hold people’s attention far better. It is actually possible to hold their attention for up to an hour. Imagine the potential in that! Webinars tick all the boxes with what bloggers are trying to do with their posts – deliver a message and build a relationship.
- Real-Time Feedback. Feedback from a blog post can come days, weeks or even months later. However, feedback from a webinar is immediate. What’s more, a webinar is personal. From the sign-up page you will have the person’s name, and you can use that during the presentation. Attendees can ask questions and you can answer them immediately. This emphasizes your expertise in the niche.
- More Sales. More and more bloggers are using webinars to drive up sales. Some studies suggest that sales from webinars can be 10% – 20% higher than targeted sales in blogs. Of course, the webinar needs to be engaging and interesting. In any case, you will experience higher sales than just by regular blogging.
- Can be re-used. A live webinar can be recorded for future use. The recording could be broken up into smaller segments and offered as free give-away videos. Or you could feature it on your site as an incentive for people leave their email address. Or, you could pre-schedule recorded webinars and have again a captive audience.
- Show Your Expertise. Hosting a webinar gives you the opportunity to show off your expertise on any given subject. It’s possible for anyone to mash an article re-write it and pretend that they are an expert. Therefore, what you say on a webinar will command more trust and respect than if it was just in a blog post. Once a person trusts the product and can see that you are an expert, they will be more willing to buy the product or service.
How to Drive More Sales
A lot of time and effort goes into creating and presenting a webinar. Therefore you want your investment to pay off. This means that you need to use specific techniques to get more sales from your presentations. Here are some top tips for bloggers to use webinars for affiliate marketing.
- Use Social Media. Social media is a powerful tool. So use it to promote your webinar and encourage attendees to do the same. With Twitter create a hashtag to use before, during and after the event. Use LinkedIn to post information in relevant groups (avoid spammy comments) to encourage your connections to spread the word. Post on Facebook a new cover photo to promote the webinar and provide a link for the registration page.
- Use the confirmation page (thank you page) to invite attendees to subscribe to your blog or email list. This is a fantastic way to increase subscribers and in the end, drive up sales.
- Use a follow up email. This can be a review of the material presented. You could also offer some special sale for the fact that they attended. This is especially good if some didn’t purchase anything. You could also send a recording of the webinar. If you do that it’s a good idea to edit out any big mistakes or you could send a ‘highlights’ video.
More and more bloggers are having to diversify to engage their audience and drive up sales. To that end, webinars can be a fantastic tool and should be part of any blogger’s marketing and lead generation strategies.
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