I had plateaued. My business wasn’t growing, I was actually backsliding.
My business was only operational because I had a few clients on retainer and a small hosting business.
The other 90% of business, the new business, was coming from one referrals source.
And that one source had dried up!
I was still seeing enough cashflow to satisfy expenses but not leaving room for anything else.
I had to do something.
My initial step was to realize that I had left the growth of my business in somebody else’s hands and that’s not what a smart entrepreneur does.
With that lesson learned, I could move on never to repeat it again.
How to Grow?
That was the same question I started asking myself every day.
What can I do to reach more people on a more direct level that enables me to be their hero, right, to solve their problems?
Then it hit me, I need to start doing workshops.
I had a great relationship with the Chamber of Commerce, and they partnered with the town to host a business “incubator”, so I knew I could leverage them to get the word out.
Use their reputation, list, and space.
After pitching the idea, the first workshop was scheduled for the next Friday and every other Friday after that.
I created all the email copy and headlines, the Facebook and Twitter post, and just had them plug them into their systems.
All the traffic was sent to my website for registration so that I could build up my list.
Then a sequence of emails was sent from me in conjunction with the Chamber emails to get more people in seats.
The Workshop Approach
- Educate
- Educate some more
- Add Value
- Solve problems the audience brought with them (real time application)
- Add more value
- Close with a simple done-for-you offer
This worked really well. And the information was well received.
I closed two new clients from the first workshop!
The One Problem
People think they’re too busy to take time out of their day to learn the things they need to be more successful.
The real problem, a lot of entrepreneurs are solo business owners, doing everything themselves. And when they’re busy with work, they stop thinking about growing and marketing their businesses.
As a result, the attendance was low. Much lower than I had anticipated.
On average we had 10 people show up.
The last workshop, I had 2 people show up. I knew that I had cycled through the business owners that were willing to take action. My market had dried up.
But There Was Success!
As I mentioned, I signed 2 new clients after the first event and about 1.5 on average for the remaining workshops.
However, that wasn’t good enough for me!
Plus I had found a marketing strategy I loved, educating and speaking.
The Move to Webinars
This didn’t happen instantly. After my last workshop, I was a bit frustrated by the mindset I was battling so I took a breather.
Ok…So it only lasted for a few weeks and then I started promoting webinars.
I segmented my list, separating out attendees from those that I had converted to clients.
And started doing two different types of webinars.
At first, I was just using Google Hangouts to host my webinars, but I wanted something that would give me more control over the access and the replay.
I tried about 10 different webinar platforms but stuck with WebinarJam and now I use Everwebinar (from the same company).
Digital Workshop
This was a digital/webinar version of the workshops I had been doing in person.
I started by repeating all the presentations I had already done, I just made them a little better based on the feedback I had gotten when I presented the training live.
These I promote to prior attendees, encouraging them to invite others from within the business to attend with them. Hoping to grab more decision makers and possibly more open minded people.
It was the same approach.
- Educate
- Add Value
- Solve Real Problems in Real Time
- Add More Vale
- Pitch a Done-for-You Service
Client Retention Webinars
The other type of webinar was designed to keep my clients happy and to stay top of mind.
These were also educational but focused on a specific service I wanted to get these clients to sign up for.
For example: When I started expanding my hosting business, I did a webinar on the need for really good hosting, and then pitched my hosting service. And I did the same thing with maintenance and SEO.
This worked really well.
Primarily because people don’t understand what these services are and why the need them. So the education part of the webinar was to answer those two questions and resolve any concerns.
With the live chat feature built into most webinar platforms, you can allow your attendees to ask questions or chat among themselves.
The Real Money!!
While I was having some success, I didn’t start to see real success until after stumbling upon this webinar training program.
It’s called The Perfect Webinar! And it’s free!
After I went through the training I identified what I was doing wrong and how I could improve my webinars to get better results.
I changed up my presentation as recommend in the program and my results doubled the first webinar.
After the first 6 months of following this new webinar presentation strategy, I doubled my business from the previous year.
It blew my mind!
Why Did Webinars Out Perform?
There were two reasons.
The #1 reason they are more accessible by “busy” business owners.
The attendance was higher for most of the live webinars.
But let’s say, even if I wasn’t able to get high attendance on the live webinar, I now had the replay I could use as a “second-chance” for them to attend.
With the replay, I used urgency and scarcity to get more people to watch it.
The replay was only available for a limited time and if you missed it you also missed out on the thing I was using as the hook.
If you don’t know what the hook is, you need to watch the Perfect Webinar training (it’s free!!).
The #2 reason, The Perfect Webinar strategy.
Without it, I would still not have my presentation structured right and I’d still be getting mediocre results.
In Conclusion
If you want to improve or start doing webinars to grow your business, you only need two things to make it a success.
- A platform: WebinarJam or EverWebinar (if you use EverWebinar they give you a year of WebinarJam)
- The Perfect Webinar training
Ok! Wait, maybe 4 things…
- Something to pitch
- And an audience to pitch it too
Would love to hear about your success! Use the comments to share your results and ask any questions.