How to sell my webinar? This is the common question many aspiring online coaches ask.

Having a fully booked webinar is a dream come true and can do wonders for the sales of your online courses, products and services.

Did you know that 2-5% of the people who attend your webinars eventually end up buying something from you? (Source: This article)

The best part about webinars is that unlike other lead generation mechanisms, they allow you to personally interact with your audience, thereby improving your relationship with your prospects and enhancing your personal brand.

But the problem is that it’s not very easy to sell the webinar seats.

Unless you are already an influencer and have a large following, it can be difficult to get enough people to register for your webinar.

So what is the solution?

The solution is that in order for you to sell your webinar, you have to first understand that there are different kinds of webinars and each requires a different kind of strategy.

Let’s look at the different types of webinars:

Free Webinars

As the name suggests, these webinars offer free registration. Your prospect doesn’t have to pay for the webinar seat.

These webinars are usually done for the purpose of lead generation. The sales usually come at the end of the webinar when you pitch your main product or service (called as an Upsell ).

For example, you can see the free webinar which I use myself.

Paid Webinars

Paid Webinars are of two types:

1. Paid webinars related to lead generation – These are similar to the free webinars that we discussed above. The only difference is that instead of a free seat, a small price like Rs.99 is charged so as to get more qualified leads. Qualified leads convert better when it comes to the upsell. You can read my comparison of Free vs Paid Webinars to see more differences.
2. Premium Webinars – This type of a webinar is conducted in order to generate income directly from the webinar fee. Here the charges for attending the webinar are much higher since it is like main product. So this is a like a premium webinar. Its main purpose is generating revenue, not leads.

So that is the first thing. You have to decide what kind of webinar will you be conducting.

The most popular type of webinars are the lead generation webinars since the main purpose of a webinar should be to educate the audience about your main product or service and then make an offer at the end.

Premium webinars are usually done for leads that have already been generated as well as nurtured and are already familiar with your brand.

Trying to advertise a premium webinar to an audience which is not familiar with your brand (referred to as cold audience) can lead to very less conversions.

But advertising a lead generation webinar to a cold audience works well since you are not charging them. Even if you are charging something like Rs.99, it is still a low amount and even a cold audience will not mind paying for it.

So we come back to the question – How to sell my webinar?

Now you can see the first part of the answer is that you should select the type of webinar correctly. For cold audience, select lead generation webinar. For warm audience, you can conduct a premium webinar.

Now the second part of the answer.

Once you have chosen the type of webinar, you will have to find a way to advertise the webinar.

Again, unless you already have a huge email list or social media following, you will usually require paid advertising because you need to sell your webinar quickly.

So which is the number one way to advertise your webinar?

The answer is using Facebook ads.

You can see an example image from one of my own Facebook ads for one of my webinars:

The reason why Facebook ads work very well for selling webinars is that you can quickly reach out to a large number of people in a very short amount of time.

For instance, my LIVE webinars are usually on a Sunday and I advertise on three days – Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Just advertising on these three days makes my ads reach out to around 40,000 people and gets me around 300 registrants for my webinar.

There is no way I can reach out to so many people using organic (free) methods of promotion.

In my course Online Course Launchpad, I show you the step-by-step process of creating and using Facebook ads for selling webinars and online courses.

If you are charging a small registration fee, then you may have to spend more while advertising. But that extra cost is usually worth it because people who pay even a small amount to attend your webinar convert more when it comes to your upsell. So you can easily make that money back.

When you are a complete beginner, I always suggest you to start off things with a free webinar as it’s much easier to market.

Also when it comes to selling webinars, there is one crucial thing you need to know, which is the attendance rate of a webinar.

Attendance rate of a webinar

Just because someone registered for your webinar, it does not mean they will attend it too when the webinar actually takes place.

This is especially true if you are doing a completely free webinar.

The average attendance rate for a free webinar ranges from 15-25%. Which means if 100 people register for your webinar, only 15-25 will actually show up on the webinar day.

You can dramatically increase this attendance rate by also adding these people to a WhatsApp group to give them reminders.

But the point is that not everyone will attend.

So in order to have a fully booked webinar, always take more registrants than your target booking capacity.

This is especially true for free webinars. If people are paying a small amount to register then the average attendance rate increases to around 95%. That’s another advantage of charging a small free for the webinar.

Conclusion

Creating and selling webinars is a great skill that can really take your business to the next level.

But just like any other skill, you need to practice it.

And there are two things to practice here – selling or marketing your webinar so it fills up and also conducting your webinar eventually.

Once you get better at both these skills, you’ll have one of most powerful tools to grow your business.

Check out Online Course Launchpad, where I teach you how to conduct as well as market your webinars and online courses.