THE BEST WEBINAR PLATFORMS REACH YOUR AUDIENCE EVERYWHERE
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The best webinar platforms reach your audience everywhere with Casey Zeman
- The whole premise of our products is that we want to help people sell better, leveraging webinar experiences.
- You can see a level of commitment when someone shows up to a webinar, whereas someone just comes, they opt into a freebie, and then go to a sales video, they can leave at any time.
- A webinar can have much higher results than a pre-polished, what is considered a perfect webinar, or a really well-scripted webinar.
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In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today my guest in studio is Casey Zeman. He is the founder and CEO of a popular webinar platform called EasyWebinar. It’s a software that has both live and automated webinars. With over 13,000 customers, Casey has figured out what works and what doesn’t in the way of webinars, live broadcasts, and videos for engagement, and how to sell better and engage stronger with your audience and your customers.
On average, his clients are generating 10 to $20,000 a day or 300 to $600,000 per month in recurring revenue. Casey’s superpower is providing sales and scalability systems to business owners so they can work less on creating and more on impacting and making more money. He has consulted to companies such as Harper Collins, Estee Lauder, and Dell on video marketing strategies and lead nurture funnels using webinars. He’s built his own multimillion-dollar software company, info product company through the power of live video and webinars.
He’s passionate about bringing these same strategies to your business and mine. Casey is also the best-selling author of a book called Build Your Audience With Live Video, and the creator of TribeMinded Systems, which combines the smart art of automation and engagement to scale a business. So I’d like you to join me in welcoming Casey Zeman to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well, hey, Casey. Super excited to have you on the show today. So welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast.
Casey: Thank you, Doug. Thanks for having me.
Doug: I’m super excited to learn more about you, your platform, and how you’re helping your clients grow their business, generate leads, and increase their sales. Do you want to just give us an overview of your role and what you guys do and how you serve your clients?
Casey: Yeah. I’m the founder of a webinar platform, EasyWebinar, and we have a couple of other software platforms that are going to be rolling out soon. The whole premise of our products is that we want to help people sell better, leveraging webinar experiences. EasyWebinar was designed to be a holistic webinar platform that does live webinars. And then going beyond live webinars into like-live experiences, and also what we consider evergreen webinars, which are webinars that can run 24/7 without you being there, basically just leveraging your best show and across multiple time zones so that no matter where someone is in the world, they can watch it and experience it in a real-time effect, and then take action and get to know you without you always having to be there running a live webinar.
So yeah, that’s what we do for our customers. A lot of our customers are our course creators. Many of them are coaches and consultants. We also have service providers that use our system as well. Anyone who basically is trying to position, and know, like, and trust to sell their programs and their products, those are the type of people that come in and leverage our system. They may start with a live webinar and then move to create an automated webinar, or some just jump straight into creating an automated webinar, leveraging like paid traffic, let’s say. And they create what are considered sales funnels, but leveraging webinars as the sales funnel, in that regard.
Doug: Let’s start at the beginning. You’re saying you’ve got a lot of people that are course creators.
Casey: Yeah.
Doug: Is there like a case study, an example you can walk us through just so we get a really clear picture of what this looks like for the marketer?
Casey: Yeah. We have multiple customers, but let’s say we have Alanna Kaivalya who created a course on, I think it was… I’m not sure where she created the course, whether it was Kajabi or Teachable. I think it was Teachable because she’s also a Teachable customer. She was trying to market that course. It was a yoga certification program, and she was having a really tough time until she came in and built a webinar with our system that was basically a sales experience. At the end of the webinar, she pitched a product, her yoga certification program. It was basically a $1,500 program.
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In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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But people entered into the webinar experience where she was giving free wonderful value, and she was also building know, like, and trust, and she was taking them through different points of understanding their pain and the solution to their pain. And then, obviously, on the webinar, she pitched her product and program and she made sales. So she was driving traffic from Facebook to a… Actually, hers was an automated webinar that she was running.
They registered for the webinar on an EasyWebinar page. They then came to a thank you page where she told them about what the webinar was going to be about. She actually gave them a free gift, which was like a free meditation class right then and there on the thank you page before the webinar started. Then she sent out maybe three or four nurture emails prior to the webinars starting. And then people had joined the webinar. She gave that 45-minute to an hour workshop where she positioned who she was, why she was there to help them. She provided value, value, value, value.
Then she let them know there was an opportunity to join her program. By that time when someone comes through, they were ready to take action and they bought her program. She started using our system. At first, she was doing about 10,000 a month in sales, leveraging Facebook, and our platform. I remember coaching her on a couple of things. Only a few months later she was doing 30, bumped it up to 50. And then, at one point, I talked to her and she was at 100,000 a month in using EasyWebinar as the sales tool, as her sales system basically for selling her program.
So, as a product creator, the things that you hope to work, like, well, you’re maybe just taking them into a VSL or a sales page or things like that, oftentimes they don’t have the same impact or they don’t have the same level of value that inviting someone to a webinar and they show up if they show up to the webinar… You can see a level of commitment when someone shows up to a webinar, whereas someone just comes, they opt into a freebie, and then go to a sales video, they can leave at any time. So may not have the same level of impact. We had a study [crosstalk 00:06:58]-
Doug: Right, because of my expectation’s different. If I go to a VSL, I expect it to be a sales pitch. If I go to a webinar, I expect it to be an education, but I also expect it to be a pitch at the end. But, to your point, there’s education at the front end.
Casey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The cool thing is the webinar can actually be used as a funnel, preceding the authority before the webinar even starts, or having content such as a testimonial video on the countdown page prior to the webinar starts. All these little things and nuances that could help with positioning you before the webinar starts are just ways that close the sales cycle gap. People, by the time they get to the webinar, you’ve maybe indoctrinated them a bit more. By the time they get to the end of the webinar, they’re much more indoctrinated, and now you’re hopefully closing, 10 to 20% of those who are still at your offer, into seeing your offer, into being customers, becoming customers.
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Today’s Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Doug: That’s really cool. Yeah, I mean, as I said, I love the platforms because I just love to learn, the old saying, “Leaders are learners.” And so, it’s not that I don’t read books, I still read books, but I also find myself taking lots of webinars and I’ve bought lots of courses as a result of taking webinars. Have you seen an evolution over the last two, three, four, five years, in the use of, or the success of our technology? Or how has the industry evolved?
Casey: Yeah. I think that webinars, there was a time when people were like, “They have to be PowerPoint presentations or keynote presentations. They have to be really polished. They have to be really dialed in, well, superscripted.” I feel like what we’ve just noticed is a lot of that has changed. Sometimes some really high-performing webinars are where a lot of our customers are just talking to their audience in a really intimate way right into the camera. And sometimes a Q and A webinar can have much higher results than a pre-polished, what is considered a perfect webinar, or a really well-scripted webinar.
Sometimes it’s better to lead with engagement. Two things. I think about two things, and because we see a lot of people not using webinars because there is this preconceived notion that they have to have a perfect webinar, where if they lead with sincerity and value, then they will eventually make sales. I teach sometimes running free, no-pitch webinars that actually sell better, which is completely counterintuitive because they’re like, “Well, when am I going to make a pitch?”
Well, the whole idea is that maybe people can reach out to you on social media, or maybe you can wait for them to hit… Get them on the second webinar or third webinar or fourth webinar. But I think the perception of needing this amazing presentation that’s just going to close somebody a hundred thousand dollars in one webinar, one live webinar, as long as the presentation is perfect, is a myth, basically.
Doug: Well, you’re watching too many other people who obviously are in the… We don’t need the name the brand, the Two Comma Club. But they didn’t start there. I mean, I find this lots of times with clients to say, “Just take some imperfect actions. Fire up your video camera. Do a few lives. Get comfortable looking at the camera. Get comfortable answering questions.” It’s not going to be pretty. It’s like when I started my podcast, I’m a bit nervous to go back and listen to episode one now that we’re 200 in. But I started and 200 later, hopefully, I’ve gotten better than when I started.
Casey: Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole idea, is that you need to start somewhere, and you need to just jump in. And your audience is going to be very forgiving. That’s the thing. I think a lot of people, the biggest fears that they have are fear of looking stupid and fear of maybe even public speaking. But, again, that’s what I’m saying, I think that that has changed where you don’t necessarily need to have the perfect setup. Before we even started this, you notice I’m in my wife’s childhood bedroom. There’s like tie-dye walls, tie-dye paint on the walls, and kid books on my left.
I run a webinar out of this every Thursday at 3:00 PM central to my audience, and I’m in front of the camera, and I’m not freaked out about the fact that my room looks… That they’re like, “Where are you?” The judgment, I think there’s less of that. If someone does judge you, they’re not the right client for you. You have to take action and put your blinders up sometimes. I had someone come through and learn a methodology around a webinar where it was all on the presentation, it was very scripted, and she was getting absolutely no sales.
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Today’s Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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And I said, “Well, what is wrong with it?” And she’s like, “Well, I don’t know, but I don’t feel authentic.” And then I said, “Well, that’s the biggest issue that you’re facing right now, is that you already know your stuff. So try to go a little less scripted, go a little more with just you in front of the camera. Use the visuals to hit home your case, but don’t necessarily rely 100% on it. Show you. Let them see you so they know who you are.
When she did that webinar on the first one, after she switched it around, she did like 19,000 in sales on that webinar. I think it’s because you need to, first off, take the pressure off of what is conceptually the perfect idea. You hear a lot of people saying, “This is going to be the perfect fit.” There is no perfect fit. You have to find your own path. You have to take into consideration different ways of projecting your message. And that’s where you learn about a lot of these things like the perfect webinar.
I teach a six-step webinar strategy, but it does not necessarily slide one is this, slide two is this. It’s more about what an overall webinar experience should have in it. But then you come in and you decide how you want to approach those six steps. You don’t have to always be in your presentation or you don’t always have to have your video on. So I think it’s really about creating an element of engagement in the webinar is really the key, but just people want intimacy. So I think that has changed. The presentation experience has changed a bit more.
Doug: Let’s talk about steps for people that are listening, that aren’t necessarily running webinars. What are some of the first steps in getting started? Obviously, you’ve got to have a message. You’ve got to have an audience that you want to attract. You’re going to have to run some advertising. But can you walk us through the starting steps to get something like this launch?
Casey: Obviously, you need to have a product. The thing that people do in our system, a lot of times they either have a product that is like a course or something that you go to a checkout page and people can buy it right off of the webinar, at the end of the webinar. The other funnel that we see a lot of people doing with our system, webinar funnel, is a high ticket, like coaching or a service funnel where they have like a 20 or 30-minute webinar that pitches a strategy call or “Gets on my calendar” type of thing.
Doug: Okay. That makes sense.
Casey: Yeah. Both of those experiences, the “Get on my calendar” experience, there’s a lot more room for error. If you’re trying to sell a course at the end of a webinar, that takes a lot more time and energy to learn how to position it and sell in the right way. You’re going to have to do a lot of webinars, but to be able to position like a 20 minute, short, a high-impact webinar that touches on the pain that your prospect is feeling, and then what the solution or the uncommon solution is, which is your program, you can have a conversation to see if you can help them, there are more people that can do that in a shorter period of time.
What you need to do is you need to have a platform that runs webinars, like EasyWebinar. You need to know who your avatar is, what your price point is. You have to know what their pain is. You have to understand what their pain is, and you have to talk about the solutions that haven’t worked for them up till now, aggravate the pain. And then you have to discuss your solution, which is most commonly the uncommon solution that they haven’t yet tapped into. That’s basically how you position the webinar itself.
But yeah, I would say, the first thing is that you need to come in and get a webinar platform. And then, like with EasyWebinar, EasyWebinar creates all the pages of a webinar that you would need, such as a registration page. So you need people to register. So you’d schedule a webinar on that page. You can have a video that says something like, “Hey, welcome to this event.” Or actually a video that positions why someone should show up to the webinar. So, “Hey, are you someone who’s been dealing with X, Y, and Z?” This pain or that pain. “My name is Casey Zeman. I’m the founder of EasyWebinar. I’m going to show you how to leverage webinars to actually sell better. So register today. Register today for my webinar all about the six steps to a high-converting sales webinar.”
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Today’s Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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So something like that. You can have a video. You can have headline bullets. So you flesh out the registration page. On your thank, you page, after they register, reiterate why they need to come. So you have a video on that page that says like, “Awesome. Thank you for registering. And be sure to show up to the webinar,” because of each point of a webinar flow or pages in a webinar back in a conversion. So, you’re trying to get people to register on the registration page. On the thank you page, you’re trying to get people to show up to the webinar. So maybe like a bribe[crosstalk 00:18:00]-
Doug: That makes sense like you’re saying. Each thing has its own job to do, and you’re not going to get people to go from the registration page and put their credit card in. You need to get them to register for the webinar first. And then, you said like gets them to show up and then one step at a time.
Casey: Exactly. They show up. You encourage them to show up by reiterating why they need to show up and even having maybe webinar bribes such as a worksheet that they can fill out while they’re on the webinar, type of thing. And if you’re positioning a strategy call at the end, maybe you can audit that worksheet for them as an incentive for them to actually sign up or get on your calendar, go through an application process, get on your calendar. So you do the thank you page. Then you have like five emails going out prior to the event starting.
Maybe the event’s in a couple of days from now. So you have a two-day email going out, or one day before email, a three-hour before email, one hour before. And then an email that goes out at the time that the webinar’s starting. So they get enough emails to show up. And then, when they show up, you go in and you start with creating a buzz. So let them know what to expect in the webinar. So you say, “Hello, welcome, everybody. Welcome to wherever you’re coming in from the world. Let us know. I see John, Jane, Rebecca, Susan, Robert comes into the room. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Maybe drop a poll in there saying, “Hey, I want to ask you very quickly, what’s stopping you from doing webinars? And then you can have like four different poll options and they can choose which one makes sense to them, and they feel like they’re getting engagement right out of the gate, which keeps them there. The whole idea of the beginning of the webinar is you want to keep a sticking factor, so create an expectation, and excitement, the anticipation of what they’re going to be gaining on the webinar. What transformation are they going to be having on the webinar? Then you go through the webinar experience.
Now, again, I have like six steps that I teach on this that actually, if you go to easywebinar.com, under masterclass, at the top of the browser bar, I have a class that teaches the six steps of a high-converting sales webinar. So I won’t go into tons of detail on that. But you go through a flow, a webinar flow that really does the position. It talks about your story, positions how your story relates to them, and talks about their problem, shares a good bit of value. Maybe like some shifts that you teach.
As an example, what I oftentimes tell people if they’re having a tough time trying to figure out how to create a webinar, is what program or course do you have right now? Do you have four modules in your course? Well, each of those four modules could be the pillars in your webinar that you’re teaching, and you teach the what and the why in the webinar, so what it is and why it’s important, each of those four pillars. But how they’re going to achieve the results is by coming into your program. I mean, that’s my 10-second version of explaining what you should be doing in a webinar.
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In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Then you sell the webinar at the end and you make sales. Then you have follow-up emails and different strategies for maybe doing encore presentations. The way we built the software was to be able to do that in a flexible way where you can actually have encore presentations of that same live webinar. The whole idea is that we want to help you increase sales, basically. So yeah, those are some of the pieces. But at the end of the day, you need to probably go to training on how to run webinars and you need software also.
Doug: Let’s move then to that point more on the training and technology side. I mean, you’ve got obviously a lot of different platforms that you guys can integrate to. So, for marketers that are listening, how tech-savvy did they need to be and what tools do they need to know how to use, to plug all this stuff together, make it work?
Casey: Yeah. The thing is like now most computers that are pretty new have good enough in-board microphones, and good enough video as well, video cameras. The other thing is that some software platforms like EasyWebinar are a browser-based platform. So you don’t have to download anything right to your machine. And people don’t have to download to their machine. Your attendees just show up in the browser. They can watch on their phone or watch in the browser for a live webinar or an automated webinar. So, in that regard, there’s nothing to download. So they don’t have to do anything.
What I oftentimes recommend is I have a Logitech C920 camera. It’s an older 1080 pixel camera that still works to this day. And I use that for all of my live webinars. Right now I’m not in my office, but you and I have the same microphone. If I was in my Los Angeles office, I have the Heil microphone, which is a great podcasting mic. But you know what? All you really need for a microphone is some USB Blue Yeti or snowball microphone to have decent enough sound. And that’s really all you need and decent internet.
What I would always recommend is try to be hard-wired into your internet source. Otherwise, just try to be on maybe a 5G network or closeout some other browser windows if you’re going to go live, those types of things. And if you’re going to be pulling from WiFi. Yeah, so those are just some ideas on the type of tech you need. If you’re going to create a presentation, you may need Keynote or PowerPoint or even… Sorry, Canva is really good for creating presentations, or Google presentations is also a good one. There’s multiple a multitude of them.
We have people that actually just use EasyWebinar for all of their webinar stuff. They don’t even use a different email system or autoresponder, and they’ve made sales off of just using our system. They don’t have a third-party page builder. They don’t have any third-party email systems like ActiveCampaign. They don’t use anything else. But we do have a lot of the people that are like the Amy Porterfield, and those types of people who use our system, they use our system, plus they build their own HTML pages and add EasyWebinar to those pages. Or they use ClickFunnels for their landing pages and then add EasyWebinar to the widget, our registration bot to those pages.
They, of course, use platforms like Infusionsoft, or Ontraport, or some of our customers use Salesforce or HubSpot. You can integrate all those with our platform. But the way we look at it is that I think it’s important to be able to have just even a minimum viable funnel or a minimum viable experience. In that regard, you just don’t really need anything else except EasyWebinar to do all that. But if you did have an email system like ActiveCampaign, you could push all the leads that are coming in through that webinar registration into your email list, so now you’re building your email list that way as well.
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In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Doug: That’s cool. So it gives you flexibility. I mean, like you said, for the listeners that have got systems in place and they’re already obviously generating lots of sales online using, like Aweber or ActiveCampaign or Keap, that’s great. But for someone who wants to start, great to know that you can just log in by one platform, get launched, start creating some revenue immediately instead of buying six pieces of software, and trying to learn them all and integrate them all. Just show up one place, put your credit card in, and start running ads, and start generating new sales.
Casey: Exactly.
Doug: Yeah. I think lots of times we overcomplicate. I mean, what I’ve noticed in the travel that I’ve done over the years and talking to other marketers, it’s not uncommon to talk to people and go, “Oh yeah, I’ve got ActiveCampaign, and I have Drip, and I’ve got Keap, and I use ClickFunnels, and I use Unbalance. It’s like, why do you have so many platforms? And they bought them all, but they don’t necessarily know how to use them all. I mean, they’re sitting idle, and they’re still not generating sales. It’s like, start really simple. Start with something that you can take a credit card today and earn some money today.
Casey: Yeah. We wanted to be a product that was basically like that, like holistically you could run your entire business on it, leveraging webinars. As I said, we have customers who literally just use everything in our system and run Facebook traffic to it, and they’re making a thousand dollars a day, and without having an email system added to it. One of my coaching clients does this. And she was listening and she knows that we have all these advanced funnels that we can integrate with, a reregistration funnel that we use with Infusionsoft, or you can use ActiveCampaign with it.
And she’s like, “Well, should I be adding all that to my webinar? Should I be adding SMS texts, and should I be adding Facebook Messenger to my funnel? And I was like, “If you do anything, you need to clone what you’re doing and then create it in an instance that is separate from what you’re doing right now.” Because of her webinar, for whatever reason, it works. It works effectively. And it’s just her in front of her camera. She doesn’t have a polished presentation, and she’s not using triggers for people that showed up, that didn’t show up. She’s not using any of that stuff. And she’s still generating really quality sales.
Oftentimes, that’s what I say. I’m like, “Sometimes less is more, or sometimes less is better than anything,” less to break, basically. So I’m saying, if you want to do all the bells and whistles that we do, sometimes on our funnels, or some of our clients do, then do it, but do it in a separate instance where you can drive traffic to it and then compare the two, and improve upon it. But again, the whole idea is like, you want to just get the minimum viable experience.
You’re looking for testing your offer right away on a live webinar and getting people into sales conversations. That will help you to know if people really resonate with what you’re selling and doing. And then, eventually, maybe you can sell it off of a webinar, but you-
Doug: And build on it, right? Better to find out right away that people aren’t interested than to spend a year building the ultimate whatever it is, solve-your-problem course, to find out that nobody cares and no one’s going to put their credit card down.
Casey: Oh yeah. We have people that use our EasyWebinar to pre-sell a course, and then they use EasyWebinar to run a course because they create a runway. They say like, “Oh, for the next 30, 60 days, I’m going to run free no-pitch webinars to build my email list.” And then just value, value, value. Then I’m going to open up my course and say, “I’m running over the next six weeks a course live. I’m running my life course and it’s called X, Y, and Z.” And this is what they do for a brand new course. This is how I did it.
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In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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The first course I ever launched took me six months to build. And by the time I launched it, I couldn’t even sell it. I didn’t know how to sell it. It was all about YouTube. And then I had to change it around because eight months later, YouTube’s interface changed. And so I created this behemoth of a course without even testing it, without even pre-selling it. But then I started using webinars and actually selling it. So it actually turned out fine. But I was suffering for a long, long time before then. But then my second course I ever launched out was a four-week program that I pre-sold. I got 20 to 30 people in at a thousand dollars. Then I ran it for the next four weeks live.
Doug: That’s cool. Yeah.
Casey: And then I used EasyWebinar to run the course to two sessions per week. And then, those became what the course was. I put them in a membership site and then sold it for $500.
Doug: So you learn by doing. And I think your example there is a great example of you… Sometimes you’ll hear people saying, “Oh, well I don’t have the budget due to this. I don’t have the budget to do that.” I think a budget sometimes could be a disadvantage. I was working with a client last year that had spent close to $100,000 building out an Infusionsoft sales funnel. The group they had hired used every field you could possibly use in Infusionsoft bought one and they weren’t generating any leads yet. So they spent a whole year and a hundred grand and didn’t have a single sale as a result of it, opposed to coming in, like you said, setting up a very simple system, get out there, do some testing immediately, get the feedback immediately.
Then as you have sales, then you can scale and you can add all sorts of stuff if that’s what you want. But my approach would be, to the girl that’s working well, that’s got some webinar working well, I’d rather spend the money on driving more advertising and more users than adding more technology.
Casey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Agility is such a wonderful thing that we have the capability of doing when we’re starting off with a new business. Again, the problem that I find people doing it, just like what you said, they spend tons of money on the preparation without the actual preparation being the preparation of knowing if their product is going to serve an audience. They put systems before that, and systems from-
Doug: Systems before sales.
Casey: Yeah. Systems have to come after-sales, right?
Doug: Yeah.
Casey: Both of my masterclasses at easywebinar.com at the top are about this, where you can systemize running webinars, where even if you have 30 people showing up to a webinar on a weekly basis, you should be able to close 10% of them. If you have a $1,000 offer, you just start running this webinar more and more and more. I was terrible when I started off doing webinars. I was a constant stutterer. One of my first webinars that had more than 200 people on it, I ran it in this house in the dead of winter in the back trailer where there was a heater blaring and I had a busted up PC. I overshared. It was a two-hour hour webinar where I just gave so much content, so much content. But all said and done, I sold 20 of my $197 product off that call.
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SHARE THIS POST: THE BEST WEBINAR PLATFORMS REACH YOUR AUDIENCE EVERYWHERE
In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Doug: That’s cool.
Casey: But that’s the thing, is I sucked, but I still did fine. I needed to just generate revenue. My goal for selling my course was I needed to get out almost losing my house because I went from being in real estate. In 2008, the market crashed 2009 and 10, and I was pivoting out of real estate into something else. It wasn’t until like 2011 that I came online and became a course creator by 2012. But by that time, I almost lost my house twice. My relationship with my wife was strained because we are going in serious debt. And so, I needed this stuff to work.
I created this course and I launched it out. The only way I was ever able to sell was to start to do these webinars. And I just started doing these no-pitch webinars for a long time just to try to build my email list up. And in that first year of doing these no-pitch webinars, I built an email list of about 14,000. And then, I was able to start doing pitched webinars, and I sold about $245,000 worth of my core sales in 2012. I just learned by trial, by fire, basically, that I just needed to take imperfect action to make connections.
I wasn’t getting a massive amount of people showing up to my webinars. I was getting maybe 30 a week. Every time I ran a live webinar, maybe 30 people. And if I ran-
Doug: That’s a cool process, though. I mean, I like what you did because you started with, like you said, free to build your list. And I’m not saying that this is everybody’s scenario, but I think the expectation if you’re getting something that is free, is going to be less than if you’re paying somebody a thousand dollars for the webinar. So people show up. You wow them with how you can help them solve their problems. There’s no ask at the end other than to make sure they’re on your list to get more information. So there’s going to be a feeling of reciprocity when you come back to them at some point and say, “Hey, I’ve got to fill in the blank for this course now.” And they open your email. That’s cool.
Casey: Exactly. I mean, by that time, they were asking me, “Do you have anything I can buy?” They were.
Doug: Can I give you my credit card number?
Casey: I’m ready to purchase. What is there to purchase? Because that’s our biggest fear. It’s like we just don’t want to ask for the sale. But the whole idea is it’s not the sale. You have the solution. They’re asking for the solution. Give them the solution. You’re doing a disservice if you’re not. That’s what I realized, is that I was scared of selling. But the fear of selling was that I was looking at sales in the wrong way. But anyway, again, you can leverage webinars to systemize selling your stuff, and you don’t have to have a ton of people.
As I said, I had 30 people showing up to my webinar. If I have 30 people and I sell a $1,000 product, I should be able to close three of them into buying on every single webinar. And that’s what I ultimately did. So I was generating about, from when I started out, $12,000 a month. And then I exponentially grew that more and more. More people came because I was also consistent with how I ran it, like every Wednesday I was running it. So I was just getting more people showing up. And that was how I built it up, basically.
Doug: Were you running the same webinar every week then?
Casey: Yeah. Mostly I was running the same webinar. Sometimes I would take like six core topics and recycle them over and over again. Right?
Doug: Yeah.
Casey: But a lot of times, I was doing the same webinar, and people were coming back to that webinar. Right. If they didn’t buy on that first one that they came to, maybe three weeks later, they’re coming to that one and buying off that one.
Doug: Sure. Yeah.
Casey: And there are new questions that are popping in. Someone may come in and they have a new objection or a new question. That helps motivate someone who’s been consistently coming in to now take action. So you’ll see a trend if you see a lot of people, similar people, coming into your webinars. Chances are they’re a longer sales cycle. They need more nurturing and you need to answer their main objection as to why they’re not taking action.
Doug: Then there’s an opportunity to sell right through to done-free consulting services. I mean, I can think of webinars that I went to that was free webinars, and then I bought the course. I went to the course, that this person’s really smart, and I really like what they’re teaching, but I gave them the thousand dollars for the course. I just don’t want to do the work, and then ultimately hired their company to do all the work. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t have to stop just with selling the course. Obviously, there’s an opportunity for people to approach you and say, “Hey, I really love what you’re doing. I just want to pay you or your team to execute on that for me.”
Casey: Exactly. Yeah.
Doug: What’s some of the bad advice you hear out there around webinars, running webinars, not running webinars?
Casey: The bad advice I hear about webinar-
Doug: Well, there are lots of people who want to give advice. I mean, you obviously, you’re deeply ingrained in this, and this is something you live every day. So you know the metrics, you know the numbers. I am always telling people, “Know your numbers, know your numbers, know your numbers,” and almost nobody knows the numbers. So you must hear people giving advice, that’s taking your clients or potential clients and sending them down the wrong path.
Casey: Yeah. Let me think about that. You know-
Doug: You could Tim Ferriss for that question. I got that out of his book, and I thought that’s a really good question.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, I think that I go back to this idea that you don’t have to have a perfect webinar to be able to generate sales. I think it consistently perpetuates that people don’t take action because they think they have to have this perfect PowerPoint presentation when in actuality they don’t. And oftentimes, it can work or it can be a hindrance. And so, I don’t think there’s a one size fits all when it comes to webinars. And I guess that’s where I have the bigger problem, is not everything fits one specific way. So there is that.
Also, there are platforms and people that will call an automated webinar live when it’s actually prerecorded. And so, there are other systems out there that do similar things too that we do. But I feel like sometimes people aren’t leading with enough of the integrity of like saying, “Hey, this is a streamed workshop. And it’s streamed in real-time, so it has the experience of life, but it’s not you live in the room.” So if you say, “Hey, come to my live webinar,” and you’re running an automated webinar that’s a prerecorded webinar, that’s not accurate.
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SHARE THIS POST: THE BEST WEBINAR PLATFORMS REACH YOUR AUDIENCE EVERYWHERE
In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Doug: Thanks for saying that. I hadn’t thought about that when I asked you that question, but that’s one of my pet peeves, is just be honest, out of integrity. If you lie to me to get me there, I’m going to expect that you’re going to lie to me after I give you my money. So this is where the relationship will stop.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is there are different types of software, similar to ours, I’d say, in the sense that they can run automated webinars. But, as an example, we don’t have a simulated chat feature where you can act like a Fred asked a question or Jane asked a question. We did it on purpose because it just felt a little too slimy. It’s just like, “I don’t know.” I mean, it’s like you’re manipulating someone a bit more in that regard. Now, you can take those same questions that you want someone to hear, but ask them yourself. Not necessarily make them that somebody in your chat is asking.
So we don’t have a simulated chat. And we have a lot of people that sometimes say, “Hey, do you have simulated chat?” And we’re like, “No, we don’t. But we don’t see that it affects sales for the people that use our system in an authentic way.” People that use it, they make sales. But I think that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t make sales. And in fact, you will repel people as well if they know that you’re not being authentic.
And so, we lead off the idea of, if you can have a third party live app in there, like in our system, you can have a Facebook Messenger, you can have a Twitter feed, you can have a question box. You can deliver polls and offers and all those things, just be respectful of the medium, and be respectful of the people that are on. And obviously, if these are future customers, don’t dupe them. So I think that’s the-
Doug: Yeah. That’s great advice.
Casey: Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of obvious, right?
Doug: Well, I think it’s obvious. But I’ve been on calls and have had those conversations, especially now with everybody in our current time in lockdown or coming out of lockdown, that would typically run live events. Then they’re the recording them, and they’re going, “Well, should we just release all of them, replay them as if they’re life?” And it’s like, “No, don’t do that.” Yeah. So great advice. Who’s one guest do you think I absolutely have to have in my podcast?
Casey: I mean, do you know who Chris Harder is?
Doug: I don’t.
Casey: Okay. So Chris Harder is an amazing guy. He was in a Mastermind with me. He has a podcast, I think it’s For The Love of Money. Let me just see, Chris Harder. Yeah. For The Love of Money Podcast, an awesome guy. He is someone I was in Mastermind with, Lewis Howes’s mastermind. Chris would be an exceptional person to talk to. He helps people with getting clear with their money mindset. He and his wife Laurie, they create massive impact in the world and I just love what they’re doing. And so, he would be somebody who I definitely would reach out to. He’s just doing some really-
Doug: That’s excellent. I’ve not had someone on my show to speak about that, but it totally makes sense. I have experienced customers who can’t sell past their own current financial situation. So whatever it is, whatever their earning is, they just can’t sell past that. So if they’re earning 5,000 a month, they can’t sell a $10,000 product. So obviously it’s a mindset thing. I mean, they have the ability to, but they just can’t think through it. So are you able to make an introduction for me?
Casey: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ll do it. I’ll reach out to you.
Doug: That’d be awesome. So what’s the best way Casey, for people to connect with you, learn more? I mean, I’ve been on your website. It’s super easy to navigate. Like you said, right at the very top there, it says,” Hey masterclasses.” So it’s an easy dropdown to find. So how do you want them to connect with you guys?
Casey: Yeah. I mean, the two things. Just direct message me or connect with me on Instagram, because I’m always showing pictures of my family or stuff like that. But I also have content that we’re putting out there about weekly webinars that we’re running and things like that. So @CaseyZeman is on Instagram. You can follow me there. And I’d love to hear from you. Just reach out. Then if you want to go to easywebinar.com, E-A-S-Y webinar dot com, yeah, that was the right…
You can go to the top. It says masterclasses, and just choose one of the masterclasses that makes sense for you. Both of them are quality, great masterclasses. One will teach you six steps to a high-converting sales webinar. The other one kind of positions more of for if you’re ready to maybe scale up with webinars, sell your stuff 24/7. That one is a good one. Both are really good webinars to just sink your teeth into. There are offers at the end of those webinars to pick up EasyWebinar at special webinar-only offers plus bonuses. But if you decide-
Doug: There you go. Good man. Taking your own advice.
Casey: Yeah, but if you decide not to grab those, EasyWebinar, we have a free 14-day trial and you can take us for a spin. Depending on where you’re at in your business, you could choose which package makes sense for you at that point.
Doug: Well, that’s awesome. I just want to say thanks so much for taking the time. The world has changed forever and people now are online more than ever. So I think you’re obviously in the right place at the right time this time. Real estate wouldn’t have been a good place to be when the market turned down. But with the market turned down now and people being online, and you help them solve the, “Hey, how do I generate sales?” you’re definitely in the right place to capitalize.
Casey: Yeah. I remember what that felt like, the recession, and I was like, “I need to create hopefully a recession-proof business.”
Doug: Man, I want to do that again, right?
Casey: Whether it’s online products or what have you. But the thing of that has always been at the back of my mind.
Doug: Well, and I think the great news, moving forward from today, is I’m never going to have to have a conversation with anybody that says, “I don’t need to be online.”
Casey: Exactly, right, that-
Doug: That conversation is over.
Casey: That conversation is over. Right. Yeah.
Doug: Mr. Retail Store, you can’t say that anymore. You can, but, well, you probably won’t be reopening.
Casey: Yeah, I mean everybody, it’s going to be a… It won’t be such a backburner idea. It will be moved more to the forward. It will be prioritized in a different way I think now, which is good for all of us.
Doug: Well, that was awesome. I want to say thanks again for tuning in. So, listeners, we’ll make sure the show notes are transcribed. So for those of you who like to listen and read at the same time, we will have all the information details that Casey shared, as well as the link to his Instagram account and easywebinar.com will be on the website. So if you’re listening to this while you’re driving or at the gym or someplace else, don’t worry about it. It’ll be in the show notes. So thanks again for Casey for joining us today. I just want to say thank you for tuning in and listening, and we look forward to serving you in our next episode.
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SHARE THIS POST: THE BEST WEBINAR PLATFORMS REACH YOUR AUDIENCE EVERYWHERE
In Todays Podcast Episode We Discuss The Best Webinar Platforms, Webinar Software, And The Growth Of Online Webinar Platform Functionality.
Webinar platforms can be used as a funnel to reach your audience. Create authority before the webinar starts. Share content like a testimonial video.
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Get in touch with Casey:
- Web – EasyWebinar
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- EasyWebinar on Facebook
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- Casey on Instagram
- Casey on Twitter