The ultimate guide on how to create & host your webinar

How to create a webinar step by step

Step 1: Define your webinar

First you must define the product that you’re going to sell. In this instance, it will be your course.

After you’ve defined the course you want to sell, you need to craft a compelling webinar theme that will naturally flow into the sale of your course. Depending on your audience sophistication and interest, you’ll want to position this in a way that the largest number of people sign up.

In the case of Scott’s webinar, he decided not to disclose anything about Udemy on the registration page. He did this for a few reasons:

He surveyed his email list, and it turned out people were most interested in “creating passive income” and creating enough of it to replace their full-time paycheck versus creating a Udemy course specifically.

Some people have no idea what Udemy is.

Some people do know what Udemy is and might immediately thin-slice this presentation as something they’re not interested in based on a very limited experience with the site.

Sometimes you need to sell people what they want and give them what they need.

Here is a link to the exact survey Scott used to define my positioning.

Step 2: Create the webinar content

Once you’ve determined your webinar title and positioning, it’s time to create the actual content. From there, you’ll also want to do a dry run.

There are a variety of ways to do this, but here is how Scott did it:

Create an outline 

First create a brief outline of how the presentation will flow. For Scott’s webinars, he always does the following:

1. Introduction and background
2. A personal story as it relates to this topic, during which you can establish relatability and empathy—“I’ve been where you might be right now.”
3. Establish three or four major teachings. This is your “content.”
4. Present your course offering or advanced training.
5. Question and Answers

Write a script 

From here, use your outline to write a script for the webinar.

This helps you think through everything you want to touch on. The balance should be 80 percent free content and value and 20 percent selling only after you’ve given a lot of free value.

Design slides 

After you have your script, use that to create a well-designed slide presentation that accompanies your script. You should aim for the whole presentation to be 60 to 90 minutes. To give you an idea, Scott’s script was 40 pages long in Google Docs and the presentation was 90 minutes long.

Create your offer 

The offer is basically how you’re going to sell your course. It can be as simple as selling your course as is, or you can offer bonuses if people buy the course before a certain time period.

For Scott’s webinar, he sold the “Udemy Fast Track” course, but also bundled in six of his other courses and a friend’s course called “Double Your Udemy Sales.”

The idea here is to sweeten the deal so much that buying is a no brainer. In this instance, for $297 people were getting $1430 value (1133+297) for $297.

Again, you’ll want to make this offer time sensitive so that people feel a sense of urgency to buy. You can even go as far as giving people who purchase within one hour of the webinar an additional bonus to incentivize people to not only attend, but also strike while they’re excited about your offering.

Step 3: Set a webinar date

You know your audience and the times that will be easiest for them to attend the webinar best, but as a general rule of thumb, we recommend hosting live events on Wednesday evenings EST.

This allows you to do your promotional activity early in the week and close the offer out on the weekend. We’ll go into the ideal schedule in a bit more depth shortly.

Step 4: Create a registration page for your webinar

You can see the registration page for my webinar above. We highly recommend using Leadpages for this part of the process. They have a ton of great out of the box templates as well as plug and play integrations with most email providers and webinar software.

The most important function of the registration page is that you have a way to capture registrants information to remind and direct everyone who signs up to your webinar. You don’t have to use leadpages, but make sure whatever you use can accomplish this. Again, a Google form would be the most basic tool for this.

Best webinar platforms & software:

My software stack which we highly recommend is the following:

• Webinar Registration Page: Leadpages
• Webinar Hosting: GoToWebinar
• Mailing List: Aweber
• Course Hosting: Teachable

Because Leadpages allows me to integrate directly with both GoToWebinar and Aweber, as soon as someone registers, they’re immediately confirmed with GoToWebinar as well as added to a special mailing list for the event.

GoToWebinar sends reminders leading up to the event and Aweber allows me to communicate with this audience on a more personalized level leading up to the event as well as after.

Step 5: Create your webinar emails

Before driving signups, we recommend creating a series of emails for each part of the webinar funnel which includes sign ups, registrant reminders, and post event follow-up.

Registration 

If you already have an email list or are partnering with someone else who has an email list, we think it’s appropriate to create two emails with a call to action for people to register. The first will be sent to everyone on that list. The second can be a follow-up with a title change to people who did not open the first email. You should appeal to a slightly different hot button in the subject line of your second email.

Email Title 1: Passive Income

Email Title 2 Sent to Unopens: One Way To Fund Your [X]

Here is the first email for Scott’s webinar:

Reminder emails 

Once someone signs up for the webinar, you still need to make sure people show up.

To do this you should be reminding all registrants leading up to the webinar the details like date and time as well as all the awesome things they are going to learn. Depending upon lead time, we recommend sending reminders at minimum 24 hours and one hour in advance of the actual event.

Follow-up emails 

Many people who signed up for your webinar will not have actually attended the event. In addition, many attendees that attended will still be on the fence about whether or not they should purchase your product. This is why you need to send follow-up emails to people after the webinar to push them to ideally take both actions.

Depending on whether you want to try and segment people who attended the webinar versus non-attendees (which you can do in GoToWebinar), you should focus the first one to two messages on watching the replay and the last one to two follow-ups on purchasing the product you’re selling.

We like having all of these emails written in advance, so that we don’t feel like we have to scramble to get all the pieces together in order to maximize the results from the event the week of.

Step 6: Drive traffic to your registration page

Once you have all your emails and webinar content queued up, it’s time to promote your webinar and push people to sign up for the webinar.

For Scott’s webinar, he sent two email blasts out to his email list and some light social media. The first day he sent it to everyone on my email list. And as mentioned earlier the following morning he sent an email to the segment of people who didn’t open that email.

If you don’t have an email list, you could drive traffic to this page by:

• Social media
• Facebook ads
• Guest blog posts
• Partnering with someone with a list to do a joint webinar

Because you’ve done a lot of the preparation work beforehand, this is really the last new step in the process. After this, it’s all just about executing everything you’ve already created from emails to attendees to the presentation and follow-up process.

Example webinar execution schedule

By sending out the mailer on Monday, you give people a few days to register for the event as well as time to remind attendees. Give prospects time to register for a time in the near future, otherwise, they’ll sign up and forget about it. It’s always best to strike while the iron is hot.

We’d recommend Wednesday and Thursday to host the actual webinar because generally, people are less busy than say perhaps a Friday night.

Lastly, we like to always make the offer and replay expire around 48 hours after the live presentation, which in this instance was on Friday. If you leave the replay and offer it up forever, there won’t be a strong enough sense of urgency to watch and subsequently buy the product, which is why time-boxing it is so effective.

If someone isn’t able to watch it prior to the expiration and emails you, you can always just send them a link to the video off the record.

Scott’s ideal one-week webinar promotion schedule 

There are a ton of components to this process and timing is very important. Below is what we believe to be the ideal execution schedule for a webinar and the exact one we used for the webinar outlined in this post.

Step 7: Host the webinar

Now, you’ve learned how to create a webinar and done most of the heavy lifting at this point, but you need to make sure to bring your A game during the actual webinar.

Best webinar tools and tips:

• Always host the Q&A session at the end to make sure people know that is when you will be answering most questions.
• Stand during the webinar if your desk set up accommodates it.
• Use a microphone if you have one.
• Have someone manage the chat for you, if you can, during the presentation.
• Introduce some quick exercises or even questions that make it more interactive than just a monologue.

Know also that every time you do this, you will get better and more comfortable. So don’t worry if you don’t come out of the gates perfectly.

Step 8: Put up your replay

Immediately after the webinar, you’re going to want to export the webinar recording (often known as a replay), which can be done automatically with GoToWebinar or even hangouts on air. This will be sent out to everyone who registered.

You should host this on a new page that includes a place for attendees to buy the product and ask questions.

If you really want to get fancy, here are a few other best practices:

• Remove the ability for people to be able to fast forward the content so that you can control the experience very similar to a live presentation
• Have the purchase button be a dynamic element that displays only after people have watched a certain amount. Again, you don’t want someone making a snap judgement on whether or not they should buy your product until you’ve given a chance to sell it
• Display a timer on the top that displays how long viewers have before it gets taken down

Note that only after someone has watched the webinar for 60 minutes, a yellow button will appear that allows watchers to purchase.

Again, the reason it’s better to time release is so that you have a chance to sell someone before exposing your offer.

Step 9: Drive registrants to the replay

After you’ve put your replay page up, it’s now time to send out those emails you constructed!

These emails will all look pretty similar and the goal is the same: do everything you can to get anyone who signed up for the webinar to watch the presentation, if they haven’t already, with the goal of them ultimately purchasing.

If you’re not sure when to schedule these, check out the ideal schedule image above again.

Step 10: Analytics review

After you’ve executed this whole process, it’s always a best practice to review the analytics of your entire funnel.

This will help understand where you can improve, and provide potential affiliates who might be interested in doing a joint webinar to their audience where you perform the same presentation and go 50/50 on the profits.

Here are the results of Scott’s funnel:

Mariah Coz

Mariah has come a long way since her first webinar in 2015 and has been using webinars to generate leads and sales successfully since then. She has a selection of free webinars that people can access if they sign up for her email list:

Jenna Kutcher

Marketing educator and influencer Jenna Kutcher sells many courses on social media and marketing. For each of her courses that she has, she has hosted a webinar that briefly explains the topic of her course and how people can use it.

And then, at the end of each webinar, she invites people to sign up for her courses so they could further implement the strategies she covered in the webinar.

Kristine Fernandez

Lastly, let’s look at an example of a webinar that’s not free, but just as effective in driving sales and generating leads. Kristine Fernandez is a fashion influencer and stylist, and she sells a webinar on how to build the perfect wardrobe.

FAQs

What is a webinar?

Webinars are free online trainings that people can tune into live or watch later as a recording. To attend a webinar, registrants sign up with their email address and get access to a private link. Webinars are usually hosted by an authority in a given niche, or someone who is beginning to establish themselves as an authority and has seen some success.

What is the best time to host a webinar?

You know your audience and the times that will be easiest for them to attend the webinar best, but as a general rule of thumb, we recommend hosting live webinar events on Wednesday evenings EST. This allows you to do your promotional activity early in the week and close the offer out on the weekend.

What’s the difference between Zoom Webinar vs. Meeting?

Webinars are often hosted by one expert, who gives a prepared presentation with an accompanying slide deck. Interview formats are also common, in which a host interviews an expert guest. Panel discussions are less common but allow you to harness the expertise of several guests at once. While attendees can engage with the host via the chat, unlike a Zoom meeting, they cannot unmute themselves and be seen or heard.