Webinars are the core offering of my $4K/mo. side hustle — a membership group for law firm marketers called Marketing for Justice. Each month, members get access to a live webinar focused on a specific digital marketing channel or strategy, hosted by a guest expert.
It goes without saying that in a membership group charging $249/mo., the core offering has to be strong, and there is little room for error.
In almost two years of running monthly webinars, here are my top 5 tips and tricks for keeping participants engaged and maximizing impact:
1. Don’t call it a webinar
Almost three years after the pandemic and resulting Zoom-ania hit the business world, people are webinar-ed out. The hard truth is that most business webinars (marketing webinars in particular) overpromise and underdeliver. Fresh insights are rare, engagement is low, and drop-off rates are high.
It’s no wonder that most emails promoting a free webinar go unread.
I’m going to dig into the actual running of the webinar in a moment, but in the meantime, the best advice I can offer other aspiring entrepreneurs interested in webinars is this: don’t call it a webinar.
By simply rebranding your webinar as an “online event,” or, as I call them at Marketing for Justice, an “online workshop,” you immediately differentiate your offering from the kitschy, dime-a-dozen webinars flooding prospects’ inboxes.
In marketing, words matter. Do yourself a favor and make your “webinar” stand out from the pack by calling it something else.
2. Follow the 90–10 rule
Your online event (remember, we’re not calling it a webinar) is not about selling. At least not directly. The most successful online events are focused on one thing: providing value to your audience through education.
Most folks offering online events don’t get it. Instead, they pack their programs full of hard sells and, to be honest, psychologically manipulative tactics designed to convert prospects on the spot.
The only problem with this approach is that it’s a complete turnoff. Participants don’t show up because they want an infomercial — they want honest-to-goodness knowledge-sharing. They’re not dumb — they know that your end goal is to sell them something — but they’re not going to stick around for a glorified sales pitch.
It’s best to stick to the “90–10” rule in which you make sure that at least 90% of your content is educational and a maximum of 10% is promotional.
On Marketing for Justice’s online workshops, I pitch my membership program just once, at the very end of the event — even after the closing Q&A section — and I keep it to less than two minutes.
Save the more focused sales message for the follow-up email sequence that goes out after the workshop (more on this in a future blog post — subscribe to my Medium blog for the latest as I document my entrepreneurial journey).
3. Keep the deck simple
Participants may join your online event hoping for education, but they’re not hoping for an academic lecture. Nevertheless, so many slide decks for online programs resemble those for doctoral-level coursework, littered with complicated diagrams, obscure jargon, and, worse yet, full paragraphs (ugh).
If you’re going to hold people’s attention and ensure they remain engaged until the end, your deck needs to be:
- Short
- Succinct
- Story-focused
Short and succinct
#1 and #2 are pretty straightforward — for an hour-long online event, strive for no more than 10–15 slides, and limit each slide to 3–5 bullet points with a single relevant image, graphic, or icon.
An online event follows the same rule as an in-person speaking engagement: you should speak about the slides, not simply recite them.
Story-focused
#3 is a little trickier but maybe the most important.
Keeping your online event “story-focused” means emphasizing a single, overarching narrative, and making the participant the hero.
Identify a problem facing your audience, present a solution, and share how they can use it to make their lives easier.
4. Use video chat — not the standard “webinar” setup
This simple choice has probably had the biggest impact on making my online workshops successful. Webinars, by their very nature, are impersonal. Traditional “webinar” technology puts the spotlight entirely on the presenter, ignoring the audience and relegating them to a clunky chat box (if that’s even available).
I recommend that you avoid traditional “webinar” software entirely.
To increase engagement, host your online event on a platform that allows everyone to participate via video — and even unmute themselves to ask questions.
At Marketing for Justice, we use Zoom to host our online workshops, but I use its standard video chat setup, not the one for traditional “webinars.” You have to pay a bit more for a Pro account able to host hundreds of video participants, but it’s well worth it.
Throughout the online workshop, we encourage participants to unmute or raise a virtual hand using Zoom’s built-in features when they have questions. I also set participant video to enabled by default, and most remain visible the entire time.
It’s a seemingly small change, but one that dramatically increases engagement.
5. Have a moderator
The most effective way to keep participants engaged and increase your online event’s impact is to make it conversational. But that’s a tall task when most online programs are led by a single content expert — there’s simply not enough bandwidth to present the material, answer participants’ questions, and prompt them for further discussion.
A moderator working alongside the content expert can help ensure that your online event doesn’t fall victim to the “talking head” format that plagues so many traditional webinars.
In an ideal situation, the moderator will:
- Serve as the online event “emcee,” introducing the topic and content expert, and laying out expectations
- Monitor the chat for questions and prompt contemporaneous discussion with the content expert and participants
- Monitor participants’ video feeds for indications of further questions and encourage them to share and engage in dialogue with the content expert
- Break up any monotonous sections by (politely) interrupting the content expert with a relevant observation or, better yet, humor
Quick Recap
So, the short but sweet version:
- Call it whatever you want, just not a “webinar.”
- Don’t sell — there’s time for that after the online event. Instead, focus on providing value and education.
- No more than 10–15 simple slides in a 1-hour presentation. Keep it short, succinct, and story-focused.
- Enable video for all participants and avoid traditional “webinar” formats. Encourage participants to unmute and ask questions.
- Use a moderator to break up monotony and cultivate participant engagement
Ready to Take Your Side Hustle to the Next Level?
Over the next several months, I’ll be documenting my journey building a $4K/mo. side hustle in ~4 hours per week. Please follow me on Medium for the latest updates or connect with me on LinkedIn to continue the conversation!
