Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Selling Online Content

We started using webinars to generate buzz and interest in premium content about six months ago. They are a terrific way to deliver helpful information to a worldwide audience and talk about the benefit of joining our membership sites or purchasing premium content. At $99 a month for an account with GoToWebinar.com it is cost effective as well.

There are two business models that have worked nicely for us with webinars:

1. Do a free one-hour webinar with a partner that has a product to offer. 45-minutes is pure education on a specific topic, 10 minutes of questions and answers, then 5 minutes of pitch for the guest presenters product. We take 50% of everything sold through the webinar.

2. A free one-hour webinar with a partner who then does a follow-up webinar that is paid. The one-hour webinar is education on a subject and at the end is a pitch for the paid webinar. One we did recently was a free one-hour webinar and a 3-hour paid webinar the following week. (three evenings with one hour each). We split the revenue 50/50.

While we’ve found that 7:30 pm EST / 4:30 pm PST works best for our US-based audience, we have a large international audience for that site as well. We record the video webinar using Camtasia and post it about 18 hours after the live webinar.

Offering the video recording made sense – especially when our international audience would have to get up in the middle of the night to view the live recording. The intent is, of course, that anyone who isn’t able to attend the live webinar will watch it later. This would fine if I actually thought people were watching the recording when we sent them the link. Some certainly do, but my sense is that many don’t.

The more webinars we do and as our list gets used to the fact that the recording will be available later, the lower our attendance at the live webinars have become. It’s a trend I am becoming increasingly concerned with. The stats show that not even half of the people who didn’t attend the live webinar (but registered so they would get access to the recording) are watching it. I know everyone says the media world is transitioning to an “on demand” culture and that consumers of the media are demanding media be on their terms. I get it.

The trouble is, the media never gets consumed if it is available “on demand” forever. As with everything else when it comes to getting people to take action, when the recording is available forever, there is no urgency to watch it and therefore it doesn’t happen.

There are a few solutions we’re considering:

1. Do the live webinar and then replay the webinar recording at a specific time that would be late afternoon / early evening for Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

2. Offer the recording for only 48 hours after the live webinar, after which time it will be taken down. It would create the urgency to get more people to watch the recording.

I think #2 is the best solution, but I’m interested in hearing the feedback of others who know the webinar space well like Paul Colligan and Ken Molay of the Webinar Blog. What do you think, guys?

If anyone else has ideas or has experienced this trend as well, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Tim creating content, site marketing how to record a webinar, record webinar