EZ Live – Ways People Can Make Money with Webinars

There are many ways to monetize including direct and equally important, indirect ways to generate additional business for your organization using webinars. For this first article, let’s start with the direct tactics and opportunities common to associations, media/publishing companies, e-commerce businesses and organizations that have communities of followers. Sponsorships – a common way to generate revenue is to sell the opportunity to allow other brands to leverage your audience and content. Many of our Engagez customers love to incorporate sponsorship opportunities for their event or series of webinars. With EZ Live we offer even more unique and customizable opportunities to promote sponsorship opportunities that include:

• Logo branding and link from webinar microsite/landing page
• Logo and link from promotional emails
• Logo and links from reminder and post-webinar emails
• Speaking opportunities—this is a big one and have many options such as being on a panel, having a part of the webinar presentation, interview, and emcee roles
• Broadcast messages during the event
• Demos during or after the webinar main program
• Ability to book one-on-one meetings with the sponsors
• Video ad messages before, during and after the webinar
• Downloadable sponsor white papers, case studies, brochures and videos
• Detailed lead reports from all sponsor-related content and clicks
• Inquiry forms
• Some organizers give the entire registration list to sponsors, we recommend that you explore what the boundaries around this might look like for you and your organization, but it can be a big selling point.
• Mentions in social media posts
• Branding on entrance and webinar broadcast locations
• Special survey identifying attendee needs and wants in the sponsors’ category
• Private meeting room for sponsors by invitation with incentive gifts provided
• Branding or ad in webinar transcript (nice pdf) for distribution to attendees and offered on website & social
• Allow sponsors to rebroadcast the webinar to their audience (getting you and them exposure)
• Keep all sponsor branding for on-demand viewing and allow for periodic download of sponsor analytics and new leads

Ticket Sales – Selling tickets for an event or webinar, has quickly become one of the quickest ways we have seen customers bring in money.  If the content you are sharing is extremely valuable, required for certification, or is otherwise of a nature that people are willing to pay for access, ticket sales can be a great source of revenue. With using a tool like EZ Live, the question of ‘is it worth paying for?’ is a no brainer. Trust me… IT IS WORTH IT! Here are some examples of how people maximize ticket revenues:

• Running your own promotion is a given for selling tickets but other partners and affiliates can also greatly amplify your marketing message and drive new sales that you would likely not get without that extra reach. A compelling monetary commission is required to incentivize ticket sale partners.
• There are many sites where you can list your event/program for free and you should develop a list and use it for every program. Some provide useful SEO links.
• Tools like EZ Live can generate certificates making it easier to sell certification programs.
• Continuing to sell tickets to the program after the live or Simu-live event is often overlooked and depending on the audience and marketing can provide continuous revenue.
• Upselling tickets to add additional team members to an existing registration can boost revenues.

Product Sales – webinars are your private QVC channel to sell your products such as software, courses, ebooks, consulting services, subscription services and much more. Here are some examples of how and why people use webinars to directly sell and take orders during their webinars:

• QVC (Quality Value Convenience) offers in-home shopping experiences for consumers and has demonstrated they can literally sell almost anything during a program.
• Many B2B webinar sales programs target a problem people are having and build a webinar that provides the solution supported by extensive marketing to draw an audience.
• Programs usually run for an hour including the presentation, demo, testimonials and special webinar offer followed by Q&A.
• B2B marketers also like webinar selling because it speeds up the sales cycle and can reach people in many locations in the sales funnel at one time.
• Once the webinar is complete, you’ll know if it is a success and warrants additional re-broadcast to continue to generate high margin revenues.

In my next post, I’ll focus on indirect monetization, which you will see is probably the most common monetization techniques for driving return from webinar programs!