What's with all the webinars popping up everywhere?

LMAO - that is brilliant!

A lot of Webinars that I have seen have special offers available only to those people attending... Another great way to make some extra sales. So, it doesn't really make sense to provide them to people who couldn't-- or most often, just didn't-- show up.

...It's also hard for the thieves to steal a Webinar and claim it as their own.

In one sense you are correct. Am I in the target market of people willing to sit and listen for an hour or more to someone telling them how to (whatever)? You are absolutely correct. I am not. I daresay that many others are also not interested in such (aside from knowing some others personally it is also said that for every one person who says something there are another 250 who feel the same way but don't say anything at all).

But in another sense you are absolutely incorrect in that I (and others) might indeed be interested in (whatever) but just not interested in hearing about it through a webinar.

Don't confuse the target market with the medium that marketers have fallen in love with for reaching said market.

To use webinars exclusively without making transcripts available might be convenient for you as a marketer but internet marketing is not about what is convenient for you as a marketer but what is convenient and useful to the target market.

Anybody who uses webinars without making transcripts available along with them is losing business if you ask me.

Carlos

If one has too much time on their hands to sit there and learn through a webinar...maybe. But there are more efficient ways to learn something that take a lot less time.

I wonder why sales are down? Isn't that the all important question to answer?

I mean ramping up and pushing more and more webinars to bolster up poor sales seems like the wrong approach to me. If webinars are doing poorly sales wise the question is why? That's a question that is not answered by pushing more webinars!

That's like saying that the solution to declining paper newspaper reading is to...well...print more paper newspapers (never mind the movement to read news online).

Or that the solution to having a cow that is not producing as much milk as desired is to squeeze it's udder harder (never mind that the poor cow might be sick) LOL.

I am in the target market for what webinars might talk of but I can tell you without a doubt that marketers trying to get me to buy anything at all through a webinar will never hit a home run through me as I won't even bother to watch their fancy webinars. In my case and in that of many others I suspect webinar authors have missed part of the target market because they have become infatuated with the medium and have neglected to take into account that some simply don't like that medium.

Carlos

The may indeed convert better. I don't doubt that.

The real question, and this is hard question to answer, is how many people don't even bother to attend a webinar where they can then sit spellbound to be sold on something?

If 1000 people are offered attendance to a webinar and 10 actually show up, if you sell 9 of those 10 on something in the webinar it can rightly be said that you have a whopping 90% conversion rate! But if you take into account the 990 that didn't even bother your conversion rate ends up being pretty poor.

Carlos

Exactly.

I have found them to be a big HUGE time waster for me when I have seen one. One of my clients once pointed me to some and I thought to myself...what an absolutely HUGE waste of time when I could have read what they talked about in 1/10th the time and either done something with it or else have gone my way and said no thanks.

There is one thing I should have been clearer with I think. I did not mean to say that everyone should stop using videos. Not at all. That's silly as videos are very good and even necessary for some things. But it's just a tool. It's not the end all and be all to internet marketing as some webinar authors seem to think it is by how they stick to this medium like some sort of holy grail or something. Not budging from it no matter what.

Certainly it's not possible to put all webinars in PDF format. For sure. Nor to write out everything that might have been said or asked in a webinar. But goodness gracious...a lot of webinar authors hype the very notion of a webinar as THE best way for people to get what they have to dish out. Such that if you don't sign up for that there fancy, absolutely essential webinar that...well...that you are going to miss out big time! Baloney.

I realize that there are a whole lot of people that are absolutely computer illiterate, have all kinds of time on their hands, love sitting around for hours on end listening to a pro explain all kinds of things through video, and who even might buy some fancy doo dad after all is said and done through a webinar but...just as everyone is not like me, so likewise not everyone is the kind that will eat up webinar's like some delicious internet marketing meal.

People who are busy simply DON'T have time to sit there for a couple of hours listening to a video or participating in a webinar!!

There is no proposition or benefit statement that would get me to sit here for two hours to watch somebody talking! 95% of what I read, never mind see in a webinar, is not news to me and just a rehash of things I already know (and many times just need to take action on when I can find the time LOL).

You got something to sell to me? Great! Show it to me succinctly, preferable in words on a web page, in a PDF, or even a video that I can somewhat scan by pushing the forward button or maybe put through some sort of utility that speeds up your talking.

But don't dangle a carrot of internet riches in front of me and try and sell me on signing up for your fancy webinar. It ain't gonna work. I'll say bye, bye faster than...well...you can imagine.

Busy people, who are the most likely to succeed by the way in whatever you are wanting to sell, don't have time!

Carlos

That is the "accepted" wisdom of what we have become. I'll give you that.

But I know a whole lot of folks, I mean a whole lot, who use the internet but who don't do Facebook (me included as it is just a time waster mostly) or Twitter and who would rather go hiking in the Sierra Nevada than go take part in yet another Friday night party or watch The Bachelor or American Idol.

Go figure.

Carlos

Well put Willie!

Carlos

I see your point DarkLock but for me it's not about my wanting to control anything. I just find them soaking up my limited time for limited value.

I would like to get the info that a webinar presents so there is no disagreement there but my contention is that to stick to presenting things only through a webinar potentially misses a great big portion of the unseen, silent, but very real market that doesn't have the time to sit there for a couple of hours to watch a webinar.

Carlos

I will be avoiding webinars in future, as most of them are set to US time and are totally inconvenient for me.

I learnt my lesson the hard way by staying up till 2am (my time) for what I was told was going to be a training session. I stuck with it until about 4am - this was after the "training session" had turned into a fully-blown sales pitch for a shiny object.

So, unless someone on my side of the Pond starts offering legitimate training sessions via webinar, then for me it will be thanks, but no thanks!

That's funny! LOL

I love your terminology Suzanne. You have a way with words! Pitch fest. That's a good one.

Carlos

Ahh...but I thought sales was about presenting a legitimate and useful/needful product to a target market and pursuading them of it's benefits so as to close sales?

Not about taking control of anything from the customer and manipulating them to buy something.

You make it sound like webinars are a great manipulation tool to sell things that aren't selling very well on their own merit.

Carlos

A couple of years ago, webinars were still a great way to create income fast. Now, they have proliferated to the extent that every webinar organiser and his uncle have a dozen going at the same time. This oversupply has swamped the market and consequently, revenue per seminar has plummeted.

Their enormous demand on my time has turned me off webinars, but not for good. Here is my workaround:

I subscribe to any webinar that looks interesting enough for my purposes but I don't attend. I've given up having to stay up until 3am to listen to whoever (I live in London and most webinars are timed for the US). Instead, I wait until I receive an email with the replay link (that's the only reason why I subscribe). I use Download Helper to download the webinar (it's a Firefox addon) and then view the dowloaded file with VLC Media Player. VLC Media Player will play anything you throw at it, and it lets you speed up playback time, so I can skip chitchat and "scroll through", as it were. This method is also pretty useful for video sales letters that have controls disabled (which is very nearly all of them).

Any webinar that cannot be downloaded will simply be ignored.

Max

I am sick and tired of all the rehashing baloney in interent marketing circles. Sell me on something original and useful. Don't throw some rehashed stuff at me over and over again as if trying different mediums to throw the same stuff at me is going to somehow fool me into buying what amounts to little more than rehashed stuff.

It's like innovation and originality respecting product creation has become almost extinct with everyone rehashing everything on everyone and and copying whatever they can get their hands on in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Carlos