Webinars should be an important part of your online marketing mix. Webinars have the ability to bring in new potential leads from all over the world, as well as help you engage with your audience in new, more personal way. If you’ve not tried having a webinar yet, maybe these ten reasons to add webinars will convince you.

1. Connect with More Customers – Just like video is shared more than text content, webinars are enjoyed on a higher level than other types of educational materials. Webinars feel more personal, even though they can actually be recorded and replayed.

2. Build Your Email List with Qualified Leads – People who will pay to attend a webinar of a certain topic are your ideal audience and will consist of highly qualified leads that want what you’re offering.

3. Establish Your Expertise – If you need a way to prove what you know, webinars are a great way to choose. Giving talks about what you know has long been a way to show authority on a subject, but doing it online is even easier than flying all over the country to do it. Both are fun and useful, but webinars offer some benefits over in-person events because you can do them from anywhere for anyone anywhere.

4. Develop New Information Products – Due to the ability to record webinars, you can use them as future information products. Not only can you sell the recording as is, you can also transcribe the recordings and turn them into eBooks.

5. The Cost to Entry Is Low – The software involved can be very expensive, but there are some great choices to use that aren’t as expensive, such as InstantTeleseminar, Adobe Connect and GoToMeeting. These vary in price and features, so check them out. There are other systems, too.

Links:

InstantTeleseminar – http://instantteleseminar.com/
Adobe Connect – http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html
GoToMeeting – http://www.gotomeeting.com/

6. Engage Audiences Easily – There are many different types of features that you can use to engage audiences, such as the ability for the audience to ask questions live during the event, and the ability to hand over the speaker controls to a guest. Not to mention the ability to screen share and watch videos together and more.

7. Add a New Stream of Revenue – Not only can you charge for webinar attendance if you want to, but you can also turn the webinar into information products as mentioned before and sell them that way. There are so many things that open up to you. For example, you can turn each good question into its own new product.

8. Easy to Repurpose – The recording ability makes webinars simple to repurpose. Turn questions into blog posts, break up videos into eCourses, put the transcript of a webinar into book form, and more. The sky is the limit; you can even make cuts into short YouTube videos.

9. Great Way to Network with Others – The webinar itself, if you add in an intermission with an open chat window, is a great way to network with others. Plus the preparation for the event, finding guests and JV partners (joint venture) is going to help you with reaching out to others.

10. It’s Not Hard to Do – Believe it or not, if you can use your online banking system, or Skype, you have the technical knowledge to use any of the webinar software mentioned. You may need some help with planning, organizing and implementation, but the technology should be straightforward to use.

Planning and hosting webinars isn’t costly, and they’re not hard to do either. You’ll gain so much more out of hosting webinars and adding webinars to your marketing mix that you’ll wonder why you did not start doing them sooner.