lessons learned Blogging lessons learned from a failed webinar

As some of you already know, I do a good number of speaking engagements. Last week, I presented a webinar for… well I won’t say for whom exactly, but I will tell you they are a tech giant from the Seattle area. Without going into great detail, not only was it the first time we couldn’t pack a full house, we had more than half the seats open! Preparing for and delivering a quality presentation without the expected number in the audience was a real heartbreaker for me personally.

Although I’m simply the speaker, I have input as to when we host these, who we market to, what the message is, and how we promote. There were quite a few lessons that could be learned and we held a post-mortem meeting this week with the marketing team.


Blog-related lessons

Evaluating lessons learned could not only help you improve for that particular item but could also help you improve other areas in your life. For example, many of the lessons from the webinar could also be applied to blogging as well. Let me share a few with you.

Incentives work

When we do these presentations face-to-face, the incentives for the attendees are clear: get a free meal, gather some collateral, collect some marketing gizmos, and take at least a half day out of the office. Webinars are trickier since none of those things can happen online.

In the past, we offered professional credits but that didn’t apply for this presentation. Moving forward, we plan on offering things like coupons for services, free software licenses, and a chance to win a big prize (like a 360). In many cases, obviously just offering good info isn’t enough!

So what incentives do you offer on your blog for what you’re trying to accomplish? Here are some examples:

  • If you’re looking to get email sign-ups, give them a free ebook or white paper.
  • If you’re looking to increase the likelihood that visitors leave a comment, then make sure you let them know that you are a DoFollow blog and give them some CommentLuv.
  • If you’re looking for guest posters, then offer to do a guest post in return.

The call to action must be obvious and specific

We reviewed our sign-up webpage and our marketing emails. You’d think that they’d have a process down that’s been perfected after all these years but I found many flaws.

The biggest one is the lost messaging. The first message didn’t even have a call to action! It was just an announcement! Then, on the next message, the call to action was in small print. Moreover, we didn’t even make it easy for them to sign up by providing a working link!

Well, I’m a firm believer that if you want something, you have to ask for it. Bloggers should be specific when they want their readers to do anything.

If you want visitors to sign up for RSS or follow you on Twitter, ask them to do just that; or if you want visitors to give you an opinion, ask them for their insight. Just don’t leave it to them to figure out what you really want.

Timing is everything

We actually tried to run the webinar before Thanksgiving but there were too many conflicts. So rather than waiting until after the holidays, we decided to run it during the first week of December.  We knew that we may have more difficulty getting sign-ups but we didn’t know that people who signed up just wouldn’t show!

Generally speaking, I detest doing anything non-holiday related between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. People have hundreds of things on their minds and usually listening to a presentation isn’t one of them. Some of them probably signed up for the webinar just so they could take a long lunch and go shopping instead. Next time, if we can’t make the Thanksgiving deadline, we’ll wait until mid-January.

Blog traffic is no different when it comes to holidays. I try not to post anything big on holiday weekends. Of course, I still get visitors from other countries with different holiday schedules but half my audience is from the US. Take a look at when your main audience’s downtimes are and even if you have that killer article ready, save it for a non-holiday week.


Sometimes we need a rude awakening

Oh we had so many other lessons but obviously, not everything applies to blogging.

The truth is, the webinar wasn’t a complete failure. The whole process went pretty smooth. I just wish it was delivered to the entire sold out crowd!

The good news? We had a chance to review our process. Like I always say, when you’re winning, it’s really easy to overlook the problems but when you’re losing, non-issues become issues. I’m almost glad we “lost” so we had this opportunity to make things better for the next webinar.

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