Transcript
Lee:
Welcome everybody to another education, at least I hope it’ll be an educational call as part of the Rosen Institute. And today we are talking about webinars for new client generation. And I am a huge fan of webinars. We have done a lot of them through our law firm. And I’ve done a bunch of them with Rosen Institute as well. But the law firm webinars are the ones that have really generated revenues for us. And I guess it’s a little ironic that we’re talking about them through a conference call rather than through a webinar. But that’s what we do here. So, we’ll just plunge forward.
Doing a conference call instead of a webinar saves me the trouble of doing the slide deck. And we’ll talk about how you’ll go about doing that if you choose to use webinars as a way to get to know people. And I really think that’s what it is. It’s a way to know people. You’ve got visitors to your website, and people that are interested in you, and interested in your practice, maybe referral sources and others. And the website is one way for them to learn about you and the subject matter in which you practice, and the way that you deal with things.
But a webinar is another step along in the chain. It brings people further down the funnel. It’s more personal. It’s more interactive. It gives them a much better flavor for who you [are] and what you’re about. Yet it doesn’t feel quite as threatening as coming in for a meeting or, quite as threatening as paying you money and hiring you. So it’s a really good way for prospects to move closer to retaining you without feeling like they’re taking a huge risk.
And I like to give people baby steps. You see that on our website and you see it on the Rosen Institute where we give away free things and they read the material. And then maybe we’ll invite them to a free webinar and get to know them even better. And then move people down that funnel to where they actually make a purchase. And so a webinar is a really efficient way to move people along in that path. You can touch a lot of people in a short amount of time without having to expend too much effort. You can do one to many, as opposed to one to one. And what I really love about webinars is that it’s a perfect position for you to be in.
When you present a webinar, you are the teacher, and being the teacher is the equivalent of being the expert. And it’s a powerful position in our culture. And all of you, at least those of you that have kids, when you have to go back to the back to school night, or the parent meetings or whatever it is, it’s weird how you walk into that classroom, and suddenly the teacher is in charge. And you are usually, except for those of us with oppositional defiance disorder, we’re ceding to the authority of the teacher. And the really weird thing about that is that we are people who are pretty successful and often running the show in our lives. And here we are often with some 23 year old kid who has suddenly taken charge in the room. And we jump right into our role of being the student. They take on their role of being the teacher. And we give them, we’re deferential, and we give them respect, and we acknowledge their authority.
And that’s where a webinar puts you. It puts you in that role of expert. In that role of teacher and it’s a powerful place to sit. It’s a powerful role to take on. And you can use that to build your practice.
Now webinars are easy and fun and powerful. But they’re not always the right way to interact with prospects, or referral sources, or whoever you’re targeting. And I did a podcast not very long ago, and I would suggest that you give it a listen when you get a chance, if you haven’t already, on when to do seminars and when to do webinars. They are very different tools and they are appropriate with different people and different circumstances. And you can do webinars for everybody and seminars for everybody, but you want to make sure you’re using the right audience, the right topic, the right timing, with whatever tool you pick. So give that a listen when you get a chance.
So webinars, let’s put one together. How do we make that happen? First of all we need a topic. Now I assigned homework to you in the last one of these educational programs, and some of you have done it, and some of you have not. And I’ll remind you, it was the outline of the 10 thousand-ish word article for your website. If you did it, and if you’re looking for a topic for a webinar, I would suggest that, that outline is a great place to start.
I’ll give you some other places to look for ideas. But that outline would be a perfect place to start for a webinar topic. Because using a webinar in the next month will force you to keep fleshing it out. And you will in effect create some of the content. And here’s the deal. Everything you do with those 10 thousand word articles, those big articles for your website, will pay off over, and over, and over again. And so, right here, right now, you’re seeing the first opportunity to reuse and recycle something that you created earlier.
And so, one place to look for the topic ideas is right there in that article. It could be that that outline becomes the webinar, or it could be that you pull a piece of it, and that becomes the webinar. That’s one place to look for topic ideas for the webinar. Another topic idea and probably a really easy one for you to grasp a hold of is to pick some or all of your practice area and do a do it yourself program. Turn that into a one hour webinar and we’ll flesh that out as we go. But anything you turn into a DIY, really has appeal to your base of prospects.
When they see that you’re teaching them how they can do it themselves, those that can afford you will quickly realize that you are the expert, you are the authority. They know that they have the money, and they would rather have you do it, than do it themselves. But when you teach somebody how to do it, that really helps them to understand that you are an expert. And just think about it, if you went to a workshop at a Home Depot on how to build your own bathroom cabinet, and you watch this person teach it, and explain it, and you see how well they’re doing with it, and you know that you’re thinking, “Man I really could do this.” And then as you watch them, you have flashbacks to a assembling something you bought at IKEA. And because you’re in a position to be able to afford to hire them to do it for you, the next thing you know, you’re not doing it yourself. You’re hiring that person or the person they suggest to build that bathroom cabinet for you. And that really works on us, and it really works on your prospects. So teach them how to do it themselves and you will find that they quickly become clients.
So that’s an idea for a topic. Another topic idea is just to do an overview of the subject matter of your expertise. Don’t worry about DIY, don’t worry about the 10 thousand word article, just do a webinar that is the high level survey course on your topic, on your subject matter, whatever it is that you work on. And so, the bottom line is that you are an expert in a number of things. Any of those things can be a decent topic. And here’s the good news, it doesn’t have to be sexy. Sometimes we want to make our topic sound really dramatic and interesting. If your clients need information, if they have a problem that they need solved, it doesn’t have to be sexy. Desperate people need less [info].
So you don’t really have to turn it into anything fancy. If you do a webinar that is an overview of Arizona Divorce Law, a whole bunch of people are going to be interested in that. It does not have to be a dramatic topic. It does not have to be too narrowly focused. People will come because they’re desperate and because there’s just not that much out there that’s competing with you in this space.
Now, when you are thinking about putting on this webinar, think of it as a donation. Think of it as a contribution. Don’t think of it as a sales pitch. Think about creating something of value. Because as you can imagine, it’s not only going to be useful as a webinar, but we’re going to talk about some ways to re-purpose it and recycle it and make it into other things. But think of it as a donation or a contribution that is helping the people that are watching and listening. Don’t sell, don’t pitch. Don’t talk about you, except to the extent that it comes up in stories that you tell. Focus on them. It is about them. It is not about you. And I’ve been to webinars probably all of you have been to webinars that turn into these sales pitches, where it’s just horrible. And you were there to learn and to figure out how to solve your problem, and the next thing you know, they’re pitching, pitching, pitching. And it’s more of a turn off than a turn on. If you educate these people, if you stimulate their thinking. If you position yourself as the expert because you’re the teacher, you don’t need a sales pitch. That’s more than enough sales pitch. They will come find you, you don’t have to worry about telling them why they ought to find you.
So, I hope I’ve stimulated some ideas about topic areas and perspective. Now, let’s talk about some of the practical issues here of actually putting on a webinar. Most programs should be about an hour. An hour is a good [and] long enough format. And you generally want to plan on about 30 to 40 minutes of you talking. The fewer people you have, the more you want to talk. The more people you have, the more time you want to save at the end for Q & A. So if it’s going to be a bunch of people, don’t go more than about 30 minutes. If it’s going to be a handful of people, maybe 40 minutes. But over time, if you repeat this, and you will because it gets really easy once you’ve prepared and done one, you’ll learn what the right amount of time is for the format.
But think 30 to 40 minutes of content, and you need to pick a format. There are a number of ways you can do this. You can do it the way I’m doing this today, where you just talk. That’s fine, but it presents more challenges than some other formats. You can have you talking, but you could use someone that you work with to interview you. And that gets easier because you have somebody to push back against. And you get the variety of the voices going back and forth. If you’ll do Q & A and if you arrange it so the questioners can talk instead of just typing into the box, and we’ll talk more about that, that gives you that vocal diversity. And that helps to keep it interesting. But think about whether you want to do it by yourself or whether you want to do an interviewer.
Another way to do it is to just have a sidekick. Think of David Letterman and Paul Shaffer. And they would bounce back and forth with one another. Sometimes I’ll do that on calls for you guys with Ned. Many times Ned is talking about very substantive stuff, but sometimes he’s just there to keep me on track and to mix it up a little bit so that it’s a little more engaging. But a lot of us don’t have somebody that we can use as our sidekick or as our interviewer. Don’t worry about it. Do it by yourself. I will tell you in our firm, our lawyers do these webinars by themselves. They don’t normally have somebody else on the line with them. So that’s fine. It works fine. But you want to pick a format that you’re comfortable with. Having somebody else with you is easier. It’s more comfortable in the beginning.
Now, as you’re organizing your talk, as you’re figuring out what you’re going to talk about for that 30 to 40 minutes, go with fewer points rather than more points. It’s better to cover less than to cover more. You’re better off going a little deep and covering fewer topics than going broad and barely covering anything. So have your bias toward fewer points and use stories to make your points. The more stories you tell, the better. And what you really want to be doing with your stories, and some of you will know what I’m talking about better than others, depending on how much time you’ve spent talking to me. But the stories you tell ought to be your story, the story of you, and their story. These folks ought to be listening to the stories that you tell as you’re making your points and getting that fly on the wall feeling. Feeling like you already know what’s going on in their lives. There’s nothing more powerful than you being able to tell them back their own story. And if that is a concept that you’re not comfortable or familiar with, stick around, because it’s going to come up a lot more over the course of the months here at the Institute.
As you’re making these points, it is better to wallow around in their problem. It’s more valuable to you to spend time in their story and their problem, than it is to spend time on the solution. That’s very difficult for us. We have trouble with wallowing around in the problem. But I will tell you, if on your webinar, you spend more time talking about them, what’s going wrong in their lives, than you do talking about how to fix it, they will like you more, and they will trust you more. And you have to really understand them and what their lives are like to be able to wallow around in the problem. But the more that you do, the more points you will score. It’s weird because you assume that they’re coming to your webinar to hear the answers, to be offered the solution, but in fact, they really want to feel that somebody understands them and appreciates the situation they’re in.
So just by way of illustration, an estate planner is probably better off talking more about the concerns, and emotions, and issues that the prospective client is grappling with, the worries that they have, than they are talking about the documents and the legal processes. Wallow around in the problem to score more points with these people. You’ll ultimately find a balance where you’re wallowing in the problem some, and you’re solving the problem some. And that’s fine. But in the beginning, it’s going to be easier for you to go straight to solutions, do what you got to do, have a bias for action, get something out there.
In an ideal world, you will organize your webinar around a numbered list. It’s just easier, especially in the beginning. When we do our family law programs at Rosen.com, we have five boxes. Use a top 10 list, use 3 lists of 3, whatever it maybe. It keeps you on track. And it keeps the listener on track. And you can use the numbers in your slide deck. And that’s what we’re about to talk now about is the slide deck.
A webinar requires pictures. There are basically two ways to go with this. You can use slides like you would make with PowerPoint or Keynote, just like you’ve seen a million times. Or with some of the webinar products, you can use your face as you’re talking. And some of the webinar products will allow you to use you talking live, streaming video, or both. You can do both the slides and the video. My lawyers never want to do the video because they don’t want to have to…the women all complain about having to do make-up. Not that they have to, but they think they do. And the men all don’t want to put on a shirt with a tie or whatever. Again, not that they have to, but they think they do. And so, doing it with video would be great if you had slides and a video.
I think doing the combination would be wonderful. But do what you’re going to do. When you make your slides, on PowerPoint or Keynote, and there are some other products that’ll do that, make slides. One of which I love is called Deckset, D-E-C-K-S-E-T, for the MAC, really quick and easy. But there are other products out there. But most people PowerPoint or Keynote. But here’s the deal, use pictures only. Don’t put any words on the slides. You don’t need any words in your deck. Down the road you may want to add some. You may want to have a professional designer help you with making the slides, once you’ve really nailed the presentation and you’re doing it over and over again. But for now just use images. It’s easier and it’s actually far more engaging and interesting. Use an image every 60 to 90 seconds. So if you’re going to do 35 minutes of talk, you probably want 30 images, somewhere in that zone, 30 or 35 images.
Just steal them off of Google. Go to images.google.com and use the images. Yes, you will go to hell for that and maybe to prison, but it’s easy and most of you are not going to have such big audiences on your webinars right now that anybody’s going to be checking your images. If you want to go to an image site, that’s the legal and right thing to do. But everybody steals their images off of Google. So make a slide deck, put the images together, organize it around a numbered list, and your presentation should involve wallowing around in their problem as much as much as you possibly can.
Which platform should you use for this? There are a number of them on the market. There are quite a few. We’ve tested a dozen of them. GoToWebinar is the most reliable. A strong competitor to GoToWebinar is Click Webinar. It’s at clickwebinar.com. We’re using GoTo Webinar and that’s the bottom line. It’s reliable. There’s nothing wonderful about it. It’s really stagnant. They don’t improve it a lot. But it does the job. It makes it easy to set up registration. It makes it easy to run the program. It makes [inaudible 00:20:54] slides, and if you want to put yourself in the video, they do a pretty good job of that. The recordings work pretty well. If I were you, I would sign up for a one month membership on GoTo Webinar and see how it goes.
Some people use Google Hangouts On Air. It’s fine, it doesn’t have the registration stuff. If you want to just cut to the chase, GoTo Webinar is a safe choice. It’ll get the job done. You can experiment with other stuff later. I would not, and I know some of you are inclined to play with the gadgets and technology, instead of going out and generating the business. Don’t do that. Just get GoTo Webinar. Pay month to month until you decide. And it’ll do the job.
And when you sign up for GoTo Webinar, you’re going to see that they have different levels based on how many people are going to come to your webinar. You’re going to have a lot of no shows at some webinars. So you don’t need as big a package as you think you need because you might have a hundred people sign up, but only 50 of them will show up. And so you don’t need a package for a hundred people if you’re not going to have…if you’re going to have no shows. And you will. But you can sign up for a lower package and it will allow people to register. And when you see how many have actually registered, if you need to, you can always upgrade. And so it’s really the attendance at the live webinar is the measurement that they are using not the number of people that actually register for the webinar.
And while I’m mentioning people registering for the webinar, you want to capture their information. You can download it from the system and you want to grab their names and email addresses so you can track this and see if those people become clients. GoTo Webinar, and all these products, have all kinds of cool interactive features, like polling and different things like that, that you can do during the webinar. Don’t use them. When you become good at this, then you can worry with that. In the beginning don’t do anything extra. Keep it simple. That stuff is just too distracting when you’re doing the program.
And when should you do the webinars? What time? That’s an important consideration as you start working through making this happen. You’ve got to look at your audience and you’ve got to figure out what works for them. We have concluded that around lunch time on a weekday works really well for us. We do them at least once or twice a month at lunch time on a weekday. And then we have concluded that in the evening after the kids go to sleep, works really well for us. Your audience will be different. You have to look at when your people want to come to a webinar. And the reality is, the only way to do that, to find out, is to test over time some different scenarios. But begin testing. Start thinking about it. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience, and think about it the way they would think about it.
Now, we’re beginning to put together this program. We’ve got a platform to do it on. We’ve got slides coming together. We’ve got a subject matter. We’ve got a time limit. We’ve got a format. All of it is coming together. We need somebody to show up. Otherwise, this is a lot less fun if nobody is listening. So how do you market your webinar? One way to do it is to put an advertisement for it on your website. If you have an email list, promote it to your email list. If you have pay-per-click advertising, this is a great experiment for your pay-per-click ads. It’s worked pretty well for us. If you’re going to do pay-per-click, maybe bring people to the webinar. Free webinar on this topic is important to the people that are seeing those ads if they’re running in the right places. So those are some ideas.
Leverage alliances. If you’ve got people with whom you have good referral relationships, like other lawyers, accountants, whoever it may be that have clients like yours or access to people that could use your services, use their websites, and their email lists to promote this thing. If I’m an accountant and I can give my client a free online webinar on estate planning for California, that has value to me as an accountant. Then you’re giving me this thing that I can give away as a gift to my clients. And so that accountant is very interested in sharing their lists with you. Think that through. Think through who your referral sources are. You’re creating value. How would it be beneficial to them? You want to leverage those alliances.
You want to mention this program, this webinar to everybody. If you’re at lunch with a referral source, that’s a great place to be using this as a part of the conversation. Remember, this is not an advertisement, this webinar. This webinar is a contribution. It’s a donation. It’s scoring good karma points by putting something valuable in the world. The people that you’re at lunch with will appreciate that. Don’t hesitate to tell them. It’s not a sales pitch. This is an educational program. This is a class that will be useful.
So, you’ve got to get the word out. And I will tell you that I remember in 1987, when I started doing seminars, because the Internet did not exist and webinars certainly did not exist. And I used these programs, these live seminars, in this exact same way. I would do them once or twice a month in churches, and women centers, and men centers, etc. I would go many times and nobody would show up. If you start putting on webinars and nobody shows up, it’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world. The good news is if you put on a webinar, and nobody logs in, you can turn it off and go home. You’re done. You don’t have to stand there and talk. So you can wrap it. But doing it over time and doing it consistently what it does is it brings an audience.
And so when we did those programs in the first year or two, we would have a small group, one person, sometimes nobody, sometimes five people. But it would grow over time to the point where there would be dozens of people. And for us, at certain times a year there would be a hundred plus people showing up for these little seminars in churches. So being able to keep doing it over and over, and promoting it over and over, gets the word out and these things take on a life of their own and grow over time.
Now to do the actual webinar, you need to do a couple of things to get ready and to prepare. You need a quiet space. I did one not very long ago in a terrible space and there was an echo in the room. I’m not sure how this sounds to you right now. I hope it sounds pretty good. But you want to find a quiet space. You need a decent microphone. The ideal microphone for webinars is a headset so that the microphone stays in front of your mouth. You can go buy a fancy microphone, but you’re going to find yourself pretty distracted with your notes and with computer, things happening on the screen. A headset is easiest if you’ll do that.
In an ideal world, when you’re doing your first webinar, and maybe your first, second, third, fourth, fifth ones, you will have a support person who logs in with you, and is on standby for whatever disaster you encounter. You likely won’t have any disasters, but it’s just a lot. It’s a little like learning to drive. The first couple of webinars, you feel like you’re multi-tasking and it’s all very distracting. And it’s nice to have somebody there for you. I really like it, sometimes I do these webinars for, I’m doing one next week for Lexus and I really like it if they will take care of advancing the slides and stuff. I can do it on my own, but the more help I have, the more I can focus on what I’m going to say, the easier it is for me, than to have to be messing with other things.
So at a minimum, I like to have somebody on standby if I need help, but beyond that, you can delegate any role in running the software and helping you to make it easier for you. Whatever you’re going to do, however you’re going to do it, you need to test everything. You want to test the software. You want to test it live. You want to get a couple of people from your office or friends to get online with you and test the slides, test the audio, make sure that the recording is working. You want to do some trial Q&A and check the chat room that’s built in to GoTo Webinar. You want to make sure you understand it all. If you’re going to do these extras like the quizzes, and the surveys, and the questions, test it. Don’t go in there on the first time with real people showing up and screw it up. It’s really important to test.
When you actually do the webinar, when you’re really going to conduct it, shut everything on your computer down. Stop all notifications. Make everything be quiet. Turn off your phone so it is not beeping in your ear. Turn off anything else that makes noise. Just get rid of it all. It really is distracting. And get online early. And one of the best things you can do, and you saw me doing it here online, is chat with the audience before the program starts. It’ll help you be more comfortable and it will give you a chance to make sure everything is working.
On GoTo Webinar, when we do programs, they will often type and text chat messages and I will then respond to them. Which really relaxes me as much as anything. It just helps me to get into the flow and feel comfortable. And it helps me to re-familiarize myself with the software. It’ll be tempting to start a few minutes late, because you will see that the people are arriving. I would encourage you to start on time. Maybe start one minute late. But it’s really better to just go at the time you’re supposed to go. And do not forget to hit the record button. Recording is going to be really valuable to us as we go forward. So we want to make sure we’re always hitting that record button.
When you open the webinar, when you open the program, introduce yourself. If you have a sidekick, make him do the introduction. But I always just introduce myself. No big deal. And introduce the software that you’re using. If there are features that they need to understand like the chat feature, or how to ask questions, or whatever features are built into the product, you want to make sure you explain that to them right at the outset when you get going.
Now, all of you are good public speakers. You’ve all given lots of presentations at one time or another. Talking in webinars is the weirdest thing. It is very different because there’s no audience to push against. It feels very strange. The first few times I did it, I found myself talking faster, and faster, and faster because it’s like I was being sucked into this black whole of nothingness. When I’m speaking to an audience, I’m seeing heads nod and I’m just getting this feedback all the time. And with the webinars, you don’t know how it’s going. And it feels weird. And so, I would encourage you to be very aware of practicing for that because the first time you do it, it just is an odd sensation to me. And I’ve done a lot of public speaking, but the webinar thing just freaks me out. And it took me a while to get used to it. Keep an eye on the clock as you’re doing it. That’s usually pretty easy because you’re looking at your laptop screen. And so you’ll see the clock as you proceed.
And as soon as you can, shift gears into Q&A. Q&A is where the magic happens. It’s the best part of the program because it really builds connection. It gives everybody a chance to ask what they want to ask. And it gives you a chance to speak directly to them whether they’re putting in questions in text or whether they’re doing voice like we’ll do on this program. But it really is where that connection gets built and it’s what turns those prospects into clients. It’s easier to do the Q&A at the end. But once you become really competent with the software, and you get comfortable with it, it’s not that hard to do it as you go. And it really does break up the monotony of it if you can do some Q&A right inside the topics as you go.
And so, when I’m really in the mode of doing it and feeling capable with the software, I love to grab pertinent questions that are happening as I see them pop up in the chat box. And then I will just say like, “Oh, let’s talk about Dennis’ question,” and boom, we go right into it. And then I’ll do a bunch more Q&A at the very end. The chat box is a lot easier to use than the voice functionality that some products offer. If I’m doing a bunch of people, if I’ve got 50 people on a webinar, I’m just going to us just the text thing that’s built in into GoTo Webinar. I don’t want to use voice because it just gets overwhelming.
It’s a lot easier if you’re getting those questions in through the Q&A box in GoTo Webinar if you have somebody else screening the questions and feeding them to you. Because especially prospective clients who are upset, their questions are hard to decipher. And they’ll write a lot. And it’s just weird for you to have to spend 20 seconds reading the question and you’ve got dead air. Nobody is saying anything. You can read it out loud, but sometimes it gets really hard to sort out. Not only the questions will be inarticulate, and then you’re simultaneously trying to figure out what the answer is. And so if you have somebody on your team that can paraphrase the question and read it out loud to you and paraphrase it, that makes life go much more smoothly. But again, when you’re more comfortable with the software, it gets easier to multi-task and do all of this.
Make sure you record the program because we’re going to re-purpose it. There are a bunch of things you can do with it. You will have an audio or a video file that has audio with it when you’re done to do things like put it on your website. You could advertise it on Facebook as an incentive. You can say to somebody, “Hey,” in an ad, you can say, “Hey, come watch the webinar, sign up here.” They sign up, watch the webinar, the recording, which would be a video file hosted on Wistia but sitting on a webpage on your site, and you would capture their email address and then you’d put them as your auto-responder sequence. So it would serve as an incentive that would be one way [of doing it].
It could just be educational content you add to your website. What we’re doing with some of them is we use a product called evergreenbusinesssystem.com. And there are a number of these products where we actually use a recorded webinar and pretend that it’s a live webinar. So people register for them and then watch them and it plays every day, but they don’t always realize it’s not live. And we use that for our do it yourself system. That’s how we do our webinars for that. So those webinars run every day of the week twice a day. And it’s all an automated process.
And as I’ve indicated a number of times, want to repeat your webinars. It’s just like a teacher, the first year is hard because you don’t have the lesson plans worked out. The second year is easier. The third year is even easier. If you’re doing these once a month or once a week, you get incredibly proficient at it. And it takes very little time to repeat. And it’s a great investment of that hour. The first time it’s going to take you a while to get it going, but once you know it, boy, it’s just so much easier going down the road.
Now be ready when you do your webinars for the technical glitches. Bad things happen, you might lose your connection. You might have slides that won’t change. You may have people who are having issues online. You want to have a backup plan. You want to be prepared for when things go poorly. And you can warn them about that at the outset if you’re worried about it. It’s worth explaining, “Hey, if we get disconnected, here’s what we’re going to do,” and then off you go.
So that’s the deal with webinars, and it’s not that challenging to put one together. The hardest part is getting an audience. But if you’ll do it, if you’ll take one of your topics, and start promoting it, it’s one of those things that people will start referring people to your webinar programs in the same way that they refer people to the educational content on your website. And you can see where it’s all a piece of the puzzle. And it just works because it’s moving you from known, to liked, to trusted even more efficiently than, for instance, your website does. So that’s the drill on webinars. I am opening the floor to Q&A. I think you guys can un-mute yourselves if you have a question. But if not, I will un-mute you. And anybody got anything?
I’ve got you all un-muted.
Brian:
Oh that’s great because my four year old just came in the room.
Lee:
You got any questions Brian [SP], or I’ll mute you back. Oh gosh. I have a ton, but one I would ask up front is do have any golden hours you might suggest for trying first webinars, times and days?
Lee:
For your practice area, for family law, I would suggest doing it at noon and, or 9 p.m. And I would suggest Wednesdays.
Brian:
Wednesdays?
Lee:
Yep. I muted you, Rob, because for whatever reason we’re getting [inaudible 00:39:45] from you. If you need to get off, just un-mute yourself. Okay, other questions?
Matthew:
Hi, this is Matthew.
Lee:
Hey, Matthew.
Matthew:
So, would you talk a little more about marketing, would you do a pay-per-click or Facebook ads to market, and have the tag line, and click here to register, and that sort of thing?
Lee:
Yeah, I would experiment with everything. We have found webinars to be a really good incentive in advertisements. People all now understand webinars. It’s funny because we used to do these things as podcasts before podcasts were cool, and people never understood what a podcast was. And now, of course, they do. But back before they understood it, they always knew what webinars were. That term got incorporated into the vernacular pretty early on, and so I would promote it on Facebook. I would promote it on your website. I would consider using Google AdWords to promote it. But most significantly, I would just be telling everybody in the world about it. If you have a prospect who is not scheduling a consultation, but they will come to a webinar, that feels much less threatening to people. It feels like a much smaller step. It’s a great way for anybody that hears about you to get to know you before they make that big step of coming in.
And I know coming in to talk to you objectively should not be frightening, but the reality is, it just is frightening to people. That is the nature of the game, and I don’t know what we can do to prevent that. But the webinar is an easy way for them to [escape that]. Other questions?
I’m surprised you haven’t asked a question yet, Billie. It’s not like you.
Billie:
Oh, I have several. I have lots. How far in advance should we be advertising for the live webinars? And then how often should we be redoing the webinars that we’re doing?
Lee:
We’re doing the same exact webinars twice a month. And we never stop advertising them. So if somebody misses it today, doesn’t get in on the one today, they can come next week, or two weeks later. In my mind, if you’re going to go hard core about it, you want to just commit to a cycle and do it over, and over, and over again. It never stops. So in terms of how far in advance you’re advertising it, you never really stop advertising it. You just change the date on the landing page. Does that help?
Billie:
Yes. And so how many would you cycle, five?
Lee:
You mean subjects?
Billie:
Right.
Lee:
I would do one. I will tell you how we do it. And you’re in our same practice area. We do an overview of family law in North Carolina. And we just repeat it in every cycle. And so we’ve done it as many as five times in a month and as few as two times in a month. And we have been repeating it live or in the webinar, multiple times a month, every month since 1987. We have never stopped.
Billie:
Wow, Okay.
Lee:
Yeah, it’s a no brainer. When we started it, we did it in churches, and we’ve had as many as eight or nine in a month because of being in multiple cities. So we would always do at least two per city. And now that we have webinars, we can obviously, you’re in every city when you do a webinar, so you don’t have to repeat them quite as much. And so we’ve just kept the same pattern of doing two a month in every city. But you got to start somewhere. But I would not worry with having more than one subject because it doesn’t make that much difference to people if you’re aiming at potential clients, as long as you’re going to cover their subject matter in some way.
So the child custody people are going to show up but so are the child support people and so are the property division people. And if you find yourself with a huge audience, and they’re asking more questions about one area or another, then go for it. We’ve done some intensives like on child custody, more focused on those subject matters. But the reality is, the people who are going to come, they just come to whatever is coming up. And so I would just develop one program, get it exactly the way you want it, then have a professional designer make the slides. And about every 12 months, I would have the slides redone so they get even better. And you’re going to farm it to associates over time. I would start by you being the one to do it because you’ll develop the program and get it just the way you want it. Then I would farm it out to associates and I would listen to the recordings every six months or so of the associates, just to make sure that they’re adhering to the system, and doing it the way you think they ought to do it.
But this is a system that once it’s in place, and you delegated it to people, it’ll go for the next 20 years. And it’ll generate clients every single time it runs.
Rob:
I’m not sure you can hear me but. I used to do a program like this for a women’s resource center, and you get some really specific questions, and you don’t know all the facts behind the questions. Do you generalize those questions, or do you try to address specifics? And I guess my issue is related to malpractice and that type of thing.
Lee:
My answer is that I only look at this, And it’s the way I look at everything that we do, I look at it as I am going to do everything I can to help that person in that moment. And so I’m going to answer that question as specifically as I can. And if I am wrong, and if I commit malpractice, then they are going to sue me and that’s what I have insurance for. Now the fact is A, I’m not usually wrong, and B, they usually won’t sue you because you’ve done something nice for them. But yeah, I’m going to run that risk, and I’m going to go as far as I can go. But the problem is, that it’s often, it’s not just that you may not want to answer the question, you may just not be able to answer the question. Because they aren’t always able to articulate everything you need to know. And so invariably, a lot of my answers are qualified, conditional of like, “Well, assuming the things that I understand are the way they are, then this is what I would say. But there’s a lot of potential that the facts could be different.” And so, I’m not saying that to get myself off the hook, I’m just saying it because it’s the best answer that I can give them. Does that help, Rob?
Rob:
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Lee:
Okay. Who else has got a question?
Brian:
I can throw something out there.
Lee:
Go for it.
Brian:
All right, well, and first of all, I’ll just say, one of the things I love about this is I’m constantly reminded of my ignorance and yet constantly made to feel as if I have a fighting chance with this new endeavor. But my question is, and this goes back to the ignorance, is are you saying that webinars can be re-purposed as podcasts, that you take the audio, and explain that difference to me. And tell me a little bit more about the re-purposing of the webinars, if you don’t mind.
Lee:
Well let’s think about this product that you and I are creating right now. So I’m using it as a live program. I will then put it on the site as a recording. I could add slides to it and turn it into a video. I could make a PDF and use the transcript. I have this outline that I prepared for the program that I could easily turn into a half a dozen articles or one really long article on the site. I could turn that article into something that I used as a guest post on someone else’s site. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m just getting warmed up in terms of the way we could re-purpose it. I could take this thing and turn it into 5 or 10 short audio or video segments. And so, you’re exactly right, Brian. You can re-purpose it in a dozen different ways. And that goes back to why I’m pushing you guys on that 10 thousand word article because that’s really the core. The written stuff is the strongest most valuable stuff because then you can take it and then turn it into all of this product that we’re talking about. And so you’re nailing it. You’re exactly on track. Does that answer it?
All right. What else we have in terms of questions? Anybody else? Let’s see, we still have another few minutes, so we’re safe on time.
Irvin:
This is Irvin [SP] and I’ve got a question for you.
Lee:
Shoot.
Irvin:
You keep referring to that 10 thousand word outline for the article. And when I did mine, I created something that was very, very specific and business focused, and focused towards a target audience of business owners. And today, you were talking about in your experience, your firm decided to do an ongoing overview of law. And now I’m trying to decide whether or not having something very specific to a specific audience is the way to go, or should I consider doing more of an overview to attract a larger audience?
Lee:
I think it’s exactly the way to go, but I’m really curious, what’s the topic that you did your outline on?
Irvin:
It’s the property division from the perspective of business owners, entrepreneurs, and just what it’s like for a business owner to have someone come after his business.
Lee:
Perfect. Okay. So imagine that you prepare this webinar and you’re talking to CPAs in your community. And you’re saying, “I’ve done a program specifically for these people. I’m offering it as a webinar and we’re doing it three times over the next three months.” You try not to tell people you’re doing it forever, because you want it to feel like there’s some urgency for people to get there. And you say, “If you have people that are worried about protecting themselves in the event that this ever happens, this is the webinar for them to come to. And you as a CPA A, you’re a business owner, you ought to be there, and B, you need to educate yourself in this stuff because you have clients that are going to go through this.” So those folks are going to be promoting your program and they’re an audience for your program.
All the business lawyers in your area of Georgia, who have clients that are in this boat, those folks need to attend this webinar. All the members of the entrepreneurial centers. I’m sure you have a center for entrepreneurial development. Then you have all these startup hubs, co-working spaces, etc. Where all of those members need to attend this webinar. And a lot of these people you’re aiming at are technologically oriented. And so this topic is perfect. And in fact, at Rosen.com, we have a divorce center for entrepreneurs loaded with content aimed at that exact audience. So now your webinar becomes a center for entrepreneurs on your website. It becomes the core piece of content for that along with your 10 thousand word article, along with your frequently asked questions, along with whatever else you want to throw into that. And then, Irvin, now you really do know all of the issues here.
You’re getting questions at the webinars. You’re thinking about this all the time. Now you’re invited to speak at all of the Vistage meetings in Atlanta, of which there are dozens of business owners, the largest organization of CEOs in the world. You’re invited to speak at all the rotary clubs because these are all business owners who, while they’re all happily married, are worried about something going wrong, and you’re the guru of what to do when this happens and how to protect your business. So I could go on and on about all this because obviously I’ve thought about these topics. But I hope you’re seeing that your article, it’s not too narrow, it’s perfectly narrow. Because it really casts you as the guru in a place where there is an audience that actually needs your help and has the ability to pay for it. So you could not have picked a better topic. That’s just genius.
What else we got guys?
Brian:
I’ll throw one more out there. Just to make sure I understand correctly, it sounds like from what you’re saying that our best return on our investment, so to speak, for a webinar is to stick to broader topics unless we have a very narrow practice interest. So for me, for instance, I’ve been working on my long article. It’s titled just Virginia Divorce. And that would probably be the best way for me to go about a webinar is on that broad scale and not narrow down necessarily to some of the topics that I’m particularly fascinated with, like the history of spousal support and it’s evolution in Virginia. That’s something that’s better suited for an article or another 10 thousand word piece. But really not going to be a large enough or wide enough net for a webinar. Is that right?
Lee:
I think that you will find that for what you are doing, and the way you’re likely to promote it, that a more general topic will serve you well. Just like what we were saying with Billy. Irvin’s article will appeal to a narrower group of people, but it’s an awesome group of people. Now, Brian, I have a question for you. When you say you’re talking about divorce, generally in your 10 thousand word article, does that article include coverage of child custody, child support, property division, spousal support, all of that? Does it all fall under the umbrella you call divorce?
Brian:
In fact, it does. And it’s interesting that you asked that because what I did in this process was I took all of my crappy 700 or so word articles and separate pages on custody, equitable distributions, spousal support, child support. I took all of those and incorporated them and rewrote most of them really into my large article. Because I realized in doing that, that I could probably, if I’d take the time and do it, could write 5 or 10 thousand words on each of those topics…
Lee:
Okay, So let me interrupt you here. You’re exactly right. And your goal here, just because I know so much about your practice area, when I say 10 thousand words, I want you to do 10 thousand words ultimately on spousal support, another 10 thousand on custody, another 10 thousand on child support. Your entire practice area is going to end up being somewhere between 60 and 100 thousand words of content. And so the 10 thousand, as it stands right now, is too broad. It’s not sufficiently narrow. Irvin’s example is a really good example. He may have trouble with 10 thousand words on that topic, but he’s got plenty of potential for somewhere between 5 and 10 thousand words on that topic. And what’s going to happen with Irvin’s article is he’s going to be able to go deep in 10 thousand words. With your topic right now being so broad, you don’t have enough words there to go deep.
It would end up being shallow. In my mind, an ideal baseline of content is 60 thousand words on the things that you practice. Unless you’re in more than one practice area, in which case, I would double it. And I know those answers are incredibly specific. And they are, of course, pulled out of thin air. But they’re a pretty educated sense of what it takes to cover a topic area pretty well. So your area I think, Brian, needs to be a little broader than it is, your topic.
Brian:
Do You think that a, and not to go too far off into this issue of the articles, but it is something I’m working on a lot now, but I have about five thousand on Virginia Divorce. I have a talk I gave to a group a couple months ago just on the history of spousal support, and also its modern application that easily, I think ,is probably between 5 and 10 thousand words already. Do you think that a Virginia Divorce just 5 or 10 thousand words is a good base general article, and then, of course, I go to the 5 or 10 thousand words on each of the sub issues. That’s okay to have that 5 to 10 thousand on the general, or should that be longer for the general? I just didn’t want to put too much detail in the general article.
Lee:
Yeah, I’m not sure that you need a general article. I think you need a big article on each topic area that is involved in your practice. I don’t think you need one article that is an overview of the whole thing. So, your call. And I think obviously you’re headed in the right direction, so play with that. And if you want to talk more about on the forum, just pop it up there as an issue and we can go back and forth and see what other input we can get on it. Okay, we’ve got just another minute left. Any last second questions here before I let y’all get back to work? Going once, twice, three times.
Brian:
Actually I have to go down to the beach with my family.
Lee:
Well a great, great perfect thing to end it on. Enjoy the rest of your vacation. Thanks everybody for coming and hope you got some value out of this. I’ll see you on the forum. Any questions pop them up there, and I’m happy to elaborate. Have a good rest of the week. Talk to you soon.