Should You Charge for Your Webinar?

One of the things you have to consider when you want to get into hosting webinars is whether or not to charge for your events. It’s not as simple as saying yes, or no, for everyone. Before you can decide whether to charge or not to charge, you have to study the entire situation fully.

Define the Goal of the Webinar

When choosing whether or not to charge for webinar, it matters a great deal whether or not you are trying to collect business leads versus whether or not you want to make money from the webinar itself as your business. If you want to get more followers, friends, likes, and email subscribers so that you can market other products and or services, then you should do the event free. If you want teaching at webinars to be your main source of income, then you should charge.

Determine Your Budget

The technology needed to charge for a webinar sometimes is more expensive than hosting a free webinar on Google Hangouts On Air, so you’ll need to figure out if the investment in a paid webinar is worth it to meet your goals or not. There are programs that you can use that make it simple to charge – for example GoToMeeting and also a system that works with Google Hangouts On Air called Webinars OnAir.

Links:
GoToMeeting – http://www.gotomeeting.com/
Google Hangouts On Air – https://plus.google.com/hangouts
Webinars OnAir – https://www.webinarsonair.com/

Choose Your Technology

Your budget and the technology available, along with the reason you are having the webinar, should help lead you to the decision about whether to charge for your event or not. Charging for a webinar is not necessary to earn money. You might even earn more over the long term by hosting free webinars, depending upon your goals.

Understand Your Audience

If you feel like you have a good enough topic and a large enough audience to charge for an event, first consider how charging for your webinar will affect registration and attendance. You will get fewer registrations for a paid event than a free one, but a higher percentage of people will show up to the paid even than the free event.

Consider Your Subject Matter

Does the audience really need to be at the live event for you to disseminate the information to them? Is the subject matter something that your audience needs to know now, or can they learn it over time? If it’s an immediate thing that they need to know to use in their business, such as training, you might consider charging. If, instead your point of the webinar is to tell them about your products that they can buy over time, then you may want to offer it for free.

Who Are the Presenters?

Often, people are more than willing to pay to attend online events with big name speakers and movers and shakers within the niche. If you can attract that type of speaker who is a known expert, who is very sought after, and whom you have to pay to attend, then you’ll want to charge. If this is a way for you and a few joint venture partners to get more subscribers and widen your audience, then you may want to offer your webinar free.

Decide If You Can Earn another Way

Make a list of all the ways in which you can earn money due to hosting a webinar, based on increasing your mailing list. You can charge for recordings, promote all your products and services to them using webinars as the free bait instead of eBooks and other works that you can now sell. Turning the tables and offering a free webinar versus a free product, is a strategy that has been shown to work.

Determine the Value of Registrations

Remember that for many types of webinar, the value is in the connection more than the attendance. This is especially true if the webinar is a way to bring them into your product funnel. Over a customer’s lifetime, how much can you sell them? What is your conversion rate for your email lists? If you can answer these questions, you can determine the value of someone who registers for an event versus what you can charge for the event.

When you add up all the ways you can earn money and consider the goals of hosting a webinar, and balance that with the lifetime earning potential of each person on your mailing list, then you can choose whether to charge for a webinar or host it for free.


A Message from Norma...

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