This is a guest post by Catie Keeler. She is the primary researcher and writer for mortgagerates.info. Her most recent accomplishments include graduating from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a degree in business and communications. Her current focus for the site involves loan rates and jumbo mortgage rates.

If you host a blog, you can host a webinar. You don’t have to be an Internet marketing guru or a dynamic public speaker who travels the world making motivational speeches. All you have to do is be able to give an informative lecture on a topic in your niche and have a product to sell (it doesn’t even have to be your product).

Webinars convert as much as 40 percent – whereas traditional advertising and affiliate marketing converts at around 1 to 2 percent. The numbers make it clear that hosting quality webinars with the right traffic can increase your income exponentially.

Here’s how you can tap into that market and use webinars to increase your revenue:


Define Your Goals

For every person trying to make a living online, the goal is the same: To increase sales. However, there are many ways to go about doing that, and you have to determine your strategy in order to define your goal.

Is your goal to create greater awareness of your brand? To establish yourself as an authority on a topic? To sell a particular product or service?

The answer to these questions will determine how you create your presentation and what kind of pitch you will make by the end. If your goal is simply to create awareness of your brand, you might highlight a number of your products and services then directs participants back to your site or encourage them to sign up for your list. If your goal is to sell a particular product, you can build a presentation around the need for that product then make your pitch at the end of the webinar.


Create a Professional Presentation

It doesn’t matter if you are selling a quality product that will offer your customers a solution to their problems – if your presentation is terrible, your customers will judge you and your product as equally inferior.

Create a professional presentation that offers your participants something of value. Practice your webinar ahead of time, making sure that it flows smoothly and that all of your video and audio works properly. Start your presentation on time. Behave professionally “on air.”

Most importantly, make sure your presentation provides value to your participants. While your goal may be to sell them a product or service, their goal is not to buy it. Their goal is to learn something new or to find a solution to their problems. Make sure you are giving them that, and then give them a reason to buy what you are selling.


Sell Products


While you can charge for admission to your webinar, unless you are a high-level person in your niche, you will likely find more success in selling products or services through your webinar.

You don’t have to have your own product or service to sell – though that would certainly help you to earn more. You can promote affiliate products through your webinars instead, making quite a lot of money doing so. Conversions are much higher in webinars – you have a captive audience that is hungry for solutions – and if you choose a high-quality affiliate product, you stand to make a lot of money.

Promote your product at the end of your webinar, and share the link throughout.

Promote, Promote, Promote

You won’t make any money if no one attends your webinar, and no one will attend if you don’t promote it properly. Promote the webinar on your e-mail list, announce it in relevant forums, let other blog owners know about it so they can share it with their readers, and blast it to all your social networks.

You can even create an affiliate program for your webinar, depending on how much profit you have to gain. This is an especially useful strategy if you will be offering the webinar again, or if you are promoting an online course or series.

Webinars offer a powerful opportunity to increase revenue through your blog. You can sell entrance to the webinar or sell products or services (either your own or an affiliate’s). Either way, you stand to increase your income by taking advantage of this platform, which features much higher conversion rates with a targeted, captive audience.

Have you been successful conducting a webinar? Tell us about your experiences in the comments!