Transcription
My name is Jason Flatland. They call me the best in the world at webinars, and I'll try to prove it to you today in this video here on YouTube. So let's break down the 14 steps.
Step number one: Hook. What is a hook? A hook is a way to get somebody's attention, cut through the noise. A hook needs to not only get attention, because you could just say, "Free beer, come here!" Oh, now that I got you, that's a disappointment. We want hooks that both increase attention and either overtly or covertly increase demand, desire of ownership. And so I'm thinking, when I'm doing anything on a webinar, what's the one most powerful thing that I can do to draw in the widest number of qualified prospects and predispose them to want to invest in what I have to offer at the end of the webinar? So before I do anything on a webinar, I got to come up with the hook. The hook will influence everything: they influence the introduction, where you only get one chance to make a first impression; it influences the landing page, where you would register to show up to the webinar; it influences the advertisements and the emails that would encourage people to go to the registration page to register and attend the webinar. You want a hook so powerful that people can't resist it; they'll stay up at night saying, "I got to know the answer to that." So a large portion of what I do on my webinar is come up and try to figure out what that Hook is. So that's the first step.
Step number two: Pain. This is the thing I think I've contributed the most to in the webinar space in terms of how I do webinars differently than everybody else. I am a firm believer of: wake them up from The Nightmare Before you sell them the dream, or provide a path Out of Hell before you show them the path to Heaven. People tend to come to webinars because they're suffering and they want to alleviate suffering. It's for the same reason they do therapy. Nobody goes to therapy saying, "Man, life is great; let's make it better." They go to therapy because they say, "Life sucks, and I want it to suck less." And so when I hook somebody that just gets them to show up, and that gets them to pay attention long enough so I can talk to them for a few minutes before they decide whether they're going to stay on the webinar or not, and this is how we talk to them: we talk to them through pain. And so we address what we think are the limitations, constraints, excuses, and limiting beliefs that that market has. These are the pains that they say, "I can't do blank because of an insert excuse here. I can't be successful because I can't concentrate. I can't get rich because I lack opportunity, time, money, belief, capability, etc., etc." So I want to know in anything that I'm teaching on in a webinar and selling on, what are the false beliefs that people have that have real consequences that keep them stuck? Cuz in the introduction, I'm going to bring them up right away. I'm going to say, "On this webinar here today, I'm going to show you how to deal with blank; how even if you have blank, that this will not be a limitation if you understand how to approach it differently; how if you are thinking this thing is stopping you, think again; I'm going to show you how we can unlimit that for you with this unique way of demonstration on the webinar today," so on and so forth. And that's the second thing. So we hook them in, and then we bring up the pain.
Number three: We tease. So this is the gain portion of it. By the end of this webinar, you'll be able to do X; you'll discover how to do Y; you'll know once and for all how to do Z; you'll see unveiled right in front of you A, B, C, and D. And this is one of my favorite parts of the webinar to create, cuz I create it last. I write all of the webinar first, first, and then I go backwards and create little teasers of what's coming up. These are also technically known as open loops, and open Loops are very effective persuasion tools because people, once they hear the beginning of something, they want to resolve it and get to the end of it. So this increases retention on the webinar, and it also creates more of a Desire of, "I got to know what that is."
Number four: Excite. Excite is different than tease. Tease gets them kind of almost agitated, like, "I got to find out the answer to that; I can see that there's possibility here," but excite is really the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you're able to follow this, and if you're able to totally unlock the full potential what I'll show you today, then these are some of the things that might await you in your future. These are the outcomes that they desperately desire; these are the things that they think about night and day and obsess over that they want more than just about anything in the world, and we put those in there too. So now we have the ability to look forward to the mystery of what's going to happen on the webinar; we have the pains, these are what you're dealing with, so I have rapport with you, empathy that can show you that I understand you, and the premise and promise of, "I will be able to solve these pains for you," so I'll be able to improve the pains and improve the gains, and this is what makes such an incredible powerful webinar introduction. It doesn't just relate to webinars; every presentation that I do, I try to put some of that into it.
Number five: Position. This is where you have to position yourself as the person that is more qualified to help them with the specific promise that you're offering up on the webinar than anybody else on the planet. Positioning is so, so, so important. It is an overarching theme in every marketing campaign. How you position something is more important than the thing itself. So if you look at standup comedians, where do they position their best material? They position it at the end, so they build up to it, and then they reveal it. How do they set it up? They set it up—that's how—with a punchline is how they deliver it, but they can't just go to the punch line; there needs to be a setup first. And so this is you setting yourself up; this is you showing and juxtaposing how you're uniquely qualified to teach a very specific aspect that nobody on the planet can match. Because if you can pull off that position, then people conclude, "I either do it through you or I don't do it at all," but until you pull that off, there's going to be two push backs to anything that you teach: the first one is, "I don't necessarily believe you know what you're talking about," and the second one is, "Yeah, what makes you special? There's 15 other people that I could go to instead, and I'll go to them later, so I won't buy from you today; I'll just take whatever you have for free and that be the end of it." So positioning is very important. How can you demonstrate that you are qualified Beyond anybody else when it comes to what you're teaching and showing and demonstrating on the webinar?
Number six: Paradigm. Paradigm is the "Oh, this changes everything" moment that you want your audience to conclude. Once they hear that, they have a massive shift of Paradigm: "Oh, what I once thought was a limitation is actually a huge advantage." That's a common Trope of a paradigm that I use very often. Sometimes the Paradigm is, "Normally I wouldn't even allow you to consider doing this because it's not for you, but because of these weird circumstances that are not normal, it's kind of forced me to have to show this to you," and that's a really exciting Paradigm because it's like, "Oh, I shouldn't be able to even do this, but because of this weird setup, now I can do this." When we started selling Amazon many, many years ago, the whole Paradigm was obvious, and this is why so many people did so good on it. We were teaching information product sellers to start selling physical products—that's a tough sell—but we were able to break that Paradigm through by demonstrating for all of these people that had limitations related to uh information products: "I'm not an expert; I don't want to put myself out there; I don't know how to drive track traffic; I don't know how to create conversion funnels," and all that nonsense. Physical products are like, "Oh, we just have to rank on Amazon." So the big paradigm shift that we really pioneered was Amazon as a search engine, just like Google. The difference with Google is you're searching for information; on Amazon, you're searching to purchase products, and there's a way you can rank brand new products on Amazon; it's easier to rank on Amazon than it is on Google, and it's so much more profitable. And that was a huge Paradigm Shift. We've had Paradigm shifts in the funnels space where the Paradigm is, "Listen, you could funnel hack everybody else's funnel to death, but if you don't have their proof elements and you don't have their offers and you don't have the other content to talk to specific audiences that are different than everybody talking to the same audiences, then you don't have anything; you have a pretty dress with nobody to wear it, essentially." So the AHA was, "Let's put the things in there for you that you can license and leverage, so now you can have the best of both worlds; you can have a better chef and you can have better ingredients." So that is a paradigm, and if you notice I use a lot of analogies, and analogies are super helpful in all forms of persuasion; they're extra helpful when it comes to the Paradigm Shift. When we got into the crypto space, we did it completely differently than everybody else did. So everybody else was essentially, "Sell, go to the Moon, you know, get rich or die trying," and a lot of people died. We were showing that there's a different alternative path that wouldn't make you be able to fire your boss overnight, but but it was a way for you to play the game so you weren't sitting on the sidelines, eliminate most of the risk, and yeah, you're going to top off a lot of The Upside, but not all of it, and so you can dip your toes in the water, be relatively safe, experience a new type of investment vehicle so you're not left on the outside, and do it in a way that makes sense to you because it's not so foreign and different than what you're already used to experiencing. So that was the premise of how we developed that Paradigm, and it shattered all sorts of records, and the good news is is it didn't put clients in a position that was Ultra Ultra dangerous. So you know, perception in reality and marketing: perception is more important than reality for the sell; reality is more important than uh perception for the Fulfillment; reality creates an enhanced perception for the next thing you sell. So it's good to be amazing at both perception and reality, but we have to sell perception; that's the only way we get people to buy and to try it out in reality. And the Paradigm is, "What's the one thing that if they understood it would change everything?" And so we focus on setting that up; that's where we start really the content portion of the webinar.
Number seven: Mechanisms. So the old 80/20 rule that everybody knows but nobody truly seems to understand is that a few of the inputs gives you a majority of the outputs. 20% of customers buy 80% of the stuff that exists out there, which makes the webinar really effective, by the way, because they go after the 20%, by Nature; those are the people that are looking and will spend two hours on a topic to get just a small Advantage out of it; that's your 20%. So when it comes to teaching any Paradigm, there are generally three to five elements, three to five inputs that will get the output of that Paradigm. So out of the thousands and thousands and thousands of things that are important, what are the vital three or vital four? That's what I try to hone in on. So if I can only teach these things and teach nothing else about the topic, could I get somebody reasonably successful? Could I get them to the outcome that they desire? And that's what I focus on with every single webinar. I'm not a "Three Secrets" kind of guy; I'll leave that to Russell. I think secrets are kind of cliche, and at the same time, Secrets can be limiting structurally. So sometimes my three things are a step-by-step process; other times they're not; they're just, "These are the considerations"; other times they're the they're the components; sometimes they are the secrets. I I don't really get too caught up on what is and isn't a secret; I just say, "If I had to make a majority of people the most successful at this particular topic, and there's only three to five areas I could focus on to teach them this, what would those be?" And then that becomes the whole focus of the webinar content portion, the training portion. If you follow that, you will train better. Forget selling for a second; if you just chopped off the pitch at the end of these webinars and just did that for your training content, you would see a significant increase in satisfaction towards your content. Then once we teach the mechanism, so it's essentially the formula for the mechanism, so this is like A, B, C, D, so on, step A, B, C, D: we introduce each mechanism; we explain why it's important, why it's considered so valuable as an input; then we Define it, what it is exactly and what's involved with it; then how to use it, and that's really important. We don't just say, "Here's how to use it," without the proper context; most people will be stuck; doesn't matter what you teach them, they're not ready to get on the bus and go into that world yet. So more is important on, "Here's what it is; here's why it's important; here's what's involved; and then how to use it." If you do those other things, the how to becomes obvious. Like if you can tell somebody, "Hey, sleep is the most important thing that you can do for your health, so let me just show you how to sleep," you forget even saying that it's the most important thing; you say, "Here's how you sleep better: step one, you do this; step two, you do this; step three, you do this," you lost it. But if you really break it down, and at first you set it up, out of all the different things that you can do to influence your health, there's one thing that you can do that is more important than everything else; it is the one thing more scientists agree on than anything else that ever exists; it's something that you have a dedicated portion in your house where you do this on a nightly basis, hopefully; it's called sleep. Now here's what's involved with sleep, and you see what I'm doing here, and then you get into, "Here's how you use it," and we teach each mechanism that way: "Here's the first mechanism; here's what it is; here's why it's important; here's what's involved; and here's how to use it," and we try to not get too much into the how-to. One really good Insight is more important than 10 decent insights; one amazing AHA, "I got this," is more important than 100, "Yeah, that's pretty cool." So we want AHAs; we always want these AHAs, and these different mechanisms that we're teaching; we want AHAs in the Paradigm.
Number eight: Commitment. We should be doing micro commitments throughout the webinar, but we want to get commitments on each, each one of our mechanisms. So we show the first mechanism, then we say something along the lines of, "So when are you going to commit to start using this to make a difference in your life?" And the more specific you could get, the better; I'm just speaking in generalities here. On the second one, you would say, "Do you see yourself being able to use this right now for an effective change?" The third one is, "If you could do this and felt confident doing this, when would you first start doing this?" And again, I'm just making these up; these are just examples to illustrate the point; there are significantly better tie downs, and the more specific you get. A tie down is just another way to get commitment: "Here's what I'm showing to you now; let's tie it down to make sure you got it and you're committed to following through with it; otherwise, you can teach till your blue in the face, but if you don't get commitment back, you probably ain't going to make change." This is why commitment is so important. So I commit in multiple different points and times in the webinar; I get commitment; I get massive commitment though when I show the full, "Here's the Paradigm; here's the mechanisms; here's what it looks like high level; here is all of the moving pieces; now that you've seen it all, what are you going to do with it?" And that's when we get a very specific commitment that they're going to be able to use this. The goal in any webinar, if you're really doing it right, is you get somebody to the point that says, "I'm absolutely committed to doing this," and then the question becomes, "Do I do it by myself and spend time only, or do I do it with you and spend money?" That's where we want the person to be at; we want them sold on doing it; now we just got to determine whether they should do it with us and spend some money or whether they should do it on their own. And that leads us to number nine here, which is the transition.
It is tough to go from teach, teach, teach, teach, teach to sell; those are two different contexts, and so if you don't have a bridge that you build between one to the other, it will be jarring when you switch; it'll be like a Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hyde: "Hey, what the just happened there? I'm freaked out all of a sudden," right? And so it's kind of tough for a lot of people to make a transition, and so I recommend what you do with a transition is you call back to all the the cool amazing things that you have done thus far up until the webinar. This does two things: one, it helps people remember consciously all the cool stuff, cuz they forgot most of it anyway; unconsciously they feel really good, but consciously they're like, "I don't remember most of the stuff that happened." It's also good for you because it reorientates you to all the value you've provided, which should put you in a good mood: "Look at what I've done for these people without asking anything in return," and that put you in a really conducive state to sell. So recap—I call it 60 minutes and 60 seconds—we run back through the 60 minutes and in 60 seconds. So so far on this webinar today, you discovered this, and I showed you this, and remember when this happened, and can't you believe that now that you understand this what you can do, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And that's the first portion of the transition. Then the second portion of the transitions it says was your time worthwhile on this webinar today? Did you learn stuff you didn't know before? Can you see yourself doing things you didn't know you could do before? These are micro commitments, so we get that yes momentum, as I like to call it: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then we do the two choices. Now this isn't the only one; I got like 15 different ways to do all of these different things that I'm talking to you about here today; I'm just giving you examples of each of these. My favorite transition is, "So if we parted ways right now and you were left to your own devices to go off and do this on your own, it would be a worthy ideal to pursue if that were your only option, but it isn't; there is another option; there is an option where we could work together, where I could have a vested interest in your success, where I could arm you with every great resource I have to give you an advantage when it comes to blank," and I chose the second option, and when you're going to see it, you're going to get very excited and be glad that I did choose this option. "Here's what it's about," and that's the end of the transition. So we have framed—you want to talk about positioning—we have positioned the offer so magnificently as this great service that we've undertaken on behalf of the person, so they're not left only to do it on their own; they can, and we've equipped them with enough Insight on the webinar at that point that they certainly could go off and do it on their own, but it doesn't have to be their only option. So this is how we ju tost it, and then we go into presenting the offer, and that's step 10.
Offer. Now I have a controversial take on this; everybody disagrees with me, but I make more money than all these other webinar folks, and so I think I'm right: is an offer has two major components to it; it has the core and it has the bonuses. The core is what they pay for, and the bonuses are what they get for free, and and every really killer offer that I've ever designed or consulted on for other people, we spend far more time on the bonuses than we do on what they pay for. So we want to position—there's that again—position the offer of this is the thing you pay for, and I want to show them as little as possible of what they pay for before I ask them to pay for it, and then I want to show as much as possible of all the cool amazing things that they get for free. So generally the flow of the offer goes like this in terms of the product what I'm selling: "Here's what it is—the name generally—here's how it's delivered to you—the mechanisms like what's involved with it—is it modules? Is it physical components? Is it software? So on and so forth, high level, right—here's what it is; here's how it's delivered to you; here's what's involved with it; here's how awesome and amazing it is with some very quick proof elements and some wow kind of money shots, as I'd like to call them: look at this thing; look at that thing; look at this thing; you're going to get all this stuff; this is going to help you with this; this is going to help you with this; this is going to help you with that," but I'm not spending more than two to four minutes, most cases, on "Here's what I'm offering you today," and that's the first part is the core portion of the offer. Now we go on to Step 11, which is the price, and I want to link price to the core portion of the offer, so I don't spend a whole bunch of time on that as I've discussed, and then we immediately go into the price. So we start with the anchor: "Here's what it's worth to me," then we go one down: "Here's what it's worth to other people that I showed this to," and then we can go one down: "Here's what other people would charge for this, and it would be okay cuz the value would be there," then you go down: "Here's what I normally charge for this," and then here's your your special deal cuz you showed up to this webinar here today. So for the next X number of hours, days, or whatever, you can get it for this. So this is you start high, you end low; it's cheesy; does it work? Works very effectively because it takes the least amount of effort for somebody to understand what the true value of the thing is, and then we do a call to action: "So go here now to sign up for it to get it, or whatever, you know, go to example.com, yes," or some URL that you can very easily say out loud and people can spell. And now we're really going to actually be in a position to start to sell because anything that is a significant investment that's not an impulse purchase, people are programmed, a majority of them will say no the first time they see anything, and so we have to get the no out of the system. We also have helped them understood that the value is related: this is what you're going to pay for, and now we're going to spend a whole bunch of time on the bonuses, which is Step 12. So here's what you're going to get for free, exclusively; ideally make them exclusive, so they're not available anywhere else; they're only available with this package, and you can't buy them anywhere, but you can get them for free if you act fast enough when you go to blah blah.
Blah. Now the bonuses are beautiful because they're like spotlights. So bonuses—there's a whole bunch I could talk to you about bonuses. I'm not going to get into the weeds today; that's a YouTube video for another time. But a bonus should ideally do one of three things: it should kill an objection. So if somebody says, "Oh my God, this program looks amazing, but it takes so long," you have some sort of shortcut bonus that can get them there faster, a "cut the corners" bonus. Or if they're really, really worried about, "Man, there seems like I have to invest in a lot of stuff," you have the "shoestring bonus"—we're going to specifically focus on how to do this if you don't have more than two nickels to rub together. Right? So those are killing objections; so that's one of the things that a bonus can do.
Another thing that a bonus should do is just some dramatic demonstration of some amazing value that you can offer to them. There should be some of that in the course as well, but it should also be pulled out and put—put into a bonus that can be dramatically demonstrated. So when somebody sees that in just a few seconds, they say, "Oh my God, I got to have that; that thing is freaking cool." And so that's a second bonus.
The third bonus could be around a proof element. And so you show how good something is because you validate it with a result. So if you have some really good results, you should turn those into bonuses themselves. So I could create a bonus on webinars of how I got over 200 people to spend $5,000 to buy a digital product that they already owned. So if I was teaching on webinars, or I was teaching on persuasion, I could do that, and that would be my proof element. If I was selling something to coaches or consultants, I could do a bonus specifically around how I got Alex Heros to pay me $25,000 to help him with his big book launch that happened on YouTube recently—at least when I'm recording this—and that could be a bonus. Uh, so you want to consider: either kill an objection, have a dramatic demonstration, and/or have a killer proof element around it. It doesn't even necessarily have to be yours; if you can license something from somebody or interview them and use their proof element as a bonus, those are ways that you can make bonuses really incredible and attractive.
And we typically want five to seven bonuses. I like seven, as long as they're really amazing. And we want to have a high retail value associated to those bonuses that far exceed the price of what they'll pay to get the whole package. And they should be so cool that people would buy the whole thing just to get one of those bonuses. Save the best bonus for last; start with the second-best bonus, and then you can tease that like, "So far you've seen all these bonuses, but I've saved the best one for last." And even before you start introducing the bonuses, "When you sign up, you're going to get these special exclusive bonuses. I'm going to show you a lot, and just so you know, hang in there, because the very best one I've saved for last." But let's check it out. Here's the first bonus: boom! And then you start talking about these bonuses, and you typically will spend two to four minutes per bonus, and you should do a call to action after each and every bonus. So, "Now that you've seen bonus one, doesn't it make—makes sense for you to go to example.com and get signed up right now? And in addition, when you go to example.com to get signed up right now, you're also going to get…" and then you introduce bonus number two.
Now, Step 13: risk. Interesting. Lucky 13: risk. Friday the 13th risk. I don't know how it plays out that way. Risk should be sprinkled throughout a lot of these things. You should sprinkle them throughout, but if nowhere else, you want to put it in after you show them everything: you know, here's the core offer, here's the offer, here's the price, here's where you go to get it, here's the bonuses if you act fast enough to get it, and then here's the risk involved, and here's how we mitigate that risk. So you can do money-back guarantees; you could address other risks beyond just the money, in terms of time risk, in terms of other objections people may have: what the risk is involved and why it's not actually a risk, or it's riskier not to buy the thing than it is to buy the thing. So you want to spend a lot of time here focusing on risk mitigation very specifically. Extra credit if you do better than money-back guarantees, which all of our biggest campaigns have. But the whole purpose of it is: some portion of your webinar, after you've made your offer, has to focus—focus very heavily on: what's the risk involved, and here's how it's not actually a risk, here's what we've done to deal with that risk on your behalf. And that's number 13.
And then step number 14 is scarcity. Now, it's not something you just tack on to the end; it's something you also sprinkle throughout. As you've noticed, I—I talk about exclusive bonuses. It's better to have bonuses that people can't buy anywhere, because then there's scarcity related to those bonuses. Those bonuses are attached to the offer, and the offer expires at a certain period of time. Some of your bonuses may be extra exclusive; they may be quantity limited or date limited for reasons that are ideally beyond your control. "Hey, I was only able to talk to this vendor over here; he wasn't able to give it to everybody because that would be insane, because it's like a $2,000 piece of software, but he did say that I could give it to the first hundred people that invested." And that's very powerful scarcity. So you'd put that in the bonus, but you'd also remind that at the end. You would emphasize that that fear of missing out—you have to these days, because there's six billion offers that somebody can pick upon. So if there's not some urgency to make a decision, then the default is to make no decision. So we want to put those in place; we want to have a reason why for the scarcity. It can't just be like, "Buy in an hour, or this bonus is going to get shot," right? It's got to be legitimate; it's got to be believable; it's got to make sense; it's got to be like, "Oh, yeah, it…" It can't create an additional objection. So when we launch group coaching programs, the scarcity is very obvious: I start training and coaching on this day, so the bus leaves. So if you're on the bus, you're with us, and if you're waiting there, we've got to go at some point in time; we just can't sit around and wait for everybody. And that's really powerful scarcity. All scarcity absolutely should be true. You're an idiot if you use fake scarcity—ethically, legally, pragmatically, all of the above—stupid, stupid, stupid. So find ways to make scarcity legitimate, and then really hammer it home, because it is the strongest motivator for taking action that exists on planet Earth. But that's the 14-step process for webinars. I could spend days and days and days upon it, but if you need a quick start and you want to go somewhere, just go down this list and make sure all of these 14 components are in your webinar, and let me know your results. And I'll see you on the next video.